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Pursuing Meaning
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13646 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
1,533 Words |
| Author
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Dale Saunders
Dale Saunders is professor of Japanese at the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He has translated all Abe's
novels except the last two |
I first became aware of Kobo Abe in 1964 when I trudged up to the Knopf office at Fiftieth Street and Third Avenue. I had just finished translating a series of nine short stories drawn from a collection published in eighteenth-century Japan, and I was not without considerable if uncertain pride. Harold Strauss was in charge of Japanese literature then, and he received me pleasantly enough. But he did not think that Knopf would be interested in publishing eighteenth-century stories. He was nonetheless pleased to meet someone who might be interested in doing modern translations from the Japanese. On his desk lay several volumes, including one by an author I was unacquainted with, and another by the well-known Mishima. Would I be interested in looking them over and seeing whether one or the other might interest me?
I left the office with a new Mishima and the other volume, by someone called Kobo Abe, under my arm. I spent the next week looking them over. The Mishima volume seemed about what I might have expected from that author. The Abe, with its vivid imagination and sprightly prose, entranced me, although he was at the time completely unknown to me and to the American public. I chose to translate the Abe book, The Woman in the Dunes, known here first through the English translation and, subsequently, through the haunting movie that proved to be immensely successful in the United States and Europe.
Thus began for me a decade devoted largely to the translation of Abe's works.
I first met Abe at the very end of my translation of The Woman in the Dunes, when we met in the Okura Hotel in Tokyo to clear up a number of passages
... (1996 of 8222 Characters)
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