This weekend I started reading, in tandem, the first chapter of the Tale of Genji from a couple of different books. What I found slightly shocked me: reading different translations of the same story from different authors was like reading completely different stories! The difference was that vast. I then went to the source -- classical and modern Japanese excerpts -- and found that all the translations were bad. Really bad. I could have done a better job.

Poetry plays a predominant part. Each poem, in the original, would rhyme and sound pleasing. Not so in the translations. It was painful to parse and process.

It made me aware of a simple truth: translation is hard if not impossible.

Icecream, if you're reading Genji in the original, it is no surprise that you have found translation hard, if not impossible. The ambiguous nature of literary expression during the Heian period lends itself to many different interpretations. I think the difference between a bad and good translation of Heian literature depends on the reader's understanding of the nuances of literary thought and the social conventions of the time. To match the rhyme and sound of the time in modern English is impossible, though I believe Seidensticker comes close.