Hardy in Japan: Translators, Translation and Publication

Abstract

AbstractThis paper analyses early 20th‐century Japanese translations of Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and demonstrates the significant impact of censorship and the emergence of mass publication on the image of Hardy and his fiction among contemporary Japanese readers, scholars, critics and translators. It argues that the effects of the Japanese censorship law were complex: the translated text of Tess of the d'Urbervilles contained word games, evoking a strange kind of erotic pleasure while pretending to de‐eroticise Tess's story. The paper also discusses the ideas that the image of ‘pure Tess’ was nonetheless shaped by a series of translators and that publishers' marketing strategies contributed to the crystallisation and wide dissemination of this image in Japan.