Leith Morton
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824832926
- eISBN:
- 9780824870201
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824832926.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This chapter deals with the issue of of translation and its contribution to literary history. It specifically examines Tsubouchi Shöyö's translations into Japanese of William Shakespeare. For ...
More
This chapter deals with the issue of of translation and its contribution to literary history. It specifically examines Tsubouchi Shöyö's translations into Japanese of William Shakespeare. For Japanese, at the time, the most powerful expression of the Western tradition was found in British civilization, the culture of the dominant imperialist state of the day. Thus, it is no accident that many of the authors translated were British—of whom Shakespeare was the most famous. The chapter reflects on Shakespeare translation in general, especially as this applies to Asia, and more specifically Japan, since Shakespeare is arguably more alien to Asian indigenous traditions than European. It explores just how the alien dramatist became Japanese, a process paralleled in the European absorption of Shakespeare.Less
This chapter deals with the issue of of translation and its contribution to literary history. It specifically examines Tsubouchi Shöyö's translations into Japanese of William Shakespeare. For Japanese, at the time, the most powerful expression of the Western tradition was found in British civilization, the culture of the dominant imperialist state of the day. Thus, it is no accident that many of the authors translated were British—of whom Shakespeare was the most famous. The chapter reflects on Shakespeare translation in general, especially as this applies to Asia, and more specifically Japan, since Shakespeare is arguably more alien to Asian indigenous traditions than European. It explores just how the alien dramatist became Japanese, a process paralleled in the European absorption of Shakespeare.
Leith Morton
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824832926
- eISBN:
- 9780824870201
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824832926.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud's famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan's many years of relative isolation, followed by ...
More
Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud's famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan's many years of relative isolation, followed by its multicultural empire, these themes seem ripe for exploration and exploitation by Japanese writers. Their literary adventures have taken them inside Japan as well as outside, and how they internalized the exotic through the adoption of modernist techniques and subject matter forms the primary subject of this book. This is the first book-length thematic study in English of the alien in modern Japanese literature and helps shed new light on a number of important authors. It examines the Gothic, a form of writing with strong affinities to European Gothic and a motif in the fiction of several key modern Japanese writers, such as Arishima Takeo. It also discusses the translations of Tsubouchi Shöyö, Japan's most famous early translator of Shakespeare, and how this author was absorbed into the Japanese literary and theatrical tradition. The new field of translation theory and how it relates to translating Shakespeare are also discussed. The book devotes two chapters to the celebrated female poet Yosano Akiko, whose verse on childbirth and her unborn children broke taboos relating to the expression of the female body and sensibility. It also highlights the writing of contemporary Okinawan novelist Öshiro Tatsuhiro, whose work springs from what is for Japanese an exotic subtropical landscape and makes symbolic reference to the otherness at the heart of Japanese religiosity. The final chapter analyzes the travel writing of Murakami Haruki.Less
Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud's famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan's many years of relative isolation, followed by its multicultural empire, these themes seem ripe for exploration and exploitation by Japanese writers. Their literary adventures have taken them inside Japan as well as outside, and how they internalized the exotic through the adoption of modernist techniques and subject matter forms the primary subject of this book. This is the first book-length thematic study in English of the alien in modern Japanese literature and helps shed new light on a number of important authors. It examines the Gothic, a form of writing with strong affinities to European Gothic and a motif in the fiction of several key modern Japanese writers, such as Arishima Takeo. It also discusses the translations of Tsubouchi Shöyö, Japan's most famous early translator of Shakespeare, and how this author was absorbed into the Japanese literary and theatrical tradition. The new field of translation theory and how it relates to translating Shakespeare are also discussed. The book devotes two chapters to the celebrated female poet Yosano Akiko, whose verse on childbirth and her unborn children broke taboos relating to the expression of the female body and sensibility. It also highlights the writing of contemporary Okinawan novelist Öshiro Tatsuhiro, whose work springs from what is for Japanese an exotic subtropical landscape and makes symbolic reference to the otherness at the heart of Japanese religiosity. The final chapter analyzes the travel writing of Murakami Haruki.
