- 著者
-
佐藤 勇夫
- 出版者
- 日本英学史学会
- 雑誌
- 英学史研究 (ISSN:03869490)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.1991, no.23, pp.29-39, 1990
My object in writing this paper is to disclose European and American poets' real names selected and their poems translated into Japanese by Ohwada Takeki for his book <I>Ohbei Meika Shishu</I> (<I>Selected Poems from the works of the Famous European and American Authors</I>, 1894) and discuss his way of translating European and American poetry into Japanese and the characteristics that distinguish the book from other Japanese translation books of Western poetry.<BR>Ohwada Takeki was born on 29th of April, 1857, in the province of Iyo where is now called Ehime Prefecture and died a scholar in Japanese literature at the age of 54, in 1910, in Tokyo. During his life he wrote his 97 books, 154 volumes of his travel diary and many dozens of his songs. Among them, the book is well-known to the Japanese and may deserve to be studied in the field of historical studies of English poetry translated to suit Japanese readers.<BR>Almost twelve years earlier than the book appeared, a book entitled <I>Shin-Taishi Sho</I> (<I>A Selection of Poems in New Style</I>, 1882) was published by Maruya Zenshichi in Tokyo. By publishing this book the three co-authors may be said to have tried a literary experiment in writing their poetry in new style.<BR>Ohwada Takeki chose 65 European and American poets and their 106 poems for the book and translated them into Japanese poems in new style, I should say, to improve the results of the experiment.<BR>Focusing on 99 English and American poems from among 106 poems taken in the book, it might be worth noting that they were familiar to the Japanese of those days; all the images of nature and human life are dealt with in them; they took their share in the making of the literary movement towards romanticism in history of Japanese litrature; they are quite different from English poetry which the Japanese poets of the symbolist school were influenced by; and they are translated in the middle way between paraphrase and imitation according to Dryden's theory of translation, therefore, Ohwada Takeki's aim was, I may add, to translate poetry, not simply the words of poems.