Mimetic creativity in Japanese translations of Edgar Allen Poe

Abstract:

This study of contemporary Japanese translations of selected stories of Edgar Allen Poe argues that contemporary translators have adopted a creative strategy of translation that succeeds in avoiding what Berman has called ‘the destruction of underlying networks of signification’. In a writer of gothic horror such as Poe, chains of expression that establish a mood and visualization are vital to building the reader’s sense of fear and anticipation. The current study shows that the Japanese translators employ sound symbolism and alliteration to create a feeling akin to that in Poe, yet their application of such techniques is distributed differently than in Poe’s original language, and differently from one another. This article examines the use of mimetics in four contemporary Japanese translations of two of Poe’s gothic horror narratives and two translations of one detective narrative. The results show that the Japanese translators used mimetic words in their translations at rates similar to those found in recent studies of selected writers of modern and contemporary fiction. The second finding is that when translating the passages containing the seventy-six sound-symbolic forms in the English source text, the translators of Poe used Japanese mimetic terms 34 per cent of the time. The third finding is that the 34 per cent figure for percentage of sound-symbolic English words translated with mimetic expressions in the target text represented only 12 percent of the total number of mimetics (355 tokens) used in the Japanese translations. The fourth finding reveals an overlap in translator use of a mimetic averaging 42.6 per cent.     

Rearranging the figures on the tapestry: what Japanese direct translation of European texts can tell us about kanbun kundoku

Abstract

From the earliest stages of reading and writing in the Japanese archipelago, the methodology of kanbun kundoku (vernacular reading of literary Sinitic) has been an important means of engagement with Chinese texts. The kanbun kundoku process of glossing and syntactic rearrangement transforms a literary Sinitic source text into a kind of ‘translationese’ that preserves as closely as possible the diction and structure of the original while making it accessible to readers who may have little or no competence in spoken varieties of Chinese. Yet whether this process should be understood as fundamentally a form of translation is a matter of debate among scholars. In this article, I argue that looking at the early modern phenomenon of ōbun kundoku, by which Japanese scholars applied kundoku methodology to European languages (including Latin, Portuguese, Dutch and English), can offer a valuable perspective. These forms of direct translation are an important although comparatively under-studied aspect of Japanese encounters with European texts and they offer an instructive perspective on kanbun kundoku: the longstanding Japanese method of engagement with foreign-language texts that was their inspiration. The theoretical writings of Japan’s early modern scholars of Dutch unmistakably acknowledge a basic commonality between these two forms of kundoku while also clarifying the ways in which the application of kundoku to European languages was distinct from application to literary Sinitic.     

No translator is an island: the changing dynamics of Murakami Haruki translations around the world

Abstract

Tim Parks has included Haruki Murakami among the group of authors writing ‘dull global novels’, a perception that is in part the result of an exclusive focus on English-language translations of Murakami. By turning attention to translations in other languages, this essay reveals a more nuanced and complex picture, showing that depending on where and by whom he is translated, Murakami in fact emerges differently than in English, and arguing that his writing is perhaps not so ‘dull’, after all. After briefly describing the history of Murakami translations in North America, the essay examines the history of translations in East Asia, using the example of greater China, where the two main translators, Lai Ming Chu (Taiwan) and Lin Shaohua (China), produce strikingly different versions of his writing. The essay then goes on to trace the main patterns of Murakami translation in Europe and into some Middle Eastern languages and Persian. In Europe there is a gradual shift away from indirect translations through English toward direct translations from the Japanese, and a greater degree of collaboration among translators. The essay analyzes the effects of these changes, offering a few examples from Murakami’s latest novels.     

