Kyoto Lectures

京都は、日本の主要な学問の中心地として、また世界中の研究者が集う場所として、古くから伝統文化を守ってきました。このシリーズでは、フランス国立極東学院(EFEO)・京都大学人文科学研究所の協力のもと、東アジアの文化・社会学の専門家が、ここ京都で研究成果を発表する機会を提供しています。
Anomalies in Aesop

Kyoto Lectures

Anomalies in Aesop

Extraneous Episodes in the Japanese Script Editions of Isopo monogatari

Lawrence E. Marceau

23 luglio 2018 18:00

École française d'Extrême-Orient

In 1593 the Jesuit Mission Press in Amakusa published the first translation of Aesop’s Fables in East Asia, Esopo no fabulas, in romanized orthography. A separate, but seemingly related, translation appeared in Japanese kanji and kana about two decades later. This translation went on to enjoy multiple reprintings and continued to be read over the next two centuries.

This lecture examines episodes in the fabricated “Life of Aesop” as well as several fables included in this text. When comparing the commercially published Japanese script text with the Romanized edition as well as with 16th-century European editions, we find that some stories have been transferred from the fables to the “Life of Aesop,” while other stories do not appear in any of the possible European source texts at all. One story, in fact, seems to have derived from a legend brought from the New World. This lecture attempts to recast the Fables from a new perspective, suggesting that the process of translation and adaptation into a Japanese idiom was far from simple.

Lawrence E. Marceau is Senior Lecturer in Japanese at the University of Auckland. He is currently serving as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto. He is the author of several books and articles, including recently “Bunjin (Literati) and Early Yomihon” in Shirane, Suzuki, and Lurie (ed.), The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (2015), and “Woodblock Prints and the Culture of the Edo Period,” in Marceau, Norman, and de Pont, Fragile Beauty: Historic Japanese Graphic Art (2014).