Browsing by Author "Henitiuk, Valerie"
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- ItemA creditable performance under the circumstances? Suematsu Kenchô and the pre-Waley Tale of Genji(2010) Henitiuk, ValerieBefore Suematsu’s 1882 translation of the Tale of Genji, the information available in the West about Murasaki Shikibu’s masterpiece was sketchy and erroneous. The main objectives of this translator were to improve Japan’s political status by demonstrating that it has a rich literary tradition, and to make known to Westerners what is in effect that nation’s “cultural scripture” (Rowley). Reaction to his version was conflicted: readers and reviewers are curious about the previously unsuspected literary wealth presented to them, but struggle to comprehend and find points of reference. My article focuses on the circumstances that made possible this early representation of Japanese literature, while paradoxically keeping the Genji from being widely read and admired until Waley’s famous translation appeared some 40 years later. I argue that Suematsu, in using this book to critique Anglo-American imperialism, nonetheless reveals his own ambivalent relationship with the text and its author. Further, Western audiences were ill-equipped to judge what they were reading, as well as reluctant to accept a non-European interpreter, and thus the reception of this world masterpiece was long stalled for reasons that had little to do with literary or translation quality.
- Item“Easyfree translation?” How the modern West knows Sei Shônagon's Pillow Book(2007) Henitiuk, ValerieIn the West, frequent references to thousand-year-old masterpieces such as the Tale of Genji and the Pillow Book suggest that although born in a particular national context, such works now possess a new life as international cultural artefacts. All too often, however, the globalization of Japanese literature reveals a quite astonishing persistence of Orientalist and otherwise reductive readings. This article examines Sei Shônagon's Pillow Book as an Eastern text that, from a Western perspective, acquires meaning only when articulated by the West, albeit in forms that would prove unrecognizable to its author or her contemporaries. Focusing on how they underpin or resist Orientalizing themes and attitudes, I consider the multiple and rapidly multiplying translations that it has inspired. The term “translation” is used in its broadest possible meaning to encapsulate a vast range of linguistic and cultural transfers along a continuum from literal to free, involving various forms of manipulation in the process of transforming this work into world literature.
- ItemGoing to bed with Waley: How Murasaki Shikibu does and does not become world literature(2008) Henitiuk, ValerieThe question of how and why works from a given national context merge into what Goethe first termed Weltliteratur has become extremely topical, what with the recent appearance of such seminal books as Pascale Casanova's La Republique mondiale des lettres (1999) [The World Republic of Letters (2005)], David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? (2003), Christopher Prendergast's Debating World Literature (2004), and numerous studies on the issue of translation and power (e.g., the essay collection edited by Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler in 2002).
- ItemSeeking refuge in prepubescent space: the strategy of resistance employed by The tale of Genji’s third princess(2001) Henitiuk, ValerieThis article will explore how and why Murasaki Shikibu presents the Third Princess (Onna Sannomiya) as perpetually child-like and innocent, despite a storyline that sees her marry, become involved in an illicit affair, bear an illegitimate child, and finally take vows as a Buddhist nun. The present character study aims to suggest a new way to read this princess’ apparently immature behaviour as a sign of agency, albeit expressed within strictly limited parameters.
- ItemSpark of light: introduction(2016) Henitiuk, Valerie; Kar, SupriyaSpark of Light is a diverse collection of short stories by women writers from the Indian province of Odisha. Originally written in Odia and dating from the late nineteenth century to the present, these stories offer a multiplicity of voices—some sentimental and melodramatic, others rebellious and bold—and capture the predicament of characters who often live on the margins of society. From a spectrum of viewpoints, writing styles, and motifs, the stories included here provide examples of the great richness of Odishan literary culture.
- ItemStep into my parlour: magical realism and the creation of a feminist space(2003) Henitiuk, ValerieThis article sets out to demonstrate that Nights at the Circus is a magic-realist novel, by comparing its features and techniques to the existing theory and other examples within the genre. It also seeks to explore why magic realism is ideally suited to Angela Carter's objectives.
- ItemTranslating woman: reading the female through the male(1999) Henitiuk, ValerieFeminist literary criticism has argued that our understanding of literary paradigms, metaphors, and meaning in general is profoundly affected by the gender of both author and audience. Critics of this school posit that a woman’s experience comprises unique perceptions and emotions, and that women and men do not inhabit an identical world, or at the very least do not view it identically, in that sexual difference as a social construct has implications for how one interprets as well as how one is interpreted. This article discusses the nature of the text/reader transaction, and the effect on the dialogue between a woman writer and her audience of mediation by a male critic and translator.
- ItemTranslating women’s silences(2015) Henitiuk, ValerieAnita Desai’s latest story collection, The Artist of Disappearance, includes a novella titled “Translator, Translated.” In it, a naïve young woman begs a former classmate, who now runs a publishing house, to give her the chance to render a beloved Oriya author into English: “She is such a great writer and no one here even knows her name. It is very sad but I am sure if you publish a translation of her work, she will become as well-known as – as – Simone de Beauvoir!” (Desai 2011, 58). It is no accident that the great feminist theorist is referenced here; gender and translation have long been closely linked. Translation makes it possible for us finally to see the previously invisible, hear the previously unheard, countering at least some of the effects of linguistic, cultural and gendered obscurity, but these acts of transmission or transcreation are often problematic. Important questions need to be addressed: who chooses what gets translated? Into which languages? From which languages and cultures? Who dares speaks for whom? What is my own complicity? This paper will briefly discuss some very different examples of my work in the area of “women in translation”, such as helping bring to light previously unknown women’s voices from India’s Orissa province, suggesting non-existing readings that (if only they did exist) might have allowed women’s silence to be broken in inspiring ways, and bearing witness to the great range of responses to Classical Japanese women’s writing through exploration of its highly complex Western translation history.