Memory and forgetting: examining the treatment of traumatic historical memory in Grave of the Fireflies and The Wind Rises

Within Japanese popular culture, manga and anime have played a significant role in mediating responses to the outcome of the Pacific War. Miyazaki Hayao's (possibly) final feature-length film, The Wind Rises, has been an important addition to the preceding body of popular media ‘texts’ that raise such themes. This article aims to address the question of how far cinematic animation can reasonably be obliged to follow the kinds of historiographical concerns that inevitably arise when engaging with Japan's militarist past. To answer this question, considerable space is devoted to examining the historical context of what others have done in the post-war period and integrate that commentary into an analysis of how the works of Takahata Isao and Miyazaki Hayao fit amongst a succession of creative works that have been co-opted in the reshaping of historical perceptions of the Japanese at war amongst the Japanese themselves. This will also require some incidental discussion of methodological issues that arise when dealing with such cases as vehicles for understanding transformations in historical consciousness. Ultimately it is argued that Miyazaki does indeed make an important contribution to the commentary on the Japanese war experience, although it must, perhaps unavoidably, be on highly personal terms so far as The Wind Rises is concerned.     

Between self-promotion and cultural politics: Murakami Haruki's travelogues

Through a close reading of contemporary Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki's accounts of his travels in Southern Europe, the United States, and Australia, this article analyses the ways in which this author uses travel writing to promote his self-image as a cosmopolitan and culturally sensitive writer. At the same time, examining the complex dynamics of identification and differentiation at play in the narratives, it highlights the texts’ potential to generate critical reflections on both Japanese and global cultural and social formations. By looking at Murakami's distinctive combination of self-promotion and cultural critique, the article's overarching goal is to complicate the current understanding of the genre travel writing and its colonial legacy.     

Questioning western universality: Sōseki's Theory of Literature and his novel Kusamakura

Focusing on the relation between the literary theory and the novels of modern Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), this article argues that we need to include more ‘non-Western’ theories in the discussions of world literature. Furthermore, it concludes that a world literature contextualization of Sōseki's theory helps explain how his novels critically negotiate the influences from Western literature in Japan. By comparing Sōseki's theoretical and literary writing, this article shows continuity between his Theory of Literature and his novel Kusamakura, arguing that both question Western universality in defining literature. In other words, the comparison stresses Sōseki's continued preoccupation with understanding the transformation of literatures due to global interaction. During the modern period, such transformation was probably nowhere more conspicuous than in Meiji Japan, where not only society but also its literature was rapidly changing.     

Dandelions dancing in the snow

Abstract: This article is a translation of the keynote address delivered at the ‘Relire Kawabata au 21e siècle – modernisme et japonisme au-delà des mythes’ conference hosted by the Maison de la culture du Japon (Paris) and Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7 on 17–18 September 2014. It situates Kawabata Yasunari's late unfinished novel Tanpopo (Dandelions) within Japanese modernity and literary history, in particular drawing an array of connections between the work and the history of the rural northern mountain country of Japan.     

The collaboration of ‘ghostwriting’ and literature – the case of Kawabata Yasunari

Abstract: Kawabata Yasunari is Japan's first Nobel Prize recipient for literature and thus an emblem of the modern Japanese writer, but as this essay demonstrates, this writer's career, like that of so many throughout Japan's premodern and modern history, is spanned by the curious practice of ghostwriting. Taking up the specific case of Kawabata, the article exposes a wider conflict between the modern West's notion of the original artist, underwritten by its idea of individualized creativity, and modern Japan's persistent adherence to ghostwriting's more collaborative premodern concept of creativity. Subjecting fine-grained literary historical analysis to its far-reaching theoretical consequences for the modernness of modern literature, Japanese and otherwise, this essay shows how the spectre of Kawabata's ghostwriting haunts our contemporary, and therefore possibly anachronistic, understanding of ‘modern’ literary practice.     

