A polysystemic analysis of the translation/adaptation of Chinese vernacular novels in Early Modern Japan

Abstract

The reception of Chinese vernacular novels (hakuwa shōsetsu) via translation and adaptation in early modern Japan exerted a great influence upon the literature of the time, which would later yield some proto-typical translations of Western literary works in the early Meiji era. While the subject has been explored mainly in the disciplines of Japanese and Chinese literature, it has not been studied in translation studies. Polysystem theory (Even-Zohar, 1978) regards translated literature as part of a broad and dynamic system and thus helps elaborate how it occupies a major or minor position in a literary system at a given time. Based on Tokuda’s (1987) acclaimed literary study of the renderings of Chinese vernacular novels, this paper attempts to perform a polysystemic analysis of the translation / adaptation of those novels in the late 17th and the early 18th century in order to add a context-oriented perspective to his text-based research.