Worlding Sei Shônagon
The Pillow Book in Translation
Publication Year: 2012
Throughout its long life, The Pillow Book has been translated countless times. It has captured the European imagination with its lyrical style, compelling images and the striking personal voice of its author. Worlding Sei Shônagon guides the reader through the remarkable translation history of The Pillow Book in the West, gathering almost fifty translations of the “spring, dawn” passage, which span one-hundred-and-thirty-five years and sixteen languages. Many of the translations are made readily available for the first time in this study.
The versions collected in Worlding Sei Shônagon are an enlightening example of the many ways in which translations can differ from their source text, undermining the idea of translation as the straightforward transfer of meaning from one language to another, one culture to another. By tracing the often convoluted trajectory through which a once wholly foreign literary work becomes domesticated—or resists domestication—this compilation also exposes the various historical, ideological or other forces that inevitably shape our experience of literature, for better or for worse.
Published by: University of Ottawa Press
Series: Perspectives on Translation
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Table of Contents

Preface
One of the distinct charms of Sei Shônagon’s Makura no Sôshi (generally rendered into English as The Pillow Book) is the striking series of leaps from one apparently random image, anecdote or list to another, which draw readers ever more deeply into a unique and uniquely engrossing...

Acknowledgements
Many friends and colleagues have offered valuable feedback and suggestions throughout the time I have worked on this book, such that it is impossible to thank everyone by name. I do need—and very much want—however, specifically to acknowledge David Damrosch, for whose invaluable...

August Pfizmaier (1875) German
An autodidact whose innkeeper father had originally intended to train as a cook, Pfizmaier (1808–1887) enjoyed a long and productive career at the Imperial University in Vienna. He lectured on and translated, inter alia, Turkish, Chinese and Japanese—his output related to China’s...

T. A. Purcell and W. G. Aston (1889) English
Theobald Andrew Purcell (1841–1877) served as Surgeon- Major for the British in Japan ca. 1870. In 1874, he published Our Neighbourhood, or Sketches in the Suburbs of Yedo, which described Japanese daily life (the various chapters, illustrated with engravings, deal with such...

Koumé Kéitchirau (1892) French
Koumé Kéitchirau (1866–1934) (his name is today more commonly romanized as Kume Keiichiro), was a Japanese painter and eventually professor at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and director of the Imperial Art Academy. He studied with Raphael Collin (a prominent...

Henry-D. Davray (1902) French
Because the first history of Japanese literature originally written in French would not appear until 1935 (co-authored by Kuni Matsuo et al.), this 1902 version of Aston’s English-language work represented a significant publication. The first to publish a review of...

Karl Florenz (1906) German
Karl Florenz (1865–1939) is a major figure in Japanology, widely regarded as the father of the field in Germany. He taught German at Tokyo’s Imperial University, and his Geschichte der japanischen Litteratur (History of Japanese Literature) would serve as the standard reference work...

Takéshi Ishikawa (1909) French
Ishikawa (1883–1951) obtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne for his thesis on the zuihitsu genre, providing explanation, analysis and partial translation of Kenkô’s Tsurezuregusa and Kamo no Chômei’s Hojôki, as well as The Pillow Book. Invited to speak about Sei Shônagon before the...

Michel Revon (1910) French
This anthology of Japanese literature by Michel Revon (1878–1946) was to remain a seminal work for generations, influencing scores of French writers and intellectuals from Edmond de Goncourt to Marguerite Yourcenar. Revon taught in Tokyo for many years, and later at the...

Paul Adler (1926) German
This version of Revon’s anthology, by the Czech-born Paul Adler (1878–1946), which includes approximately three dozen passages from The Pillow Book, enjoyed wide circulation. Adler not only translated the entire book, but also revised it significantly. He replaced the latter’s...

Kuni Matsuo and Steinilber-Oberlin (1928) French
Kuninosuke Matsuo (1899–1975) and Émile Steinilber- Oberlin (b. 1878) jointly produced numerous works on Japanese literature and culture. Matsuo, who held degrees from both the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (School of French Studies) and the Université de Paris, was...

