A Study On The Japanese Translation Of A Dream Of Red Mansions (1892-2015)

From the publishing of Mori Kainan's The Prologue of A Dream of Red Mansions in 1892 to Nishikino Humi's The Story of A Dream of Red Mansions in2015,the Japanese translations of A Dream of Red Mansions have gone through123 years.These years have witnessed the coming out of 38 Japanese translations,including 12 excerpted translations,12 editing translations,10 full translations,three abridged translations and a intermediate translation.This study focuses on the 38 Japanese translations,almost all of which have been accumulated together with the related literature during 2014 when the author of the dissertation was studying in Japan.On this basis,the time span of 123 years has been divided into five periods,the Meiji,the Taish?,the Early Sh?wa,the Late Sh?wa and the Heisei,where all the translations are analyzed and examined,followed by a comprehensive study on the system of the Japanese translations of A Dream of Red Mansions.This dissertation falls into seven chapters.The first chapter is an introduction,including the purpose and significance of the study,literature review,the thread of the research and the research methods.The body of the dissertation is from the second chapter to the seventh one.The second chapter investigates the five excerpted translations by Mori Kainan,Shimazaki T?son,Sasakawa RinP? and Miyazaki Raijy? respectively,concentrating on the two versions by Mori Kainan and Shimazaki T?son where the related backgrounds,purposes,source texts,styles and significance are surveyed.Chapter Three looks at six translations,including the abridged translation by Kishi Syunp?r?,the editing translation by Dazai Eimon,the three kinds excerpted translations by Inoue K?bai,Shionoya On and Miyahara Minpei respectively and the full version(the Kokuyakubon)co-translated by Hiraoka Ry?jy? and K?da Rohan with a focus on the Kokuyakubon.The chapter mainly discusses the cooperation of the two translators,the reasons of the translation of the first eighty chapters,the double style of kunndoku and colloquialism,K?da Rohan's creative view on the A Dream of Red Mansions overlooked by the Chinese counterparts and its influence on the later translations.The fourth chapter examins the four excerpted versions translated by Nozaki Syunpei,Nagai Kaf?,Kamiya K?hei and Kond? Akira.The emphasis of this chapter lies in Nagai Kaf?'s translation of the poem “Autumn Window: A Night of Wind and Rain”,which has added colors to the stagnant situation of the translation of A Dream of Red Mansions in the Early Sh?wa period.Besides,the origin of Kaf?'s elder generation with A Dream of Red Mansions,the source text cited in his novel Bokut? Kidan and that of his translation and the employment of the style of waka are studied in the chapter as well.The fifth chapter centers on 17 translations,covering seven full translations by Matueda Shigeo(2),It? S?hei(4)and Iizuka Akira,eight editing translations by Chen Desheng,?daka Iwao,Ishihara Iwatetu,Matueda Shigeo(2),Kimishima Hisako,Tatima Sy?suke and Iizuka Akira,the abridged translation by Fuji Masaharu and Takebe Toshio and the intermediate translation by Sat? Ly?yiti,with an emphasis on two points.One is the full translations by Matueda Shigeo,Ito S?hei and Iizuka Akira,which are examined from four perspectives.Firstly,a study of their translation processes,their researches on A Dream of Red Mansions,their life experiences,characters and eduction is conducted.Then,the subjective and objective factors that have affected their different choices of the source texts are surveyed.Furthermore,their different styles of the translation of poems and proses and thereupon the diverse translation styles are investigated.Their following and going beyond the previous translations as well as their own ones have been explored in the end.The other emphasis is Sat? Ryoichi's intermediate translation based on the manuscript of Lin Yutang's English translation of A Dream of Red Mansions which has been discovered by the author of the dissertation in Japan.The textual structure,the source text,the features of Lin's editing translation are explored and the differences in the structure,the translation method of Sato Ryoichi's Japanese translation and the necessity and importance of publishing Lin's manuscript are revealed in this chapter.Chapter Six has investigated 6 translations,covering the two full translations by It? S?hei and Inami Ry?ichi,the abridged translation by Sakai Yukio and the three editing translations by Wang Min,Kobayashi Ky?ji and Nisikino Humi,with a focus on the versions of Inami Ry?ichi and Kobayashi.This chapter examines Inami Ry?ichi's emphasis on the original text,the tradition of kundoku employed in his poetry translation and his unique interpretation of A Dream of RedMansions in the annotations.In the meantime,the originality of Kobayashi Ky?ji's employment of the form of tetrastich to translate jueju and lüshi is analyzed as well.The seventh chapter is the conclusion.On the basis of the detailed analyses of the various translations in the previous chapters,a comprehensive survey has been conducted with a summary of the entire system of the Japanese translation of A Dream of Red Mansions encompassing the translators' viewpoints on A Dream of Red Mansions,structures of the translations,the text choices,the stylistic evolutions,the translators' identities,the publishing and circulating situations as well as the impacts of the translations.