The artist as a medium and the artwork as metaphor in Murakami Haruki’s fiction

Abstract

In many of Murakami Haruki’s works, the protagonist is in a profession close to the world of literature, although usually not exactly a writer. In their role as translators, advertising copywriters, journalists, or editors, Murakami’s protagonists are invested with the task of rearranging fragments of reality into narrative or artistic form, and/or of transmitting a message. This process is emotionally charged, often involving a supernatural dimension. While the process of reconstructing a narrative is largely unconscious, the narrator’s choice to act in this capacity is deliberate, and is presented as a way of fulfilling his responsibility towards others. I read this element as an expression of Murakami’s vision of the role of a writer in society. The figure of the artist-narrator takes an interesting form in Kishidanchō-Goroshi (Killing Commendatore, 2017), where the protagonist, a visual artist specialising in realistic portraits, decides to pursue a more creative approach to painting that leads him to a series of supernatural adventures. Through a close reading of the novel, this article investigates how Murakami’s portrayal of the artist as a shaman-like figure functions like a metaphor for the role of the literary author as a catalyst that enables people to connect with their inner self and with each other.     

外事翻译素质及技巧浅谈

本文根据笔者多年从事外事和翻译工作的经验和体会，从外事口译着眼，分析了外事翻译所应具备的素质和技巧，包括外事翻译的标准和要求、互联网在翻译方面的应用等问题。     

'Something nasty down below': The challenges facing cultural studies in English departments

ABSTRACT

This article examines the controversial impact that English literary studies is having upon cultural studies. Instead of reconstructing itself in the light of moving onto the terrain of cultural studies, English literary studies is in danger of over-textualising cultural studies, and remains captive to appropriating texts ethically to suit its historical mission as a 'surrogate religion'. These prevent English literary studies from properly engaging with the recent shift within cultural studies to notions of the 'active audience'. However, the preoccupation of English studies with postmodern textualist theories can enable cultural studies to break with the damaging opposition between 'text' and 'social context'.     

伪满初期的东北文学——以部分报纸文学副刊为中心的考察

伪满洲国建立初期,报纸的文学副刊作为发表文学作品的主要园地,反映出了东北文学的基本样貌。伪满初期东北文学主要有两种类型,一是以揭露黑暗现实、唤起青年奋起反抗为主题的进步文学,二是迫于日伪统治集团高压政策的以通俗写作为主的附庸文学。二者以不同的思想和艺术,共同形成了不乏进取而又稍显杂乱的文学局面,不仅使沉寂冷清的东北文坛呈现出一段短暂的"繁荣",而且由此缓缓拉开了东北沦陷区文学的大幕。     

Eyes left! Some comments on Christo van Staden's ‘Claiming the African Mind’

SUMMARY

This commentary piece charts the ways in which cultural studies, both in relation to Communication Studies and other disciplines, has emerged over some 20 years in South Africa. This development is considered in contrast with Christo van Staden's commentary piece ‘Claiming the African mind’ in Communicatio (vol 22 no 2, pp 71–76). After tracing social, political and intellectual origins of one strand of cultural studies in South Africa, that which has evolved at the Centre for Cultural and Media Studies (CCMS) at the University of Natal, the article recounts some of the considerations which have emerged for the practice of interdisciplinary cultural studies since 1990. The article concludes by outlining some of the efforts under way in CCMS to confront these challenges in the spirit of the Centre's previous approaches and attitudes.     

The problem of tatemashi in Murakami Haruki’s work: comparing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84

Abstract

This article investigates a problem that has been underexamined in Murakami scholarship so far, namely what I will call tatemashi (stacking), a method of novel-writing which Murakami Haruki used twice in his career, first in Nejimakidori Kuronikuru and later in 1Q84. In both cases, Murakami first published a shorter, two-volume version, but later stacked up the novel with a third volume. This article studies the various problems surrounding this writing method. I suggest that edits during the translation process of the two novels into English have made it impossible to detect why tatemashi was carried out. By studying the Japanese versions, I identify that a main reason for tatemashi to happen is the thrust of a storyline that calls for the development of a ‘smaller-scale’ story of personal self-discovery into a ‘larger-scale’ tale of commitment to an ‘other’.     

