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Paper short abstract:

Nagai Kafū’s collection of translated poetry Sangoshū displays creativity in its rendition of French Symbolist poems, combining Japanese scripts and Latin alphabet to create a hybrid text in form and content. He positions the translator as a cosmopolitan mediator between languages and cultures.

Paper long abstract:

Nagai Kafū’s collection of translated poetry Sangoshū (A Collection of Coral, 1913) displays a wealth of creativity in its rendition of French Symbolist poems. A decade after Ueda Bin’s groundbreaking Kaichōon (Sounds of the Tide, 1905) first introduced Parnassianism and Symbolism, Kafū proposed his own, less aestheticized vision of late 19th century French poetry, daring and bold in both form and subject. His approach to translation as a transformative linguistic experience adds to the creative practices developed around the often inappropriately called “derivative” writings of the Meiji era authors-translators, specifically Mori Ōgai (Wixted 2009: 105). Kafū experiments with French and Japanese scripts, producing a hybrid text mixing languages and forms. He freely combines original kanji compounds with unusual furigana, written in both katakana and hiragana. He heavily relies on loanwords and neologisms, transliterated in one of the three Japanese scripts or a combination of two. In particular, the extensive and strategic use of foreign words written in Latin alphabet is where Kafū radically innovates on his acclaimed predecessor Ueda Bin.

This paper examines Sangoshū’s formal creativity by focusing on Kafū’s “flexible positioning” between France and Japan, which allows for “interconnected spaces acknowledging subtle differences between cultures and cultural communities” to take shape (Hutchinson 2011: 12). The translator in Sangoshū can be characterized by a strong individual and individualistic stance of privileged mediator connecting cultures and languages. This paper argues that the extensive use of a composite script, made immediately visible on the page, plays a central role in crafting this translator’s stance. Moreover, its tendency to rely on an exoticized “other”—usually othered by gender and/or race—to contrast with the original authors and the translator, united in their cosmopolitan selves, is not without problems. This paper ultimately aims at contributing to the discussion on the role of translation as a creative practice in the mediation between national and international heritages in post-Meiji literature.

References:

Hutchinson, Rachael. Nagai Kafū’s Occidentalism: Defining the Japanese Self. New York: State University of New York Press, 2011.

Wixted, John Timothy. “Mori Ōgai: Translation Transforming the Word / World.” Japonica Humboldtiana, no. 13, 2009, 61-109.

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Paper short abstract:

In his literary work, Natsume Sōseki uses outmoded kanji, sophisticated glosses and katakana, which bring the presence of the written text itself into the foreground. This paper focuses on the visual aspect of his prose, which is grounded in his interest in calligraphy, painting and book-binding.

Paper long abstract:

Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) decisively shaped the direction of modern prose in the Meiji period and later achieved canonical status as the hallmarks of modern Japanese literature (Ōyama, 2020). This paper focuses on Sōseki’s creative use of the graphic potential of Japanese writing and the “visual” aspects of his prose, which is grounded in his interest in calligraphy, Chinese-style painting and book-binding (Kawashima, 2020). Sōseki began his literary career at a time where many writers had abandoned traditional forms for modern vernacular prose with the rise of the novel. But he uses outmoded kanji, sophisticated glosses and katakana scripts, which bring the presence of the written text itself into the foreground (Kitagawa, 2012). For example, in his most famous novel Kokoro (1914), Sōseki explores the meanings of the “heart”, as both an organ of the body and a locus of passion, by writing the word phonetically in hiragana syllabary (こゝろ), kanji characters (心) and katakana scripts (ハート). In this paper, I will analyze the styles of writing in two of Sōseki’s fictional works in which translation is a central trope. Maboroshi no tate (The Phantom Shield, 1905) – a short story based on the Arthurian legend – is a mixture of Latin alphabet, katakana scripts and obsolete kanji which creates a sense of estrangement. In Sorekara (And Then, 1909) – a novel about a Japanese dandy with Western ideals – Sōseki often mixes a word of foreign origin with a local one, as when he writes “an original” (特殊人) and glosses it with the オリジナル furigana pronunciation. The claim of this paper is that the blur of languages and scripts in these two texts convey the way Sōseki explores the connection between the visuality of writing and the practice of translation in a unique way.

References:

Kawashima, Yūya. Natsume Sōseki: shodō bunka ni okeru kyōyō no henyō. Kyūryūdō, 2020.

Kitagawa, Fukiko. Sōseki no bunpō. Suiseisha, 2012.

Ōyama, Hideki. Sōseki to Teikoku daigaku. Kōyō shobō, 2020.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation will focus on the creative use of horizontal writing in some novels from the turn of the 21st century. Horizontal writing has been generalized in daily life in Japan, but in Japanese books, horizontal alignment can alienate or even disturb the text as literature.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese language, which was originally only written vertically, is now written and printed both vertically and horizontally. The spread of horizontal writing, due to the influx of Western writings during the 19th century, happened less quickly for the eye (reading) than for the hand (writing). Horizontal writing has been generalized due to the increased use of word processors, personal computers and smartphones, while most books in Japanese today are still printed and read from top to bottom, right to left.

It is in this context that we can understand the provocation of Minae Mizumura. Shishōsetsu from left to right (1995) is the first bilingual Japanese-English novel, and the first title in the Shinchō Bunko collection (founded in 1914) to be printed horizontally. The novel is presented as a shishōsetsu, an autobiographical novel, and follows the style of a diary. The heroine, a Japanese PhD student, who lives in the United States since her childhood, writes her diary on the computer by mixing two languages. The genre of shishōsetsu, product of the naturalist trend of the early 20th century, marked by a confessional tone, is an important phenomenon in Japanese literature. Mizumura, through her novel, pays tribute to Japanese tradition, materialized by the old books with vertical lines, while also challenging it. She does so, less by simply typing her work on a computer, and more by writing the book with both languages aligned horizontally. When she cites texts by great writers, she stages the quotes in a confrontation with her own work, between two poles of culture, Japanese and American, literary and spoken, reading and writing. Seeing the computer screen in front of the heroine (and the novelist) materialized on the page of the book, would be quite normal in the world of alphabets. In a Japanese book, horizontal alignment is capable of alienating, or even disturbing the text as literature. This is what I will also show in a few other experimental novels adopting horizontal writing, such as Ishiguro Tatsuaki’s Heisei 3 nen… (No title, 1993), Hirano Kenichiro's Saigo no henshin (2003) or Kuroda Natsuko's ab sango (2012).

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Paper short abstract:

Fujitomi Yasuo (1928-2017) is a visual poet whose works often combine writing and drawing. This presentation will give a general overview of his creations associating poetry and image, before discussing some examples where he plays with the graphic possibilities of writing in a significant way.

Paper long abstract:

Fujitomi Yasuo (1928-2017) was a prominent visual poet and the author of a multi-faceted work including collections of poetry, children's books, books on football, and translations of the American poet E. E. Cummings. From a very young age, he was interested in the graphic arts, and went on producing drawings that were exhibited in galleries. His poetic work is often at the intersection of writing and drawing. In addition to reflective texts on the links of the Japanese writing with the image, such as "Keshiki no yoi ji" (Fujitomi Yasuo shishû, Gendaishi bunko, n. 57, 1973), Fujiomi published poems based on plays with writing (for example the use of a series of graphically similar kanji within the same poem), and others combining text with drawn elements. An example is e-shi, images-poems, that he wrote in his book Ippatsu (1995). This presentation will give a quick overview of his creations associating poetry and image, before focusing on some examples where he plays with the graphic possibilities of writing in a significant way. I will recall the importance of his research in the 1960s, a period in which Fujitomi joined two avant-garde groups, VOU (1935-1978) and ASA (1964-1977), led respectively by Kitasono Katsue (1902-1978) and Niikuni Seiichi (1925-1977). Within the field of visual poetry itself, these two groups defended two different conceptions of the relationship between text and image. We will then show how, through his personal interpretation of drawing, Fujitomi never ceased to search for his own path, which blurs the boundaries between writing and drawing. In his works, written characters are made to be very visible. Fujitomi’s use of writing illustrates one of the fundamental ideas of visual poetry, treating the word like a material, but it suggests as well that his work, which may still offend the reading habits of many poetry readers, only serves as a reminder of another essential fact: poetry, once it is written, cannot exist without a reflection on its creative tools, namely writing itself and its diversity of media.