Arthur Waley (1928) English
Arthur David Waley (1889–1966), né Schloss, is generally considered the West’s single most influential translator of Classical Chinese and Japanese. Within Japan as well, where many native writers once claimed to have first learned to appreciate The Tale of Genji via his English...

Nobuko Kobayashi (1930) English
This translation would appear to be the only published work of Nobuko Kobayashi (dates unknown). It is an abridged version, containing just over fifty passages, although the claim is made in the introduction that Kobayashi has indeed translated the entire text...

Helmut Bode (1944) German
Helmut Bode (1910–1988) translated numerous Japanese works into German. His version of Sei Shônagon’s text is an abridged one, and this particular passage appears about two-thirds of the way through it. (In what would appear to be a simple oversight or printing...

Gerhart Haug (1948) German
This volume contains just over forty passages, with haru wa akebono appearing second (immediately after Sei Shônagon’s description of the genesis of her text). Interspersed among the passages are numerous reproductions of Japanese woodcuts by Utamaro, Hokusai and...

Zhou Zuoren (1958) Chinese
Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) was an important mainland Chinese essayist, political figure and translator, not to mention the younger brother of renowned modernist Lu Xun. They both travelled to Japan in 1906, where Zhou Zuoren studied Japanese language and literature. In...

Lydia Origlia (1968) Italian
Lydia Origlia (dates unknown) is a prolific translator of primarily modern Japanese, known especially for her renditions of Mishima, Kawabata and Akutagawa. This translation of The Pillow Book is complete and was published not long after that by Ivan Morris...

Marcello Muccioli (1969) Italian
Muccioli (1898–1976) was a professor of Japanese language and literature at the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples and at the University of Rome. He translated the Hôjôki in 1930, wrote a volume on Shintoism in 1948, and contributed extensively to an...

Miroslav Novák (1984) Czech
This Czech translation is found in an attractive volume devoted to the three major examples of the Japanese zuihitsu: Notes made in moments of leisure: Old Japanese literary notebooks of Madam Sei Shonagon, Kamo no Chómei, Joshida Kenko (for a brief discussion of this...

Charlotte Rohde and Lone Takeuchi (1989) Danish
Charlotte Rohde (b. 1951) and Lone Takeuchi (b. 1947) are both natives of Copenhagen. Rohde graduated from Copenhagen University in 1979, and is a librarian at the Danish Royal Library. Takeuchi earned her PhD in Classical Japanese in 1987 from...

David Greer (2000) English
David Greer (b. 1952) was raised in Pennsylvania, but has lived in Japan since 1982. He is currently Associate Professor of English at Tosa Women’s Junior College in Kochi City, Shikoku, and has published a number of articles in the Kyoto Journal and has also written...

Iván Augusto Pinto Román, Oswaldo Gavidia Cannon, and Hiroko Izumi Shimono (2002) Spanish
Peruvian scholars Pinto Román (b. 1950) and Gavidia Cannon (b. 1963) collaborated with Izumi Shimono (b. 1964), a Japanese literature specialist then resident in Lima, to translate the entire Pillow Book. (They later went on to translate jointly the...

Kenneth L. Richard (ca. 2003) English
The website created by Kenneth L. Richard (b. 1940), associate professor (now retired) with the Siebold University of Nagasaki, comprises some brief introductory information on Sei Shônagon, with links to other resources, and translations of seven...

Jorge Luis Borges and María Kodama (2004) Spanish
Borges (1899–1986), the famed Argentinian writer, enjoyed a lifelong interest in both literary translation and Japan. He is said to have translated Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” at the age of nine, for example, and in the 1930s, he reviewed...

Meredith McKinney (2006) English
McKinney (b. 1950), a freelance writer and literary translator of both modern and classical Japanese, taught English at the Kobe University of Foreign Studies for two decades, but now lives in her native Australia, where she is a visiting fellow and lecturer at...

Xavier Roca-Ferrer (2007) Catalan
Roca-Ferrer (b. 1949) has a PhD in Classical Philology. He has translated many classics from Latin, German and English into Spanish and/or Catalan, and his Spanish version of The Tale of Genji appeared in 2005. According to the foreword, this version of...
E-ISBN-13: 9780776619798
Print-ISBN-13: 9780776607283
Page Count: 330
Publication Year: 2012
Series Title: Perspectives on Translation
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