Japanese Literature discussion

This is a folder for threads about translators.

This will support our thoughts and discussion about the translation of Japanese works. It will also support profiles of translators and their body of works.
Thank you Allison for setting this up for us.
I will try to add translator profiles for our group reads.
r/Jack

Where else to start this, but with the most translated Japanese novel: The Tale of Genji?

G.G. Rowley recommends the newer Royall Tyler translation over the old Esward Seidensticker translation. She clearly knows what she's talking about. And she pointed out specific problems with the older translation when we were reading it here in the group.

i was hoping that 2024 was the year for me to read the Royall Tyler translation. I have it and the one by Edward Seidensticker.

My favorite has been The Tale of Genji: Scenes from the World's First Novel, as translated by Donald Keene, .... ILLUSTRATED by Miyata Masayuki.

Masayuki Miyata (宮田 雅之, Miyata Masayuki) (1926–1997) was a Japanese kiri-e (papercutting) artist. In 1995 he was selected as the year's official artist for the United Nations. He created illustrations for modern publications of Japanese classic literature, including Oku no Hosomichi, The Tale of Genji, and The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. His most prominent work, Red Fuji, was produced and sold in 184 countries worldwide. Selections of his work are still published today by Kodansha International. (credit Wikipedia)

I love his work! (Seriously, I am over the top on this.)

The Issac Meyer podcast has a discussion about the origins of the Japanese written language in the beginning of episodes 507 and 508, “The culture of Classical Japan, Part 1 & 2”. There is a link at the end of this post.

Isaac’s description:

“And we're going to start off with what's probably the most important subject of them all, language and writing, since without them, the others wouldn't exist. So the origins of the Japanese language are a bit unclear. Officially Japanese and related languages like Ryukyuan belong to what is called the Japonic language family, which is not academically considered to be related to any of the surrounding language groups.
It's pretty clear that early Japonic languages came over to the islands from the Korean Peninsula with the Yayoi cultures, with the earlier languages of the Jomon people forming the basis for the Emishi and Ainu languages. Those languages of which only Ainu survives today are what's called language isolates. We don't know where they came from, nor do we have any clear evolutionary relationship to trace with surrounding languages.
Japonic languages are pretty clearly related to the neighboring Koreanic languages, of which the most prominent is, you guessed it, Korean. The two groups share very similar language structures in terms of grammar, which alongside several centuries of vocabulary borrowing means it's pretty easy to learn one if you already know the other. Neither Japonic nor Koreanic languages are related at all to the Sinic language family, the family of Chinese languages, of which the most prominent is the Beijing-style dialect known in the West as Mandarin Chinese.”
…
He goes on to describe the differences between Chinese and Japanese, and the challenges:

“Chinese, like English, is a subject-verb-object language, while Japanese and Korean are both subject-object-verb. Second, Chinese, like English, is what is called an analytic language, while Japanese is agglutinative. Once again, I am not a linguist, so I'm not going to do a good job getting into this or explaining it in too much depth, but my understanding is the key difference is that in agglutinative languages, you add more syllables to the end of a word, especially a verb, to modify meaning.
Take the Japanese verb, kaku, to write. To make it past tense, you add the suffix ta to the end of it to make kaita, with some changes to the base verb for vowel harmony. To make it formal, you insert the suffix masu in the middle for kakimashita.
To make it passive, you add the suffix re to make it kakaremashita. In English, these would all be separate words.
Hopefully this is clear without offending any of the linguists in the audience by oversimplifying. Finally, Japanese has a lot of complicated modifiers for verb tense. Chinese just doesn't.”
---

(Clarification per Bill's comments below... Jack comments from here on:) He goes on to describe how the Japanese written language developed. I find his description illuminating and the podcast series is just very good throughout. Japan absorbed the written Chinese to create a written, and complicated, Japanese language.

You will see discussion on the forum about early Japanese works. It is good to remember that what we read may have gone through multiple translations. The first from Classical Japanese to modern, and then to another language. Sometimes, we get a translation from, for example Italian, then from that into another language, like English. This abstracts us from the original text and also makes observations from Bill and others who read modern Japanese so valuable about the works we discuss.

