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...destination, linguistically experientially, for European travelers. Enforcing policy of sakoku (literally, "closed country," which lasted from 1639 to 1854), Japan stands as an anomalous nation in a time when elsewhere in the world mercantile and intellectual commerce increased. However, complete national closure functioned more readily as an abstract ideal than as a tenable practice. Motivated by a desire for foreign products, the Japanese at this time permitted a limited trade with China and Holland. One area, however, where the ruling Shogunate attempted to enforce complete control is that of textual or linguistic exchange. Not wanting foreign ideas and influences to enter their nation, Japanese officials banned the ownership of all foreign publications by Japan's citizens and confiscated all books from foreign traders for the duration of their stay in Japan. The communication that the Japanese government allowed between its citizens and the Chinese and Dutch merchants took place ostensibly only through the means of its state-employed interpreters. Despite these formidable restrictions, information about Japanese culture and history does reach Europe. The two works that I examine here, published in the late-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries in English from translations of Dutch and German works, attest that the "closed" nation, especially the linguistically hermetically sealed one, is ultimately an impossible construct. These works both document instances of Western fascination with the Japanese language, linguistic difficulty, mistranslation, the surprising transfer of information that gives insights into Japanese life, and the metaphorical translation of Japan into often unlikely idioms and concepts so as to render it comprehensible to European readers. The convergence of these two factors--European texts that deal with issues about translation and language, and Japan, a country that actively tries to resist all translation--provides a particularly fruitful locus to examine ideas about translation in the long eighteenth century.
The first work, Atlas Japannensis, published in 1669 in Dutch by Arnoldus Montanus and then "English'd"--substantially altered, added to, and published by John Ogilby in 1670--is a sprawling and heterogeneous work. The English text represents a translation practice whereby the "original" text provides the raw material for what becomes a substantially different work. For this reason, when writing about Atlas Japannensis, I take the unconventional step of referring to Ogilby as the work's author and refer to his English edition. Atlas Japannensis is an elaborately illustrated attractive folio of limited factual accuracy. Providing comparatively little information about Japan relative to the substantial volume of text, Ogilby constantly compares Japan to biblical and classical models. This work reads as the product of a historical juncture when beliefs in a universal humanity begin to give way to a more fragmented pluralized view of human existence. The second, Engelbert Kaempfer's five-book A History of Japan, published first in English translation in 1727 (more than fifty years before it eventually appeared in its original German), is a well-organized and scholarly text. Based on the author's detailed personal observations and his reliance on historical accounts written in Japanese--and surreptitiously yet efficiently translated for him by his personal interpreter--the History remains throughout the eighteenth century a comprehensive and authoritative work on Japan. It does, however, move into the realm of fancy, when in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary, Kaempfer asserts that the Japanese are a "pure" race and that their language is the "original" sacred Babylonian tongue. Kaempfer's fascination with Japan's economic and cultural self-reliance causes him to conclude that universal sympathy is untenable and that true mutual understanding and communion are located only amongst the people of a nation.
Despite the differences in style and scholarly methodology that separate Ogibly's Atlas and Kaempfer's History, what unites them is the way they attempt to translate the unfamiliar language and meaning of Japan into familiar terms. Both Ogilby and Kaempfer connect Japanese history to recognizable Christian narrative by suggesting Japanese is the original language that exists prior to splintering of languages that occurs at Babel. European commentators in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries frequently represent the "primitive" unlettered cultures of the Americas and the South Pacific in prelapsarian terms--as existing in a state of nature and grace due to their ignorance of sin. The encounter, however, with the grand and complex Asian civilizations of Japan and China, which could not be relegated on a temporal or social continuum to a position of innocence, requires the adoption of different paradigms and metaphors. (1) The notion of "Babel" readily provides explanation for the confusion of incomprehensible languages and in the case of Japan contextualizes its genealogy and its national isolation. Babel, the location where translation first becomes necessary, I would argue, provides a model not only for understanding Japan, but equally for conceptualizing the increasing importance of vernacular languages amongst the nations of Europe. (2) And, therefore, Japan becomes a useful site for Europeans' self-reflection as they attempt to interpret their place in the world.
Originality and authorship are both fraught concepts to evoke when referring to the chaotic, hybrid Atlas Japannensis. Arnoldus Montanus published this work in Dutch in 1669. However, it was not the work of a single author, but a compilation of observations written by Dutch merchants. In addition to their own impressions of their visits to Japan, these traders also relied upon earlier Jesuit accounts for information about Japan. And to this composite text, Ogilby's 1670 English translation adds supplementary materials and commentary. (3) His "translation," therefore, is no servile imitation, but one that boldly asserts its own claims and priorities. Though Ogilby first achieved prominence as a popular English translator and publisher of the classics, a subsequent generation will view him, in the words of John Dryden, as a "botching interpreter." The production of a number of "atlases" of foreign lands, including China, Africa and America, forms the middle section of his diverse career. In his final work, Britannia (1675), he turned away from the foreign to the domestic. Unlike his earlier exotic publications, in this text he "attempt[s] a scientific calculation of the length and conditions of the major and minor roads of England and Wales." (4) This returning home is perhaps the appropriate conclusion to Ogilby's career, which, whether dealing with classical literature or foreign nations, attempts to render foreign texts and landscapes more easily accessible to the English reader by translating them into a familiar language and idiom.
From the very beginning of Atlas Japannensis, Ogilby attempts to reconcile the strangeness of Japan by describing it in "universal" terms that would be recognizable to his readers. Though it is the putative subject of this text, Japan receives consideration primarily in comparison to European models, both ancient and modern. Ogilby's lengthy introduction, appended to the English version of the text, mentions Japan only after a sprawling, rambling consideration of such issues as the hierarchy of the universe, the origins of various nations according to biblical authority, and the history of navigation and exploration of foreign lands by ancient Greeks and Romans and by modern-day Europeans. The thematic preoccupations with national origin, genealogy, religious potency, and linguistic difference established in the introduction provide the focus for the text as a whole.
As one of the conditions of trading in Japan, the Dutch were required to make annual visits to Japan's capital in order to present gifts to and make their obeisance before the Emperor. Atlas Japannensis begins with a plate depicting such an embassy. The text, however, immediately departs from the specifics of European interactions with the Japanese to discuss the wider universe with its "Celestial Luminaries" and the "Earth and Sea making one Body." (5) The accent in this extended introduction is on the wholeness of the universe. Ogilby emphasizes global harmony even when contemplating the greatest geographic variety. "For the highest Tops and lowest Descents are nothing in comparison to the Magnitude of this vast Body, but seem less than Warts on the Hand, or small Furrows in a Plough'd Field" (1), he writes. With extreme difference reduced to the scale of physical blemishes or pastoral scenery, it would become easier for readers to comprehend and imagine the Earth's dissimilarities. In this world, which is emphatically not one of fragmentation, Ogilby claims that any seeming singularity is minimal in relation to the universal whole. Throughout Atlas, Ogilby applies a strategy of leveling difference so any aberrations may be subsumed in a larger, always interrelated, universe. In the introduction he uses this approach to discuss geographical difference. Later in the text, in order to explain the cultural and linguistic difference exhibited by the Japanese people, he employs a similar method when he compares their alien culture to familiar European paradigms.
With the order of the world established, the narrative proceeds with relative efficiency...
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