Japanese Warriors’ Tales in Translation: History of translation of The Tale of the Heike into English and Russian

In this research, I propose a historiography of translation of Japanese military terminology and imagery into English and Russian throughout the 20th century using Heike Monogatari as an example of Japanese medieval war tales. Military terminology and imagery have a network of embedded meanings and interlinguistic references that the translators attempt to match in order to convey the meaning on the macro-level of the text. However, as this layer of lexis is rich with extralinguistic cultural references (ECR) (i.e., the words that have no exact equivalent across the linguistic pair) in the choices different translators make while rendering the text into English and Russian, we can see the influence of the academic field of Asian Studies and indirectly assess the predispositions and translational norms in academia at various times. To emphasise the role of the translator in the process of meaning-making across two language pairs, a major part of my thesis outlines the history of The Tale of the Heike in translation and the biography of translators.

At their inception, Japanese-English translations of Japanese war tales with Heike as a case study were carried out by British scholars and translators. With key figures in intercultural communications from the diplomat A.B. Mitford to the historian A. L. Sadler, the issue of class coinciding and partially overlapping with the aesthetical and political movement of medievalism prompted the translators to curate their selection of materials for publication in accordance with their class-attuned taste. This led to a degree of tampering with the original, which was tolerated by the target culture to a high degree.

After WWII, the United States (the U.S.) funded the military training of the translators E. Seidensticker, D. Keene, H. and W. McCullough, among others who became the avant-garde of the Japanese-English translations and Asian Studies. As the training of the interpreters funded by military forces allowed more social mobility, the class profile of the interpreters was increasingly varied. The question of class consciousness recede, and a question of marginality and positionality of the study of Japanese culture and literature in the world literary system in the second half of the 20th century rise to prominence.

In the Soviet Union, ideology and an overt political orientation of academia manifested themselves in the interpretation of Japanese medieval literature within the context of the power struggle between the classes, and anti-cosmopolitanism was displayed on a word level to a high degree. From the viewpoint of a Soviet Japanese studies scholar, academia was often described as a place of refuge from the indoctrination of Soviet propaganda, and medieval texts were used as means of indirect social commentary and channelling of the traumatic experiences that Soviet scholars endured.

Comparative analysis of the texts across multiple retranslations further illustrates and reinforces the arguments outlined in the biographic sections of the thesis.