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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.