Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the scholar Ban Kōkei’s (1733-1806) advocacy of translation as a means of cultivating a national Japanese prose style, drawing upon examples that include a translated section of Genji monogatari in Kōkei’s 1794 work, Utsushibumi warawa no satoshi (Translation for the Enlightenment of Little Children).

Paper long abstract:

Ban Kōkei (1733-1806) is best known for his published collection of biographies of eccentrics, Kinsei kijinden (Eccentrics of our Times, 1790), which was one of the best-selling books of Japan’s late eighteenth century, and for his Japanese-style poetry (waka). However, Kōkei was also an ardent proponent of writing what he called kunitsubumi (prose in the national style). At a time when most prose writing in Japan used either the medium of written literary Chinese, or a hybridized mixture of Chinese and Japanese elements, Kōkei advocated a move towards a purer Japanese style that drew upon precedents in Japan’s literary past while incorporating contemporary linguistic developments. Much like the well-known European example of Cicero, who developed his rhetorical Latin language centuries earlier by translating from classical Greek, the main methodology advocated by Kōkei for cultivating his ideal prose style was translation, or as he called it utsushibumi (“transferred” or “translated” text).

This paper examines what Kōkei meant by utsushibumi, and looks in particular at his use of translation from classical Japanese into the vernacular, drawing upon examples that include a translated section of Genji monogatari in his 1794 work, Utsushibumi warawa no satoshi (Translation for the Enlightenment of Little Children). I will put Kōkei’s efforts at language reform in the context of eighteenth century developments in intralingual translation from classical into vernacular Japanese, and explain the role of translation in his attempts to develop a “national” prose language for Japan nearly one hundred years before the national language advocacy of the genbun itchi movement of the Meiji period.