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.