Poets, Paragons, and Literary Politics: Sugawara no Michizane in Imperial Japan
Robert Tuck examines the Meiji reception of the Heian scholar and poet Sugawara no Michizane (845–903) to outline the development of several influential modern narratives of Sino-Japanese literary relations. Beginning with the views of Michizane held by Edo-period Confucian scholars, he proceeds to cover key debates among Meiji scholars concerning Michizane as an icon of imperial loyalty and as a kanshi poet of “utmost sincerity” (shisei). In the 1890s literary scholars attacked all Heian kanshi writing as insincere and formalistic, but from 1902, the one-thousandth anniversary of Michizane’s death, other scholars made Michizane the focus of a new narrative in which Japan overcame the linguistic obstacles of literary Chinese and domesticated kanshi. By analyzing Meiji scholars’ discourse on Michizane, Tuck reveals the cultural and ideological currents that continue to influence narratives of Sino-Japanese literary history to the present day.
MYTH AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITAIN - THE LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR AND ROBIN HOOD.
Scholars have become increasingly interested in how modern national consciousness comes into being through fictional narratives. Literature is of particular importance to this process, for it is responsible for tracing the nations evolution through glorious tales of its history. In nineteenth-century Britain, the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood played an important role in construction of contemporary national identity. These two legends provide excellent windows through which to view British culture, because they provide very different perspectives. King Arthur and Robin Hood have traditionally been diametrically opposed in terms of their ideological orientation. The former is a king, a man at the pinnacle of the social and political hierarchy, whereas the latter is an outlaw, and is therefore completely outside conventional hierarchical structures. The fact that two such different figures could simultaneously function as British national heroes suggests that nineteenth-century British nationalism did not represent a single set of values and ideas, but rather that it was forced to assimilate a variety of competing points of view.
Translating Legal Language and Comparative Law
Legal texts are in the focus of both lawyers and translators. This paper discusses the binary opposition of these two views especially in the light of contract law. There is one crucial epistemic difference between the point of view of the translator and the lawyer when it comes to the interpretation of legal texts. In the translator’s view legal text is traditionally conceived as static as to its nature; something that already exists in the form of text. Traditionally, the translator is interested in the text itself as it was written down in a document, i.e. the translator needs to go back to the frozen moment when a legal document was constructed and finalised. The lawyer, in contrast, is very much interested not only in the text of the legal document but also in the contextual surroundings of the text. In fact, for legal interpretation, sometimes the key-elements for the interpretation come from outside of the text itself. This paper concludes that legal translation is in many cases closer to transcreation than it is to traditionally understood translation.