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The Metaphysics of Translation and the Origins of Symbolist Poetics in Meiji Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Earl Jackson Jr
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Abstract

Japanese modernity is often equated with Westernization, and the cross-cultural link is restricted to the Western influence on Japan. The translations of Western philosophy and poetry in the Meiji period (1868-1912), however, relate to native symbolist poetics, in a way that has earlier parallels: Japan's alchemical cultural interaction with China in the transformative cultivation of Zen in the medieval period and its complex responses to Neo-Confucianism in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). The consistent metatextual dynamics suggested by these parallels cannot be adequately described through influencebased comparative methods. This essay defines Japanese modernism as a creative conflict stimulated by the introduction of transcendence-based texts into fundamentally immanence-grounded aesthetic, epistemological, and semiotic systems.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 2 , March 1990 , pp. 256 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

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