He then traveled a millennium back in time to Japan’s first extant vernacular poetic anthology, Man’yōshū his study Traversing the Frontier: The Man’yōshū Account of a Japanese Mission to Silla in 736–737, appeared from the Harvard University Asia Center in 2012. His first two books, Song in an Age of Discord: The Journal of Sōchō and Poetic Life in Late Medieval Japan (Stanford, 2002) and The Journal of Sōchō: Translation with Annotation and Introduction (Stanford, 2002), deal with the culture of medieval linked verse ( renga). His academic specialty is premodern Japanese literature and culture, in particular poetry and the literature of self-representation in the vernacular and in Chinese. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. Mack Horton is the Catherine and William L. While translations from the mid-19 th century to the mid-20 th century receive primary attention here, more recent examples are also selectively considered. This overview also reveals that the stylistic choices made by Western translators tended increasingly to diverge from those by their Japanese counterparts. This new willingness to let premodern Japanese poetry speak for itself, to “make it old,” so to speak, developed in concert with stylistic developments in English poetry, which in turn were influenced by Japanese poetry in English. A historical overview of representative examples reveals a trajectory from heavily naturalized renditions to increasingly literal ones in terms of both form and content, as Anglophones became more familiar with Japanese history and culture. The extreme differences between English and premodern literary Japanese and the welter of classical poetic conventions have complicated accurate interpretation and translation. But translations into English of its various genres, notably waka and haiku, only began to appear in the mid-19 th century. Premodern Japan boasts one of the world’s richest and most venerable poetic traditions, with a written history dating back to about the 6 th century CE.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |