Fog and Steel: Mapping Communities of Literary Translation in an Information Age

This essay explores the application of social-scientific and computational methods to the study of translation and textual circulation in interwar Japan. Leveraging extensive bibliographic data on modernist poetry journals, as well as techniques such as network analysis and visualization, the essay presents a new model of translation as an affiliative mechanism mediating between diverse communities of writers and the larger literary field in which they positioned themselves. This model aids in mapping transnational textual flows at the macroscale but is itself meant to provoke reflection on “scale” as a concept that can disrupt the restrictive paradigm of close versus distant reading.