Narrative Coordinates: “Contemporariness” of the Literary Translator in Japan

As a Japanese translator of contemporary fiction in English, I will take up a series of challenges I have faced–"–"linguistic, cultural, and literary–"–"in working on various kinds of narratives. What is the translator’s “task” in shuffling between the two languages marked by profoundly different writing systems and syntax, as well as ideas of pronouns, gender representation, punctuation, and so on? Given the fact that the norms of translation change over decades, what is the definition, if any, of the “faithfulness” of a translated text? Behind these questions lies, moreover, Japanese literary culture in which a handful of privileged translators have their own readership. Some aspects of such “contemporariness” of translation in Japan will be compared with English translation of contemporary Japanese fiction.

Hikaru FUJII is Associate Professor of Contemporary Literary Studies, the University of Tokyo. He is the translator of more than thirty books of contemporary literature in English, including Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Rebecca Makkai’s Music for Wartime, Ling Ma’s Severance, C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, among others.

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies

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