Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji) belongs to the best known classical works in Japan, attributed to a female writer known as Murasaki Shikibu who lived in the eleventh century. The work has been translated into several languages and into English a number of times. In Swedish there are indirect translations from English of the first nine chapters (from a total of fifty-four) as well as one direct translation of one chapter.
In this project, the English target texts, as much as the classical Japanese source text, make up the examination’s corpus. The text is distinguished by its metaphoricity; and this is particularly prominent in the four chapters that have been chosen for close reading. The aim of the survey is partly to uncover what kinds of metaphor that are found in the source text and the target texts respectively, partly to analyze which translation strategies that have been applied in the translation of metaphor. The metaphor concept is at the same time related to Japanese and Western theories of metaphor. Finally, in order to strengthen the theoretical basis further a Swedish direct translation of the four closely read chapters is made, and linked to the theoretical part.