Performing the Author-Translator Across Shores: Japanese Refractions of World and Latin American Literature in the 20th Century

Abstract

This dissertation intervenes in current scholarly debates surrounding East-West literary exchanges and the role that Western literary and academic cultural networks play in the mediation of transcultural literary relationships between the Global South and non-Western cultural spaces. It does so by analyzing the translations and intertextualizations of Japanese literature in Latin American literature during the 20th century, and vice versa. The critical argument of my project is centered on the figure that I have termed the “author-translator,” writers whose work in translation occurs not in parallel to professional or academic careers, but in direct relation with their endeavors as creators of works of literature. Author-translators approach the task of translation with a different set of considerations, expectations, and goals than those of a different ilk. My contention is that by treating such translators as a distinct category, and by then using the Japanese and Latin American examples of this phenomenon as a case study, we can shed light on the larger processes of literary circulation and world literature canon-formation in contemporary global literature. The Introduction provides a substantial account of how Latin American literature was read in Japan during the 20th century, while also establishing the theoretical framework of the dissertation in regard to translation studies, postcolonialism, and world literature studies, the three vectors on whose intersection this dissertation lies. Chapter 1 analyzes Mexican poet Octavio Paz’s early stays in India and Japan, and his translation of Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the North (1st ed. 1952, 2nd ed.1970). Chapter 2 discusses how Borges has been read in Japan since the 1950s up to the present day, but also pays special attention to Borges’s own transculturation of Japanese literary themes in the form of his tanka, haiku, and short fiction, and how these have been translated into Japanese. Chapter 3 analyzes Terayama Shūji’s 1980s adaptations—first for the stage and later for film—of García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Chapter 4 proceeds to the 1990s, tracing Murakami Haruki’s career as an influential translator of American literature in Japan before analyzing his 1992 travel narrative to Mexico, included in his 1998 travel book Distant Frontier, Close Frontier.