Translation
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Writing in(to) Japanese
Sarah Cox
Brigham Young University
In the Meiji era, Japan turned its attention to the assimilation and appropriation
of literature from the West through translation of works from Europe, Russia,
and the Americas. This assimilation so profoundly influenced the
literary
climate that critics could compare Higuchi Ichiyô’s writing to that
of Turgenev,
and Hinatsu Kôsuke could claim that the history of Meiji literature
was the
history of translation. Eventually, translation became no just an activity
but a
topic of discourse, a discourse simultaneously situating the Japanese bundan
and its activities within the global literary scene and challenging the
authority
of the “originality” of Western works.
This paper will examine the discourse on translation carried out in Bunshô
sekai. Drawing on Benjamin’s notions of originality and authority,
it will
show how members of the literary establishment in Meiji Japan read the
significance of inscription of foreign writings into native language, an
inscription which required stretching the limits of Japanese to accommodate
the foreign. As literary works were removed from their contexts—both
time
and place—and made to speak in Japanese, Bunshô sekai critics focused
on
the act of translation rather than on questions of accuracy and fidelity
to the
original text. They read multiple translations of a single work as
well as jûyaku
(Japanese translations from already-translated materials) as part of the
life
cycle of an original work of art. The conception of the work of literary
art as
infinitely translatable, and therefore infinitely reproduceable, substituted
a
plurality of voices and a democratic view of art for the monolithic authority
of
the foreign “original.”
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"Novels You Can Watch/Movies You Can Read": Visual
Narrative in 1930s
Women's Magazines
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Sarah Frederick
Boston University |
The influence of cinematic culture on Japanese writers in the late 1920s
and early 1930s
has been the subject of
recent analysis (such as the montage-like scenes in Yokomitsu Riichi's
Shanghai). Women¹s
magazines in early Showa incorporated visual forms into written
narrative in a more literal
way. Women's magazines produced their own stories using
photographs in the style
of film stills using the same format as their introductions both
Hollywood and Japanese
films. Full page photographs of urban scenes or domestic life were
accompanied by a small
amount of textual dialogue and narration. Publishers gave these
visual stories different
names such as "photographic novels" (shasshin shôsetsu) Shufu no
tomo) and "Novels you
can watch/ Movies you can read"(Mieru shôsetsu/Yomeru eiga) in
Fujin Kôron. These
narratives, which were made possible by the influence of cinematic
culture, cheaper methods
of magazine photograph printing, and the enormous profit potential
in advertising in women's
magazines, took illustration of serialized novels and the increased
visuality of print culture
to their logical extremes. By introducing some of these extreme
examples, this paper will
consider the broader question of the effects of visual technology on
modern Japanese written
fictional forms.
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Publishing Houses and Court Houses: Ishihara Shintaro's Debut as a Novelist
Ann Sherif
Oberlin College
From 1945 through 1960s, prose fiction writers in Japan started adopting
new strategies
for evoking the body,
gender, and sexuality in their works. Much of this change has been
attributed to politic
and social changes occasioned by Japan's defeat and the Allied
Occupation, as well as
the debates within literary communities about the future of post-defeat
art and literature. In
my paper, I will examine the roles that the publishing world, literary
prizes, and the legal
system (in particular, Lady Chatterly's Lover censorship trials
that
commenced in 1952) had
in steering the course of literary production. Specifically, I will look
at then-innovative fictional
texts of Ishihara Shintaro (b. 1932, now xenophobic mayor of
Tokyo), and the ways that
vestiges of Occupation censorship policies, literary censorship
trials, and publishing
and advertising practices influenced the production and reception of
Ishihara's famous Season
of Violence (Taiyoo no kisetsu, 1955).
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