Translation Of Short Story Research Articles

Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature Steven C. Ridgely (bio) Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature. By Jeffrey Angles. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011. vii, 302 pages. $75.00, cloth; $25.00, paper. The contemporary formation of “boy’s love” (BL) is a manga genre authored primarily by women and marketed to girls (who like boys who like boys). Jeffrey Angles’s book is about this genre’s Taisho and early Showa literary predecessor, which was authored by men but marketed to both male and female audiences. Angles makes a strong claim about these writers of what might be called Gay Taisho—that the writers Murayama Kaita, Edogawa Ranpo, and Inagaki Taruho collectively invented a language for the emergent form of egalitarian love between young men in single-sex schools that begins to displace the hierarchical and machismo-driven formation that preceded it. “Love of boys,” then, refers not to men’s love of boys but to the love between adolescent boys or young men that is aestheticized and codified into a bishōnen (beautiful young men) genre of literary production. Writing the Love of Boys is a seven-chapter book consisting of an introduction that positions the study amid work on the literary and cultural history of male-male desire in Japan, two chapters on the poet and artist Murayama Kaita (1896–1919), two chapters on the mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo (1894–1965), one chapter on the modernist writer Inagaki Taruho (1900–1977), and a conclusion tracking the legacies of these writers in post-war culture. The main chapters are characterized by a great deal of translation, a primary interest of the author. Angles has devoted much of his energy to translation recently, producing volumes of translated poetry by Arai Takako, Itō Hiromi, Takahashi Mutsuo, and Tada Chimako. His translations of short stories by Kaita, Ranpo, Taruho, Yumeno Kyūsaku, and Hagiwara Sakutarō are collected in the anthology Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), edited by the late William Tyler. Angles has rapidly emerged as the most active advocate of contemporary poetry working in Japan studies today. [End Page 193] For this study, Angles acknowledges and builds on Jim Reichert’s work on male-male sexuality in Meiji literature and Greg Pflugfelder’s history of male-male sexuality from the Tokugawa period to the early postwar period. But this book can be positioned among other recent research as well. In tracing the roots of a 1970s manga genre back to earlier literary formations, Angles’s book will pair nicely with Deborah Shamoon’s recent study of shōjo culture from Meiji literature through contemporary manga (Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan [University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012]). Shamoon’s central insight might also be applicable to bishōnen—that the passionate female-female “esu” (S) relationships, like “smashes” elsewhere, were not simply tolerated by school authorities but were seen as fully in line with heterosexual development as practice relationships in preparation for marriage and as a deflection of sexual desire away from premarital sex with boys. Writing the Love of Boys could also be considered against John Treat’s Great Mirrors Shattered (Oxford University Press, 1999). Treat’s book, when understood for what it is—a piece of experimental literary writing that combines the “rhetoric of confession” from Taisho-style “shishōsetsu” (I-novels) with 1970s gay life-writing in the style of Larry Kramer—is very much akin to the memoir-of-the-present mode of writing Angles explores in the Kaita chapters. And yet, these books in other ways could not be further apart. I expected to find something scandalous in Angles’s book, too, but what makes us blush is just how desperately sweet, gentle, and (frankly) clichéd the love odes of Kaita, for example, are to the object of his affections: “my yearning / Cannot withstand your scintillating form / And I weep” (p. 57). The personal is very much part of Angles’s book, however, as with Treat’s. Writing the Love of Boys is done...

The Issue of Metaphor in Literary Translation: Focusing on the Analysis of a Short Story Translation

This paper defines metaphor translation in literary texts translated into Korean. Specifically, it presents concepts related to metaphor translation such as ‘text types’ and ‘semantic/ communicative translation’ necessary for discovering how the issues of culture and metaphor are defined. Then it introduces a method of data analysis and seeks out an appropriate metaphor translation technique. The results of the analysis of five Korean translations of a short story by Poe show that the main feature of the metaphor translation into Korean in the data is the priority on the transfer of meaning rather than that of form. As for desirable translation of metaphor in high literature, a suitable method is to reproduce the image in the TT as closely as possible. Therefore, it is important for a metaphor to be retained in the translation. However a metaphor translation cannot be always identical to its ST. When the semantic translation cannot help TT readers understand the metaphor, the translator should try to find equivalence rather than identity. In other words, if metaphors cannot be translated by using metaphors, it can be done by focusing on communicative rendering and/or cross-cultural translation.

