Paper short abstract:

Through a textual and paratextual analysis, this paper explores the ‘translator’s voice’ that Wakamatsu Shizuko adopted when, as Mrs. Kashi Iwamoto, she inverse-translated the Japanese classic “Ends not meeting at the last reckoning of the year” (1894) by Ihara Saikaku into English.

Paper long abstract:

Wakamatsu Shizuko (1864-1896), usually associated to her role as a divulgator of children’s literature, was also a writer, a prolific essayist, and a translator who contributed to the ‘genbun itchi’ literary movement in Meiji Japan. Because of her Western-style education, her English was practically native, albeit she never went overseas. This led her to translate several English classics into Japanese such as “Wasuregatami” (1890), Adelaide Anne Procter’s “The Sailor Boy”, or “Shōkōshi” (1890-1892), Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “Little Lord Fauntleroy”. But even though her contributions to ‘genbun itchi’ and her Japanese translations have started to receive a well-deserved attention over the last few years (Yamaguchi 1980, Matsumoto 1999, Copeland 2000, Ozaki 2007, Kohiyama 2020), the same cannot be said about her inverse translations of Japanese classics into English. These translations, alongside English-written essays on various topics ranging from women’s education to introducing the Japanese culture and traditions to Western readers, were published in the English-language periodical ‘The Japan Evangelist’ under her real name, ‘Mrs. Kashi Iwamoto’, and were aimed at foreigners residing in Japan.

In this paper I analyse the translated text and paratexts of “Ends not meeting at the last reckoning of the year”, Wakamatsu Shizuko’s English translation of Ihara Saikaku’s “Ōtsugomori awanu san’yō”, originally published in ‘The Japan Evangelist’ (1894). Since paratexts can be defined as the presenters of the literary work (Genette 1997), translator’s prefaces and footnotes particularly help to extrapolate information on the translation process, as well as on the translation norms or ideological stance of the translators (Dimitriu 2009, Gürçağlar 2013). By looking into the paratexts of this particular work and the reason behind its selection —a short story commending the honour of the samurai—, and by analysing the translation methodology, this paper aims to provide a new lens through which to look at Shizuko’s translational identity, defined by Wilson (2017) as the identity of those translators who have been referred to as migrant, diasporic, transnational and translingual, and compare the translator’s voice of ‘Mrs. Kashi Iwamoto’ against that of ‘Wakamatsu Shizuko’.