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"Translation, in one form or another, has been present in all major exchanges between cultures in history. Japan is no exception, and it is part of the standard narrative of Japanese history that translation has played a formative role in the developmentof indigenous legal and religious systems as well as literature, from early contact with China to the present-day impact of world literatures in Japanese translation. Yet translation is by no means a mainstream area of study for historians of Japan and there are no monograph-length overviews of the history of pre-modern Japanese translation available in any language"--
List of contents
Acknowledgements; List of names with Sinitic characters; A note on dates, transliteration, and names; Introduction; 1. Language and society in Tokugawa Japan; 2. Classical Japanese texts; 3. 'Chinese' texts; 4. Translation of Western languages; 5. Late Tokugawa 'crisis translation'; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Dr Rebekah Clements is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, and Research Fellow of Queens' College. She has degrees from the University of Cambridge, Waseda University, Japan and the Australian National University, Canberra. She grew up in Cowra, Australia, a small country town with a long connection to Japan, having been the site of a mass breakout of Japanese POWs during WWII. From tragic beginnings a friendship between the townspeople and Japanese representatives developed in the post-war period, leading to numerous exchanges, and the Japanese language being taught to a high level at the local high school. Dr Clements' own interest in Japanese history and culture, and her fluency in Japanese date from this time.
Summary
A comprehensive cultural history of translation in Japan during the Tokugawa period, 1600–1868. By examining a wide range of texts that were translated into Japanese from Chinese merchants, Jesuit missionaries and Dutch traders, Rebekah Clements sheds new light on the circles of intellectual and political exchange in early modern Japan.
