Arthur Waley may have been the first Westerner to read the entire work in Japanese. His translation into English in 1933 is considered the most fanciful, adding twentieth-century expressions to the original story to make it readable and enjoyable to a modern audience, although it's been complained that he turns Genji into an Edwardian gentleman.

Seidensticker is more faithful to the original text, more in the style of the original work, and thus more dryly ironic, leaving much unsaid. Until recently this translation was considered the most authoritative, presenting an accurate impression of medieval Japanese culture that is still highly readable by a modern English audience.

The recent Royall Tyler translation (2001) has been lauded for presenting the most exacting translation yet, as well as copious notes to help the Western reader through the story, although he follows the old Japanese tradition of identifying characters by title or position, rather than by name, making it difficult to know who is speaking at any particular time. Seidensticker usually puts in the familiar name wherever it is known.

Waley incorporates the hundreds of short waka poems into the prose text. Seidensticker translates them into couplets, often in the iambic pentameter form that English readers are used to from classical British poets. Tyler also presents them in couplets but retains the more complex meter and division into syllable groups that characterize the original poems in Japanese.

You may also find abridged editions of the Waley and Seidensticker editions, as well as translations of selections from the Genji tale by Suematsu Kencho (1882) and Helen Craig McCullough (1994).

— Eric