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- Convenors:
-
Irina Holca
(Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
Victoria Young (University of Cambridge)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Modern Literature
- Location:
- Lokaal 2.24
- Sessions:
- Sunday 20 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
Modern Literature: individual papers
Long Abstract:
Modern Literature: individual papers
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Sunday 20 August, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This paper will address the significance of the commercial aspects of translators in Japanese literary history, by investigating the relationship between translators' prominence and Meiji period publishing practices.
Paper long abstract:
The discussion of literary translators of the Meiji period tends to focus on their approaches to translation in relation to the modernisation of literary culture (e.g. Mizuno 2009, Inoue 2012). The commercial impact of translators’ visibility over the circulation and reception of foreign literature has received less scholarly attention. For example, prominent translators can be used by contemporary publishers as marketing tools (Akashi 2023), and Meiji publishers strove to produce European literature translated by prominent writers who were also translators, whose names guaranteed sales (Akashi 2018, 77). Put another way, translators’ names value played a major part in selecting translations for reading, because the great majority of readers of this period were unfamiliar with foreign authors (Yamada 2012, 31). The paper aims to address the significance of the commercial aspects of translators in Japanese literary history, by investigating the relationship between translators’ prominence and Meiji period publishing practices. The key questions are: how did translators’ fame manifest in the marketing strategies; how did it influenced readers’ perception of the translators and their work; how might findings relate to the publishing practices in evidence in present day Japan.
Focusing on Kuroiwa Ruikō (黒岩涙香, 1862-1920), one of the most prominent Meiji writers/translators of popular literature (Akashi 2018, 79), this paper will investigate how publishers promoted his translations. It will examine the presence of his name on the book covers of his translations in comparison with that of the source authors; identify how Kuroiwa’s prominence was reflected in the book cover designs; and how it relates to the way his works were received by the readers, based on biographical accounts of his professional life (e.g. Itō 1988) and literary critics’ reviews. The aim is to estimate the impact of his fame over the reception of his works.
Paper short abstract:
To better understand the process of translation and publication of the "early" translation of modern Japanese literature I will discuss translators into English from the 1910s and the 1920s, who traveled extensively, were plurilingual and had established networks for international collaboration.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, there have been significant scholarship that illuminate aspects of the “early” (i.e. in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries) translations of modern Japanese literature: Suzuki Akiyo’s *Ekkyō suru sōzōryoku: nihon kindai bungaku to airulando* (Osaka daigaku shuppankai, 2014) and Kono and Murai (eds.), *Nihon bungaku no hon’yaku to ryūtsū* (Bensei Shuppan, 2018). But there are still questions regarding the process of translation and publication. For example, the selection of texts seems uneven and even arbitrary; and the translators were not specialists in literature, and the connection between the translator and the work is unclear. As Walter Benjamin says, the translatability of texts may be understood contingently and apodictically, but especially in the “early” translation of modern Japanese literature, contingency figures more prominently. Translators have been quite rare, and the material conditions of the translation shaped the images of Japanese literature at the time significantly.
To fully understand the process, it is important to study the material conditions historically, such as the biography of translators, their networks, and institutions. In this presentation, firstly I will paint a broader picture of the early translations scenes for modern Japanese literature through recent scholarship. Next I will discuss a few specific examples from the translators into English from the 1910s and 1920s, such as Gregg Sinclair (for Futabatei Shimei’s *An Adopted Husband*) and Glenn Shaw (for Kikuchi Kan’s plays among others). Drawing on my own archival research, I will examine their biographies and their involvement in translation projects. They were not trained translators (at least initially). But they know multiple languages, travel extensively, and establish personal networks for international and multilingual collaboration when the institutional bases for such collaborations had not been yet established. At the end, I will suggest future research directions toward a more comprehensive historical understanding of Japanese literature as world literature in the early twentieth century.