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"I
now had a vast quantity of paper at my disposal, and I set about
filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and
all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial
material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I
found charming and splendid, my notes are also full of poems and
observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
So
wrote Sei Shonagon some time around 1000 A.D. as she wove together
what is now called The Pillow Book. It is in essence
a miscellany of lists (164 of them, whimsically titled with names
like Rare Things or Things That Make One's Heart Beat
Faster), journal entries, nature sketches, character studies
and tales of court life in the Heian Court, all written with a
heightened aesthetic consciousness, a quick and haughty
intelligence, and a beautiful and evocative poetry in its
language. The mid-Heian Period was a time of cultural
development and aestheticism and also a time of female literary
development with the emergence of writers like Lady Murasaki and
her novel, The Tale of Genji, and many female poets as well
ladies of the Court who kept diaries.
Little
is know about Sei Shonagon's personal life - only that she was
perhaps the daughter of a scholar and a poet, worked a s a
lady-in-waiting to the Empress Sadako in the final decade of the
10th Century and perhaps married a government offical called
Tachibana no Norimitsu, and may have had a son with him. She
remains mysterious.
But
there is documentation of an ancient story of literary
rivalry. She is mentioned by Lady Murasaki, her
contemporary, in her diary: "Sei Shonagon has the most
extraordinary air of self-satisfaction….Someone who makes such
an effort to be different from others is bound to fall in people's
esteem, and I can only think that her future will be a hard
one. She is a gifted woman, to be sure. Yet, if one
gives free rein to one's emotions even under the most
inappropriate circumstances, if one has to sample each interesting
thing to come along, people are bound to regard one as
frivolous. And how can things turn out well for such a
woman?"
And
perhaps Murasaki knew that Sei Shonagon's language with its beauty
and power surpassed her own when she wrote those lines about Sei
Shonagon. Ivan Morris, a translator of The Pillow Book,
says of Sei Shonagon: "The language, rhythmic,
quick-moving, varied, and compressed, is far clearer than that of
The Tale of Genji with its long sentences and huge networks of
dependent clauses; for this reason many Japanese consider
Shonagon's book to be the greater work of literature." And
Arthur Waley, the eminent Sinologist who translated both writers,
said of Sei Shonagon: "As a writer she is incomparably the
best poet of her time….the few lines about crossing a moonlit
river show a beauty of phrasing that Murasaki, a much more
deliberate writer, certainly never surpassed." And
so The Pillow Book remains, a thousand years later, a work
of astonishing beauty.
Read:
The
Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, (translated by Ivan Morris)
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