Looking Up or Looking Level? : Translating Fiction into and from Japanese

The Japanese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries read Western literature, including American literature, for instruction. Westernizing themselves as fast as they could was highest on the country\u27s agenda then, and people read Franklin\u27s Autobiography as a self-help manual and struggled through Emerson\u27s essays to learn about self-reliance. What readers derived from these authors most were lessons in inventing an independent, autonomous self, which was rather a new idea for those who were samurai not too long ago. And it was not merely ideas that were new: the Japanese language had to be radically reinvented, to accommodate new ideas and concepts. The tendency to read for instruction continued even in the postwar era. The West, especially the United States, was still a model, and the Japanese looked up to the American authors. Both authors and characters in their books were somehow more than life-size, deeply involved with life in more profound ways than Japanese readers were. This partly accounts for the fact that translations of American literature in the past tended to sound more serious than the originals. In the mid-1970s, however, some translators started to produce translations that focused on the pleasure of the text, conveying the tone and texture of the prose more faithfully. These new translations encouraged readers to look level at, rather than up to, the authors and the characters. This is probably a reflection of the new international economic status Japan gained in the late twentieth century. We realize, however, that We Japanese have not entirely ceased to look up to the West when we find ourselves feeling excessively proud when a Japanese author is translated into English and receives positive responses.特集 世界文学へ／世界文学から : 比較・翻訳・日本と世