Translation and the relativity of cultural identities

Translation as a bridging means of communication across language-cultures has a double role to play: it both constructs and deconstructs, or deconstructs and constructs, the national cultural identity of the source and target texts. The present paper attempts to explore the nature of this double role of translation. By looking at what is constructed and deconstructed in the translation process, and how, it argues a ‘reciprocal’ relationship between the two, emphasizing that neither the ‘deconstruction’ of the source nor the ‘construction’ of the target is to be taken in the absolute. While the core area of what is regarded as a particular cultural identity is distinct, the peripheral areas are by no means as clear-cut. The more access there is to other cultural identities, the more cultural ‘common ground’ there may be between one’s own identity and the identity of the Other, hence the less distinctive the identity of One is from that of the Other. The paper argues that the reciprocal relations between the various processes in translation are in fact the reflection of an underlying postulation, namely the relativity of cultural identity in translation. To support the argument, the paper makes a case study of Lu Xun and his bother’s translation of Short Stories from Abroad by examining both the reasons behind its initial reception failure in Chinese society, and the reasons that can be used to account for an opposite view that the seemingly failed translation has in fact been a positive contribution to the evolution of modern Chinese literature.

English Translations of Short Stories by Contemporary Argentine Women Writers

English Translations of Short Stories by Contemporary Argentine Women Writers

English translations of short stories by contemporary Argentine women writers

English translations of short stories by contemporary Argentine women writers

A Critical Analysis of a Short-Story Translation: "The Sisters"

A Critical Analysis of a Short-Story Translation: "The Sisters"

Three Libraries of World Literature Published by Kokuminbunko-kankokai

In 1911, the Meiji Emperor set up a kind of academy. One of the schemes the academy established was to translate European classics into Japanese. The academy was soon abolished, and the translation-scheme failed. But one private publishing company, called Kokuminbunko-kankokai (the Publishing Society for People's Library of Literature) enterprised the same plan and managed to found three Libraries : Taiseimeichobunko (the Library of European Classics), Taiseikindaimeichobunko (the Library of European Modern Classics) and Sekaimeisakutaikan (the Library of World Classics).The translators of the three Libraries mainly consisted of the members of a coterie magazine called “Bungakukai” (the Literary Circle) and the graduates of Tokyo Imperial University called “Akamon [the Red Gate] -school”. The two groups are well known for their contribution to the introduction of English literature to Japan. Therefore, the three Libraries introduced by the society can be regarded as the fruits of their study of English literature.How did the two groups join? The magazine called “Geien” (the Athenaeum) and the editor Kocho Baba played an important role in merging the two groups. Kocho Baba was a member of “Bungaku-Kai”. Several years after the magazine was discontinued, Kocho and Bin Ueda, another member of the magazine, founded a new periodical called “Geien”. Sohei Morita and Choko Ikuta, who were students of Tokyo University and often visited Kocho, were asked to write for the periodical. That is how the two groups joined to write for “Geien”.Then, who connected the two groups with the translation project of the society? It seems to have been Shukotsu Togawa, another member of “Bungakukai”. Ogai Mori's diary says that the first person who asked Ogai to publish his translations of short stories as one of Taiseimeichobunko was Shukotsu Togawa. It was also Shukotsu who recommended Tokuboku Hirata to Kyusaku Tsuruta, the owner of the publishing company.The Libraries are very interesting because they show what books were read and appreciated by Japanese literary men in the Meiji era. To show how interesting the libraries are, one example is mentioned; the connection between the works of the Libraries and Soseki Natsume, a great novelist and scholar in English literature. Toyoichiro Nogami, one of Soseki's students, translatedGulliver' s TravelsandPrideandPrejudicefor Sekaimeisakutaikan. He chose the two novels because Soseki praised them as masterpieces and strongly recommended him to read them. Another of Soseki's students, Masaki Minakawa, translated George Meredith'sThe ShavingofShagpat. He translated it because his other teacher, Lafcadio Hearn, recommended it to him and he was very impressed by the novel. He asked Soseki to help publish it, but Soseki died before he could find a publisher for him. However, Toyoichiro Nogami used his influence to have it published as a volume in the Library because he knew Soseki also thought quite highly of the novel. Therefore, we can say that Soseki influenced his students in their choice of novels for the Libraries.I believe this one example is enough to tell us that the three Libraries of World Literature published by the society are worthy of attention.