Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture Presents an International Workshop:

Translation and Japanese literary studies

Saturday, July 18, 2015, 13:30-17:30
Room 301, Building 10, Sophia University

The third workshop under the collaborative research project “Japanese Text in Motion (lead investigator: Shion KONO)” will feature presentations on the translation of Japanese literature and a discussion on the state of the studies of translation in Japanese literary studies.

Malissa and Maeshima will present from their current research on the translation of Japanese literature from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Washburn, who recently completed a translation of The Tale of Genji, will speak on the challenges of translating a canonical text for the contemporary readership. The last segment of the workshop is a roundtable discussion on the current states of translation of Japanese literature and its significance in the field of Japanese literary studies. The roundtable opens with a comment by Smith.

In English.
Open to the public; no prior registration necessary

Schedule
13:30-13:40 Opening Remarks

Part I
13:40-14:05 Samuel Malissa (Yale University), "For Domestic Use Only? English Translations of Japanese Fiction in the Japanese Market"
14:15-14:40 Shiho Maeshima (University of Tokyo), “Revitalizing Poetic Possibility: Translation and Interpretation of Haiku around the Turn of the Twentieth Century”

Part II
15:00-16:00 Dennis Washburn (Dartmouth College), "Another’s Speech in Another’s Language: Translation as Possession”

Part III
16:15-17:25 A Roundtable: Current State of Translation and Japanese Studies
Commentator: Jordan Smith (Josai International University)

17:25-17:30 Closing Remarks

Samuel Malissa is currently writing his doctoral dissertation, "Translating Japanese Modernities," toward a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. This year he is conducting research in Japan on a Fulbright Fellowship. He is also a translator of Japanese fiction and scholarship.

Shiho Maeshima (Ph.D. Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo) is Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Her primary research interest centers on the comparative historical study of the democratization/popularization of print and reading culture in modern Japan and its formation of discourses concerning everyday modernity, while her other academic interest lies in translation and reception studies of Japanese literature, with particular focus on haiku in the modern world. Her recent publications include “New Journalism in Interwar Japan” (Japanese Journalism and the Japanese Newspaper, Teneo Press, 2014) and “Constructed/Constructing Bodies in the Age of the New Middle Class” (Resilient Japan. Japan Studies Association of Canada, 2014).

Dennis Washburn is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies in the Comparative Literature program at Dartmouth College and, in Spring 2015, a visiting professor at Sophia University. He is the author of The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction (Yale, 1995) and Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity (Columbia, 2006). In addition to his scholarly work he is a translator of both modern and classical fiction, including Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai, Mizukami Tsutomu’s The Temple of the Wild Geese and Tsushima Yūko’s Laughing Wolf. His most recent publication is a new translation of The Tale of Genji (Norton, 2015).

Jordan A. Y. Smith (Ph.D. Comparative Literature at UCLA) is Associate Professor in International Humanities at Josai International University. His research focuses on the relationship of translation practice and production to the creation of world literature in "translationscapes." As a translator, he translated collections by Mizuta Noriko (The Road Home, 2015; Blue Algae Sea, forthcoming 2015), as well as shorter works by Yoshimasu Gozo, Nomura Kiwao, Satoh Makoto, Usami Kohji, Fernando Iwasaki and Alberto Fuguet.

Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture
7-1 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8554
+81-(0)3-3238-4082 (Tel) / +81-(0)3-3238-4081 (Fax)
http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/ (Web)
diricc@sophia.ac.jp (email)