Defamiliarizing translations of children’s literature in Meiji Japan: a study of Wakamatsu Shizuko’s Wasuregatami

Abstract

This paper will examine Wasuregatami (‘The Memento’, 1890), Wakamatsu Shizuko’s Japanese translation of Adelaide Anne Procter’s poem The Sailor Boy (1858). The poem is narrativized into the Japanese monogatari style and the culturemes are assimilated into the target-culture context of Japan in an apparently domesticating approach. Nevertheless, Wakamatsu Shizuko’s inclusion in the translation of original source-culture items and the implementation of the experimental colloquial genbun itchi (vernacular) literary style could also exemplify Venuti’s foreignizing and “defamiliarizing” translation since it goes “beyond literalism to advocate an experimentalism” by using “registers, and styles already available in the translating language to create a discursive heterogeneity” (Venuti 2000: 341). This paper will contend that the style used in Wasuregatami was the cornerstone on which Shizuko would base her later, more acclaimed translations of children’s literature into Japanese.