The quotes above my comments are from - History of Japan: Episode 507 - The Culture of Classical Japan, Part 1, Nov 3, 2023
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
This material may be protected by copyright.

I'm not sure if the next to last paragraph is paraphrased from the podcast or solely from Jack.

Double translation (where you translate from the original to language A, and then from language A to language B) is less common in English than it used to be. I can't speak for other languages; perhaps the global dominance of English means that some books are double-translated with English as the middle language.

150 years ago Japan was rapidly modernizing. Part of this was modernizing the way Japanese was written to make it better conform to the way people spoke. At the same time, Japanese authors were learning more Western languages and reading more Western literature. The combination of these two trends creates what we call 'modern Japanese literature'. These days (at least in English) we have enough skilled translators of modern Japanese that double-translation isn't done. Through, say, the 1960s, this wasn't the case. There was a demand for modern Japanese literature that exceeded what publishers could put out with direct Japanese-to-English translation, so some novels that were translated from, for example, Japanese-to-French were then double-translated from French-to-English. I have a few of these old editions that specifically credit this, though I suspect there were more that double-translated and don't say so.

In more mass media, like anime, manga, light novels, and video games, Japanese translation is paid very poorly, and they often end up with less than competent translators. Perhaps they even do double-translation, but I've never seen it credited as such.

Pre-modern Japanese literature is significantly harder to translate, and gets harder the farther back you go. But because it's a niche market inside Japanese literature, it's unlikely that publishers could get away with double-translation of it these days. It would tick off their already small customer base. From what I understand reading the long introductions to these translations is that they begin with authoritative editions of the original in Japanese. These authoritative editions aren't modern Japanese translations, but rather the result of textual criticism (the scholarly comparison of different manuscripts to make the best educated guess as to what the original text said). I expect that they also read a modern Japanese translation to assist them in translating the authoritative edition, but that they are translating from the original.

At the very beginning in the 8th century in Japan, they didn't have a way to write their own language. The Chinese script just didn't fit, and it took over a century for them to work out a way to actually write in Japanese. As a result, these 8th century works take specialist study to read, and I wonder to what extent we have single-translations from the original text to English. A few examples:

The Kojiki was the first history of Japan, written using Chinese script for a mix of sound and meaning, making it very hard to read. I have Chamberlain's translation (Chamberlain lived in Japan for 40 years in the Meiji period); I find it unlikely that he was able to read the Kojiki in the original. There is a more recent 2014 translation by Gustav Heldt, which is likely a single-translation, but the reviews of the Kojiki here on GR have all the translations lumped together, and I'm not seeing any reviews specifically of Heldt.

The Nihongi was another early history, written in pseudo-Chinese. I have Aston's translation, made around the same time as Chamberlain's translation of the Kojiki. I'm not seeing any other credited translations here on GR. There seem to be a lot of editions of Aston's translation because its copyright has expired.

The Manyoushuu is the oldest poetry collection in Japanese and is similar to the Kojiki in difficultly. Part of it was translated by committee in 1969. I expect it was single-translated, but can't be sure. There is no complete edition of the Manyoushuu in English as far as I can tell.

I have two translations of the Kojiki in addition to the Chamberlain one. The first is the 1968 University of Toyko Press version by Donald L. Phillips. The other, as noted by Bill, is published by Columbia University Press in 2014 and translated by Gustav Heldt. Heldt credits multiple sources and previous translation works. I think I favored his translation on the last pass through the Kojiki though I didn't keep many notes so I am not sure. I usually look to see if there are new translations when I cycle through the early works. (This is just for fun or a periodic obsession... )

I have Aston's translation of the Nihonji. I don't think I found another translation on my last cycle through.

On the Manyoushuu, I have been following the works of Ian Hideo Levy and I recommend his translations, but, as Bill says, there is not a complete translation.

If I am lucky, I will have a chance to read through all these again one more time.

I am looking at Gold & Silver , translated and self-published by a Shelley Marshall.

I haven't heard of this translator before. I've grown increasingly cautious about self-published translations, so I'm wary of giving this book a try.

Does anyone here know anything about Shelley Marshall?

She’s on my “guilty until proven innocent but maybe” list. 🤷