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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.