Performing the Politics of Translation in Modern Japan

Performing the Politics of Translation in Modern Japan
Author: Aragorn Quinn
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019-12-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 042957486X

Performing the Politics of Translation in Modern Japan sheds new light on the adoption of concepts that motivated political theatres of resistance for nearly a century and even now underpin the collective understanding of the Japanese nation. Grounded in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and analyzing its legacy on stage, this book tells the story of the crucial role that performance and specifically embodied memory played in the changing understanding of the imported Western concepts of "liberty" (jiyū) and "revolution" (kakumei). Tracing the role of the post-Restoration movement itself as an important touchstone for later performances, it examines two key moments of political crisis. The first of these is the Proletarian Theatre Movement of the 1920s and '30s, in which the post-Restoration years were important for theorizing the Japanese communist revolution. The second is in the postwar years when Rights Movement theatre and thought again featured as a vehicle for understanding the present through the past. As such, this book presents the translation of "liberty" and "revolution", not through a one-to-one correspondence model, but rather as a many-to-many relationship. In doing so, it presents a century of evolution in the dramaturgy of resistance in Japan. This book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese history, society and culture, as well as literature and translation studies alike.

Realisms in East Asian Performance

Realisms in East Asian Performance
Author: Jessica Nakamura
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2023-10-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472903845

Existing scholarly discussions of theatrical realism have been predominantly limited to 19th-century European and Russian theater, with little attention paid to wider explorations and alternative definitions of the practice. Examining theater forms and artists from China, Japan, and Korea, Realisms in East Asian Performance brings together a group of theater historians to reconsider realism through the performing arts of East Asia. The book’s contributors emphasize trans-regional conversations and activate inter-Asian dialogues on theatrical production. Tracing historical trajectories, starting from premodern periods through today, the book seeks to understand realisms’ multiple origins, forms, and cultural significances, and examines their continuities, disruptions, and divergences. In its diversity of topics, geographic locations, and time periods, Realisms in East Asian Performance aims to globalize and de-center the dominant narratives surrounding realism in theater, and revise assumptions about the spectacular and theatrical forms of Asian performance. Understanding realism as a powerful representational style, chapters collectively reevaluate acts of representation on stage not just for East Asia, but for theater and performance studies more broadly.

Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary Japan

Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary Japan
Author: Beverley Curran
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317641264

What motivates a Japanese translator and theatre company to translate and perform a play about racial discrimination in the American South? What happens to a 'gay' play when it is staged in a country where the performance of gender is a theatrical tradition? What are the politics of First Nations or Aboriginal theatre in Japanese translation and 'colour blind' casting? Is a Canadian nô drama that tells a story of the Japanese diaspora a performance in cultural appropriation or dramatic innovation? In looking for answers to these questions, Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary Japan extends discussions of theatre translation through a selective investigation of six Western plays, translated and staged in Japan since the 1960s, with marginalized tongues and bodies at their core. The study begins with an examination of James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie, followed by explorations of Michel Marc Bouchard's Les feluettes ou La repetition d'un drame romantique, Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Roger Bennett's Up the Ladder, and Daphne Marlatt's The Gull: The Steveston t Noh Project. Native Voices, Foreign Bodies locates theatre translation theory and practice in Japan in the post-war Showa and Heisei eras and provokes reconsideration of Western notions about the complex interaction of tongues and bodies in translation and theatre when they travel and are reconstituted under different cultural conditions.

The Japanese Shakespeare

The Japanese Shakespeare
Author: Daniel Gallimore
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2024-07-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1040045588

Offering the first book-length study in English on Tsubouchi and Shakespeare, Gallimore offers an overview of the theory and practice of Tsubouchi’s Shakespeare translation and argues for Tsubouchi’s place as "the Japanese Shakespeare." Shakespeare translation is one of the achievements of modern Japanese culture, and no one is more associated with that achievement than the writer and scholar Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935). This book looks at how Tsubouchi received Shakespeare in the context of his native literature and his strategies for bridging the gaps between Shakespeare’s rhetoric and his developing language. Offering a significant contribution to the field of global Shakespeare and literary translation, Gallimore explores dominant stylistic features of the early twentieth-century Shakespeare translations of Tsubouchi and analyses the translations within larger linguistic, historical, and cultural traditions in local Japanese, universal Chinese, and spiritual Western elements. This book will appeal to any student, researcher, or scholar of literary translation, particularly those interested in the complexities of Shakespeare in translation and Japanese language, culture, and society.

Translation in Modern Japan

Translation in Modern Japan
Author: Indra Levy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351538608

The role of translation in the formation of modern Japanese identities has become one of the most exciting new fields of inquiry in Japanese studies. This book marks the first attempt to establish the contours of this new field, bringing together seminal works of Japanese scholarship and criticism with cutting-edge English-language scholarship. Collectively, the contributors to this book address two critical questions: 1) how does the conception of modern Japan as a culture of translation affect our understanding of Japanese modernity and its relation to the East/West divide? and 2) how does the example of a distinctly East Asian tradition of translation affect our understanding of translation itself? The chapter engage a wide array of disciplines, perspectives, and topics from politics to culture, the written language to visual culture, scientific discourse to children's literature and the Japanese conception of a national literature.Translation in Modern Japan will be of huge interest to a diverse readership in both Japanese studies and translation studies as well as students and scholars of the theory and practice of Japanese literary translation, traditional and modern Japanese history and culture, and Japanese women‘s studies.

A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan

A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan
Author: Rebekah Clements
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2015-03-05
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1107079829

This book offers the first cultural history of translation in Japan during the Tokugawa period, 1600-1868.

Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance

Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance
Author: David Jortner
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780739123003

Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance is a collection of sixteen essays on Japanese theatre, including historical overviews of twentieth century theatre, analyses of specific productions and individuals, and consideration of the intercultural nature of modern Japanese theatre. Also included is a new translation of a 'Superkyogen' play.

The New Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 3, The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire, c.1868 to the Twenty-First Century

The New Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 3, The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire, c.1868 to the Twenty-First Century
Author: Laura Hein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 945
Release: 2023-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108169198

This major new volume presents innovative recent scholarship on Japan's modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. An international team of leading scholars offer accessible and thought-provoking essays that present an expansive global vision of the archipelago's history from c. 1868 to the twenty-first century. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens, capturing international attention ever since. These Japanese efforts to reshape global hierarchies powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan's shores. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, this volume highlights Japan's distinctive and fast-changing history.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics
Author: Jonathan Evans
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 539
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 131721949X

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics presents the first comprehensive, state of the art overview of the multiple ways in which ‘politics’ and ‘translation’ interact. Divided into four sections with thirty-three chapters written by a roster of international scholars, this handbook covers the translation of political ideas, the effects of political structures on translation and interpreting, the politics of translation and an array of case studies that range from the Classical Mediterranean to contemporary China. Considering established topics such as censorship, gender, translation under fascism, translators and interpreters at war, as well as emerging topics such as translation and development, the politics of localization, translation and interpreting in democratic movements, and the politics of translating popular music, the handbook offers a global and interdisciplinary introduction to the intersections between translation and interpreting studies and politics. With a substantial introduction and extensive bibliographies, this handbook is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation theory, politics and related areas.