Translation from Russian in the Melting Pot of Japanese Literature

Futabatei Shimei was the first significant translator from Russian into Japanese. In his two debut translations, Ivan Turgenev’s ‘The Tryst’ (‘Aibiki’) and ‘A Chance Encounter’ (‘Meguriai’), both published in 1888, he reproduced the preterite by employing ‘-ta’ verb endings. In 1914, Nakamura Hakuyō published a translation of Fedor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which he meticulously reproduced almost all the third-person pronouns using ‘kare (he)’ and ‘kanojo (she)’. Natsume Soseki, in later works such as Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa, 1915) and Light and Darkness (Meian, 1916), masterfully employed both the preterite (‘-ta’ verb endings) and third-person pronouns, duplicating their use in European languages. However, neither ‘-ta’ verb endings nor third-person pronouns were widely adopted in the modern Japanese novel. The use of ‘-ta’ verb endings expressing the past tense, and of the Japanese third-person pronouns kare and kanojo, temporarily became the norm in translations, but recently the frequency of third-person pronouns has started to decline rapidly. This chapter examines how past tense forms and third-person pronouns have been used in translations from Russian into Japanese; and studies the impact of translations from Russian on the Japanese literary language.