question

[Alina Israeli]

Such sloppiness, i.e. translation from a translation, occasionally  
happened but usually for "popular fiction".

Since the person who asked you probably doesn't know Russian, he  
should hire a research assistant who knows Russian to do what I just  
did:

1. look up each individual work by whatever writer he is interested in.

I looked up a Kawabata novel in translation: http://www.litportal.ru/genre215/author3857/book17815.html

2. note who the translator is and research the translator.

In this case it was ГРИГОРЬЕВА Татьяна Петровна

Thanks to the web we can find a lot about her in less than a minute:

спец. по традиц. учениям Востока; д-р филол. наук, проф. Окончила  
Моск. ин-т востоковедения (1952), асп. Ин-та вост. языков при МГУ  
(1957). С 1958 работает в Ин-те востоковедения АН СССР (РАН), с 1988 —  
вед. н. с. Докт. дисс. — "Японская художественная традиция" (1980).  
(and more) http://www.biografija.ru/show_bio.aspx?ID=29958

Not likely that she would translate from anything other than Japanese.

AI


Oct 30, 2010, в 1:01 PM, Katz, Michael R. написал(а):

> Dear colleagues:
>
> Larry Venuti (Temple University) has written to my colleague and  
> friend in Japanese Studies at Middlebury to ask how influential were  
> the English translations of the trio (Tanizaki, Kawabata, Mishima)  
> in stimulating interest in these writers and sending the US-made  
> canon abroad? Did these translations drive translations of modern  
> Japanese fiction into other languages? Were the English versions  
> themselves translated into other languages?
>
> This last question particularly interests him ost, but he's not sure  
> how to research it. The databases he's looked at do not indicate  
> that a translation may have been not directly from Japanese but  
> through an intermediate language.
>
> I am wondering if anyone has ideas as to how one could discover  
> whether the Russian versions of these authors' works were translated  
> from Japanese, or from an intermediate language.
>
> Please reply to me offline with your suggestions.
>
> Thanks very much.
>
> Michael Katz
> mkatz at middlebury.edu
>
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Alina Israeli
Associate Professor of Russian
LFS, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave.
Washington DC 20016
(202) 885-2387 	fax (202) 885-1076
aisrael at american.edu

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