村上龙文学的原初风景

村上龙文学原初风景话语中美军基地、金发女郎、日本少年等意象,意味着作家从处女作《无限近似于透明的蓝》中受动、被害型美国文化接受意识中解脱出来,表达出对于"强者"美国的更为主动的认同。但这并不意味着对美国文化的无条件、无选择的全盘服从。从《悲伤的热带》到《KYOKO》等代表作主题、内容的嬗变,展现了作家主动、积极地接受美国文化意识的理性方式。     

Change and continuity in Japanese corporate reform

Abstract

Confronted with critical business situations in the late 1990s, Japanese firms began to tackle reforms in both corporate governance and human-resource management. These reforms advocated that Japanese firms shift from being organization-based to market-based corporations, similar to their US counterparts. However, the actual reform did not produce such an overall change but occurred with incremental and cumulative changes within the existing institutional framework. This article examines continuing changes in Japanese firms, and demonstrates that they are diversified into different directions as a result of gradual institutional change.     

(Re)inventing African oral traditions and national heritage(s) through film images: The case of Keita! The Heritage of the Griot [1995] and Kare Kare Zvako: Mother's Day [2004]

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to explore how African films such as Keita! The Heritage of the Griot and Kare Kare Zvako: Mother's Day reinvent oral traditions on-screen, so that the traditions are revitalised and given new life in a contemporary world where visual and literary narratives have tended to dominate the collection and dissemination of information. The ontological and cosmological dimensions of African oral traditions provide the cultural humus that continues to feed the narrative structures of most African films. It is argued that the films' conscious refusal to be totally submerged in European modernism or their capacity to merge some traditional aspects with modern values is what constructs the multiple subjectivities that most African filmmakers strive to bring out. By using oral narrative structures embedded in songs, storytelling, myths, legends, poems, riddles, anecdotes and proverbs, the selected African films recreate traditions and heritage; they help to preserve African values that face a Western onslaught, promoted through European languages. Oral narratives carry a freight of cultural meanings infused in different modes of expression, while articulating the philosophies and beliefs of African people. It is important to recognise and [re]discover the critical role played by oral narratives in order to understand the epistemologies and ontologies that inform the construction of African films. A study of this nature is critical in that it builds on the existing indigenous knowledge systems embedded in orature (oral literature) that remain threatened by European cultural imperialism, which is promoted through the Hollywood film paradigm.     

Kawabata's views of language and the postwar construction of a literary genealogy

Abstract

This paper shows the ways in which, in the immediate post-war period (1945–1951), Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) reflected on his earlier, pre-war literary career and re-envisioned his postwar literary trajectory by constructing a new genealogy of the modern novel in Japan, in relationship to the intricate issues of the literary styles of the modern novel, ‘national language’ (kokugo), and the literary tradition. By examining his Shin bunshō tokuhon (New Guide to Literary Language, 1950), which presents Kawabata's past and present views of literary language, I will argue that Kawabata's changing views of language and literary style must be understood in the context of contemporary debates over national language policy and language reform movements. I will show the manner by which Kawabata formulated his views of language in dialogue with his two rival writers: Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) in the prewar period and Tanizaki Junichirō (1886–1965) in the postwar period. As we shall see, the death of his close literary colleague Yokomitsu in 1947 and Tanizaki's unflagging literary exploration during and following the war prompted Kawabata to position himself in a genealogy of modern Japanese literary writers as well as in relationship to the linguistic and literary tradition of Japan.     

日本女性文学的中国百年译介史

1918年,周作人将日本女性主义者、著名诗人与谢野晶子的《贞操贵于道德》一文翻译后发表在《新青年》杂志上,开创了中国日本女性文学译介的先河。迄今,已有150余位日本女性作家的作品相继为中国读者所熟悉,成为近百年来在中国近代化进程中风格独具的精神食粮。与此同时,这项工作也理所当然地成为了中国域外文学审美取向史的有机部分。