![]() ![]() Rather, the author sets herself three questions: “what forms of translation were practiced, who were the translators, and what, exactly, were they translating (or not translating)?” (p. You will not find in Clements a detailed analysis of how Ueda Akinari translated or adapted vernacular Chinese stories in his Ugetsu monogatari. For their vast subjects, both Kornicki and Clements provide essentially a kind of annotated bibliography. Clements’s methodology is similar to that of her mentor Peter Kornicki and his History of the Book in Japan (Brill, 1998). ![]() The scope of this study is truly vast, and a reader might wonder how any one person could cover such a range of material. A penultimate chapter takes up “late Tokugawa ‘crisis translation’” and is followed by a conclusion. ![]() ![]() Individual chapters consider three kinds of source texts: pre-Edo classical Japanese texts, “Chinese” texts, and texts in Western languages. The first chapter, “Language and Society in Tokugawa Japan,” provides background for the following chapters, considering urbanization, literacy, the printing industry, “multilingualism,” kokugaku, and “language consciousness among Tokugawa sinologists,” among other issues. Her introduction considers what one might consider “translation” in the early modern period and the plethora of terms used then to describe the rendering of one text into another. Rebekah Clements has produced an important study of the kinds of texts that were translated into contemporaneous Japanese(s) throughout the early modern period. ![]()
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