I sometimes suspect the divide in reputation of Shônagon and Murasaki exactly mirrors that of Ovid and Virgil. I don't have enough sense of their reception through history to confirm this, though.
I was surprised to find how much I preferred McKinney's version over Morris's -- a lively and lifelike translation. It's what I reach for when I'm writing Heian setting and need to pick up atmosphere and attitude.
As an aside, have you read Torikaebaya Monogatari? If not, it'd be worth tracking down while The Pillow Book is still fresh as period background. It's a post-Genji story about siblings whose gender sense is swapped at birth, with the sister growing up to become a courtier and the brother a handmaiden to an imperial princess. It is, alas, the sort of comedy that resolves everything to the social norms of the day, but it's still a hoot and a half to read. The translation called The Changelings by Rosette Willig is smoothly readable (though apparently she mistranslates what exactly caused the genderbending and how it's resolved). (There's also a modern light-novel adaptation called The Change!, with a manga adaptation of that, which has been scanlated.)
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I was surprised to find how much I preferred McKinney's version over Morris's -- a lively and lifelike translation. It's what I reach for when I'm writing Heian setting and need to pick up atmosphere and attitude.
As an aside, have you read Torikaebaya Monogatari? If not, it'd be worth tracking down while The Pillow Book is still fresh as period background. It's a post-Genji story about siblings whose gender sense is swapped at birth, with the sister growing up to become a courtier and the brother a handmaiden to an imperial princess. It is, alas, the sort of comedy that resolves everything to the social norms of the day, but it's still a hoot and a half to read. The translation called The Changelings by Rosette Willig is smoothly readable (though apparently she mistranslates what exactly caused the genderbending and how it's resolved). (There's also a modern light-novel adaptation called The Change!, with a manga adaptation of that, which has been scanlated.)
---L.