In 1875, Nagamine Hideki, a teacher at the Naval Academy, made a Japanese translation of the 1001 Nights from G. F. Townsend's English version. This was the first translation of the 1001 Nights in Japan. Since Nagamine, a number of translations have appeared, among which two complete translations were well-known and wide-spread, namely the one made from R.F. Burton's and the other from J. C. Mardrus'. All of these, however, were not made from the original Arabic, but were retranslations made from different European languages. In addition, most of the translators in Japan were not orientalists, but literary men who had no knowledge of Arabic and Islam. Among them were famous writers like Kawabata Yasunari and Kikuchi Kan, though many of their translations had been limited to juvenile stories. In 1966, the first translation of the Nights from the original Arabic was made by the late Maejima Shinji, who was then a professor at Keio University and a pioneer orientalists in Japan. His translation is entitled "Arabian Naito" in Japanese after the famous English title and based on Calcutta II (Macnaghten), emended by Bulaq, Breslau, Cairo, Beyrut and some other editions, and supplemented by a few independent texts like that of L. Langres. An additional volume in 1985, which contains "Ala ed-Din and the Marvellous Lamp" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers", is based on H. Zotenberg's and D. B. Macdonald's respectively. By 1983, twelve volumes had been published and, after his death in 1983, Ikeda Osamu, a professor of Arabic at Osaka University of Foreign Studies, succeeded him. Maejima's translation which renders the whole text, though still being published, is very faithful to Calcutta II edition. His style, when compared with his predecessors', seems to be simple, dry and slightly old-fashioned but, at the same time, charming and veryreadable. As for the accuracy of his rendering, it can be compared with that of Enno Littmann which is said to be the best translation of the 1001 Nights. This accuracy and faithfulness to the original makes his work suited not only for entertainment but also for scholarly use. Maejima's translation has rich and valuable annotations which occupy about 20 pages in each volume and cover a wide field of Arab-Islamic cultures. He also adds a good epilogue at the end of each volume. He expended 20-30 pages for epilogue to analyze the stories contained in the volume and the 1001 Nights itself, to compare the texts and translations of the Nights, and to explain Arabic history, literature, society, religion, folklore and so on. This epilogue is based on the latest studies in Europe, the United States and Japan, and therefore is the most outstanding feature of Maejima's work in the history of the translation of 1001 Nights.
抄録全体を表示