soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2022-09-15 04:52 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2022-09-15 04:52 pm
Folktales of Japan, edited by Keigo Seki, translated by Robert J Adams
This is a pretty elderly collection of folk tales, published nearly 60 years ago, and and it is hugely invested in Aarne-Thompson tale types and Thompson's motif index, which is a highly european system and not....ideal as a framework for investigating stories outside the bounds of the areas the types and index were based on. When you're choosing which stories are worth studying, and what elements of a story are the important elements for what the story is doing, if you do this based mainly on stories from a different background, it's going to affect how the folklore of the culture you're studying is represented!
Anyway, so there's that, and then I also actually have a concern about how accurately the stories are translated. Of course I have not read the originals in Japanese because I am monolingual, but there was a word choice at one point that just stopped me in my tracks.
At one point a character is referred to as having been "crucified". My understanding of Japan is that Christianity is an extremely minor presence there, and even more so historically -- and none of the other stories in the collection show the slightest hint of Christian influence as far as I could tell. So either in the original the character really was crucified and the (generally fairly comprehensive) annotations did not bother discussing the highly unusual presence of this element in the story, or the translator was so laissez-faire about his translation that he paid no attention to the connotations of his word choices. This does not fill me with confidence about the things I DON'T know enough to question in the rest of the collection!
I did appreciate that in the story introductions there were often explanations about elements of Japanese culture that underpin a story, as it helps contextualize aspects of the story that would otherwise be confusing to the outsider reader. And it was very readable as a whole, and included both stories I knew already and stories that were new to me.
So.....a decent collection for its era, but not one I can unambiguously recommend.
Anyway, so there's that, and then I also actually have a concern about how accurately the stories are translated. Of course I have not read the originals in Japanese because I am monolingual, but there was a word choice at one point that just stopped me in my tracks.
At one point a character is referred to as having been "crucified". My understanding of Japan is that Christianity is an extremely minor presence there, and even more so historically -- and none of the other stories in the collection show the slightest hint of Christian influence as far as I could tell. So either in the original the character really was crucified and the (generally fairly comprehensive) annotations did not bother discussing the highly unusual presence of this element in the story, or the translator was so laissez-faire about his translation that he paid no attention to the connotations of his word choices. This does not fill me with confidence about the things I DON'T know enough to question in the rest of the collection!
I did appreciate that in the story introductions there were often explanations about elements of Japanese culture that underpin a story, as it helps contextualize aspects of the story that would otherwise be confusing to the outsider reader. And it was very readable as a whole, and included both stories I knew already and stories that were new to me.
So.....a decent collection for its era, but not one I can unambiguously recommend.