East Asian Colloquium

Tanizaki on the Essence of Language, Japanese and Western: The Views of a Japanese Novelist

Anthony Chambers
Professor of Japanese, International Letters and Cultures
Arizona State University

Friday, September 24, 2010
12:00 p.m. - 1:15 p.m.
Ballantine Hall 004

Professor Anthony Chambers, a distinguished scholar and award-winning translator of Japanese literature, will explore Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's views on the essential nature of Japanese and Western languages and of their speakers. The chief text for his discussion will be Tanizaki's A Style Reader (Bunsho tokuhon, 1934), which is still used in Japan as a composition primer. Chamber argues that Tanizaki's statements about Western languages are often misleading (his choice of Theodore Dreiser as a representative writer of English prose, for example), and that Tanizaki's essentialist generalizations about language led him to misrepresent issues concerning translation from Japanese into English, specifically in the cases of The Tale of Genji and classical waka poetry. He will also show that Tanisaki's 1934 analysis contradicts his own earlier writings on Japanese and Western languages.

Author of The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki's Fiction (1994) and other critical works, Professor Chambers has published translations of many of Tanizaki's works, including The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot (1982), Naomi (1985), The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto's Mother (1994), and three stories in The Gourmet Club: A Sextet (2001). He has also translated short works by Zeami, Natsume Soseki, Mishima Yukio, Miyamoto Teru, Hirano Keiichiro, and others. For his 2006 translation of Ueda Akinari's Tale of Moonlight and Rain (1776), he won the 2007 Japan U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Classical Japanses Literature. Having taught at Wesleyan University, he is currently Professor of Japanese at Arizona State University, where he teaches literary translation and Japanese literature, pre-modern and modern.

Light refreshments will be served. You are also welcome to bring your own lunch.

For more information contact:

East Asian Studies Center
Memorial Hall West Room 207, 1021 E Third St
Phone: 812-855-3765
Email: easc@indiana.edu