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- Title
A Modernist Adventure in Translation: Ueda Bin's Rhythmic Poetry as Kinetics of Mind.
- Authors
Ikuho Amano
- Abstract
In the early twentieth century, a few decades after the genbun'itchi movement in 1880s, Japanese literary circles underwent a period of experiments over poetic styles and translation. The focal point of the quest was an inquiry as to whether or not the traditional scheme of rhythmic verse adequately renders modern sensibilities in poems. In response to the debate, the polyglot scholar Ueda Bin (1874-1916) employed the sevenfi ve syllable scheme in his translation of Symbolist poems by Mallarmé, Baudelaire, D'Annunzio, and Busse, among many others. Whereas Ueda's synchronization of contemporary themes and traditional style invited criticism, his approach was far from being arbitrary. As prominently shown in the case of Busse's "Über den Bergen," the eclectic approach to Symbolist poems challenges the limit of linguistic signs, extending the reader's attention to an extra-linguistic realm of emotion via rhythm, while suggesting the influence from the Bergsonian philosophy of élan vital and Walter Pater's Aestheticism. The traditional poetic scheme is a legitimate apparatus, as it conjures up the reader's cognitive experience of emotion. In the socio-culturally transitional epoch, by virtue of the rhythm pattern familiar to Japanese readers, Ueda's Modernist translation makes foreign sensibilities accessible to them, and therein creates an intersubjective ground of literary experience.
- Subjects
MOD culture (Subculture); AESTHETICISM (Literature); RHYTHMIC modes; BAUDELAIRE, Charles, 1821-1867; TRANSLATIONAL research
- Publication
Japan Studies Association Journal, 2011, Vol 9, p57
- ISSN
1530-3527
- Publication type
Article