Alumni representatives

Having heard recently from a couple students heading to Japan, I got to thinking that we must have a sort of "critical mass" of alumni there. Is anyone interested in volunteering to be a "regional alumni volunteer" either in Kansai or Kanto? Right now we do a lot of networking, but it tends to be through the listserv or even less formally (i.e., I distribute your e-mail addresses with reckless abandon). If we had a regional volunteer then maybe things might be easier. The alumni page of the university says that a regional volunteer does the following:

• Act as a central contact for alumni, parents, prospective students,new graduates, and the UAAA.
• Serve as a university ambassador at events determined by theUniversity (faculty visits, presidential visits).
• Plan the occasional informal event (book readings, viewing parties).
• Assist in determining a location for a University event in their region.
• Distribute promotional emails inviting people to attend upcomingevent in their area.
• Assist alumni relocating to their area.

Lest you think this would end up being an "expat" group, let me remind you that a lot of our alumni are/were international students. This would be a great way to meet the locals, too.

If anyone is interested, check out http://www.albany.edu/alumni/regionalvolunteers.php

And, let me know, too. Just because the Alumni Association gets involved doesn't mean the department would necessarily be copied on any correspondence.

Likewise, if there is anyone in Beijing or Shanghai (the two likely locations) who might want to volunteer that would be great. Given how many UA alumni are in China I'd think this would be easy.

I hope someone chooses to do this--right now there are only two international volunteers, which is pretty sad when you think about it. Come on, let's show them that EAS alumni are a force to be reckoned with (or, at least, a cool bunch of people)!

Translation

I recently attended the memorial service for my graduate advisor, Edwin McClellan, who passed away last month. As most such services are, it was a time of reflection. In attendance were many former students of McClellan's, and the reminiscences were largely about his guidance as a mentor and accomplishments as a scholar. (For those of you outside of Japanese studies, McClellan was one of the prominent translators of modern Japanese literature.) McClellan was one of the last of his generation of Japan scholars--those who served in World War II, and who introduced Japanese studies to the United States. It must have been a very lonely existence, in a way. Very few people in the U.S. knew anything about Japan or Japanese literature 60 years ago. To quote one of the obituaries: "In 1948, [McClellan] went to the University of St. Andrews, where he earned a degree in British history and met his future wife, Rachel Elizabeth Pott. At St. Andrews he also met the noted political theorist Russell Kirk, who took him on as his graduate student at Michigan State University. Two years later, McClellan transferred to the University of Chicago to work with economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek. McClellan appealed to Hayek to write his doctoral dissertation on the novelist Natsume Soseki, whose work was much admired in Japan but unknown in the West. To persuade Hayek of Soseki's importance as a writer and interpreter of Japanese modernity, McClellan translated Soseki's novel "Kokoro" into English. McClellan's definitive translation of "Kokoro" was published in 1957." (the full obituary is on the Yale website at http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=6691)

A translation for Hayek! We should all be so lucky to have such a readership.

I also spent time this weekend talking with Jay Rubin and Steve Snyder, both of whom have become prominent translators of Japanese literature (and both of whom were students of McClellan's). They told me something I thought I'd share with my students: often it is the editor/publisher who decides to cut a sentence or paragraph or chapter, not the translator. But, when that happens, unless one reads the colophon, the translator gets the credit/blame for it. So, before we jump down the throats of the translators for missing something, we should think twice.