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Paper short abstract

This paper investigates the trends and historical background of literary translation from Hungarian into Japanese in the Cold War Era, specifically from the 1960s to the 1980s, focusing on the activities of Kōbunsha Publishing, and on children’s books translated from the 1960s.

Paper long abstract

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Japanese readers encountered Hungarian literature primarily through the works of Molnár Ferenc. Molnár’s play Liliom was staged in Tokyo in 1927, which likely contributed to his popularity in Japan.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Japanese translations of poems by nineteenth-century literary classics such as Petőfi Sándor and Arany János were also published. After the Second World War, and during the 1950s, the pioneering work of Imaoka Jūichirō (1888–1973) and Tokunaga Yasumoto (1912–2003) made early twentieth-century Hungarian classics available in Japanese as well (overview of Hungarian literature translated to Japanese in Kume 2009).

The Hungarian authors translated into Japanese up to the 1950s form an unquestioned core of the Hungarian literary canon, and it is not surprising that they were among the first to be translated. In this presentation, I focus on which Hungarian literary works were published in Japan from the 1960s to the 1980s, when the most significant authors of the literary canon were already at least partially accessible in Japanese.

From the 1960s, Kōbunsha Publishing played a crucial role in introducing then-contemporary Hungarian literature to Japanese readers, primarily through the series Gendai Tōō Bungaku Zenshū (Collected Works of Modern East European Literature), published between 1966 and 1969. The Hungarian volumes of this series contained works written mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, thus contemporary in a strict sense, addressing events and social tensions of the recent past. Kōbunsha continued to publish Hungarian novels in the 1970s and 1980s (although fewer ones), also with a strong social focus. I will introduce the works selected for Japanese translation and explore the possible reasons of this selection, as well as the source languages of the translations.

It was also in the 1960s that Hungarian children’s literature found its way to Japan. I will look into why the 1960s and 1970s are considered a golden age of children’s literature and illustration in Hungary (based on Révész 2018), and present several representative examples of this genre, which was introduced to Japan at a relatively early stage.