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0Russian Japanology Review, 2024, 1, pp. 110-127 DOI: 10.55105/2658-6444-2024-1-110-127
Dostoevsky in Japanese Translations: The Problem of Textual Images
U. P. Strizhak
Abstract
The phenomenon of "Japanese Dostoevsky" is the subject of active discussions in literary studies all over the world. One of the central issues discussed is the problem of the textual images in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky. The use of digital humanities' technologies, the methods of corpus and computational linguistics makes it possible to formalize literary analysis' tasks to state the texts' problems in the language of algorithms. In this article the mechanisms of the transformation of textual images in Dostoevsky works in the Japanese representation will be considered. Different linguistic means are used to analyze the perception of the concept "love" as love-affection or love-passion, and concept "strange" as human essential or social characteristic in Russian and Japanese. Such analysis will help also to highlight the peculiarities of the "new translation school" that adheres to the strategy of domestication, making the foreign text more readable.
Keywords: Dostoevsky, Japanese translations, textual image, corpus study, quantitative literary studies
Introduction
The popularity of Dostoevsky in Japan has traditionally been the subject of study around the world. Translations of his works into Japanese continue to provoke numerous discussions among the translators and literary scholars. The phenomenon of "Japanese Dostoevsky" can be
found in various spheres of philological discourse: Dostoevsky's artistic style, his religious and philosophical beliefs, plot lines, the historical and cultural background of the problematic issues of his works, etc. One of the major discussion topics could be addressed to the problem of Dostoevsky's textual images: the origin of Sonya Marmeladova's sacrifice, the nature of Prince Myshkin's charm, the influence of slavery on Smerdyakov's behavior, and the specific motives of Raskolnikov to confess his crime - these and other debatable issues are discussed in the academic research field.
Over the past two decades, the confrontation between two translation schools has intensified in Japan. First is the traditional translation school, which tends to preserve the flavor of the source text. Second is the new translation school, which tends to simplify the source texts to popularize the world classical literary heritage. The most prominent representatives of the new translation school include such famous translators as Kameyama Ikuo, Ura Masaharu, Mochizuki Tetsuo (Russian literature); Anzai Tetsuo and Nanjo Takenori (English literature); Okazawa Shizuya and Sakayori Shin'ichi (German literature); and Kudo Yoko (French literature). Their translations quickly became best-sellers which led to the crucial battle of two schools.
As a result of this confrontation, from 2007, the Japanese media hosted heated debates calling for "the enjoyment of great writers in new translations" under the slogan "Updated classics - now you can read them".1 This confrontation led to fierce debate around the figure and legacy of Dostoevsky on the contradiction between traditional academicism from one side and new strategies to win over the "ordinary inexperienced reader" from the other. This confrontation sometimes entailed bold assessments: from the admiring reviews of the new school emphasizing "mistakes, but wonderfully outrageous mistakes," or: "when looking at the page there is a feeling of freshness," to bewilderment at the recent proclamation of such slogans as "the bright and cheerful
1 Nihongo bukkuretto 2007. Kokuritsu kokugo kenkyujo: https://mmsrv. ninjal.ac.jp/nihongo_bt/2007/doukou/sinbun/topic02/
Dostoevsky," "Dostoevsky as a product" [Fujii & Nakashima 2012, p. 24, 49]; so far as to directly accuse fellow Japanese translators from the other camp of myth-making and trickery. In response to these accusations, Numano Mitsuyoshi notes that "Kameyama's new translation is written in a fresh, contemporary idiom that is relatively easy to read" and in total "recent translations aim for reader-friendliness" [Numano 2012, p. 189-190]. In order "to explain this explosive boom" in Dostoevsky's translation, Tawada Yoko asks if Dostoevsky's texts can "be translated in such a way that it reads smoothly and fluidly like a bestseller?" and says the new translations of Dostoevsky are "easily accessible and had a good rhythm [...] the odors and dust of a foreign society are suppressed [...] characters are readily distinguishable from one another despite their inconsistencies" [Tawada 2009, p. 2].
The aim of the new translation school is a "resurrection" of translated classical literature in Japan to refresh hard-to-understand texts with "light and simple words that will reach the very heart of the Japanese reader who might otherwise get lost in the authoritative pronouncements of the classics" (from advertising materials of the Kobunsha publishing house). However, this often leads to some simplification of texts and sometimes to semantic losses. Such conclusions are most often drawn based on the traditional methods of literary analysis: the slow reading, the observation, comparative and compositional genre analysis, stylistic features of texts, etc.
Traditionally, literary analysis uses mainly the qualitative research methods listed above. It should be considered, however, that with the development of digital technologies, such research methods as the linguistic study of literary texts are gaining momentum: the digital identification of various trends, statistically significant patterns, etc. using corpus and computational linguistics. Such digital linguistic approaches tend to be in high demand in the study of plot dynamics, the analysis of the rhythmic organization of texts, and the grammatical and lexical features of a writer's individual style (frequency and distribution of lexical units, preferences for parts of speech and verb forms), etc. This work examines the peculiarities of the Japanese perception of textual
images in the works of Dostoevsky based on a digital corpus analysis.
The development of instrumental and methodological bases for processing and analyzing corpus texts based on the computational methods makes it possible to use the quantitative data for literary interpretation. Literary texts are difficult to formalize; as for facts, they can easily be extracted and transformed from text into numbers; but it is much more difficult to extract meanings in any formalized form. Today digital literary analysis deals with problems of varying degrees of complexity: from simple technical problems of the digitization and processing of literary heritage to more complex processes of thematic modeling, stylometry, rhythmic organization of prose and poetic texts, classification and clustering of characters, and the sentiment analysis of the text, etc.
The first conceptual digital tasks facing quantitative literary studies were given in the Russian introduction to [Moretti 2013] as the possibility "to open the way to testing hypotheses and experiments based on digital methods [...] The quantitative basis here is not the main goal, but an empirical platform for analysis; numbers leading to meanings, to large-scale conclusions not about a discrete series of canonical texts surviving in culture, but about a continuous space of forms, styles, and genres" [Moretti 2016, p. 15]. Examples of specific digital tasks are initially offered in [Moretti 2013]: "literary scholars analyze a stylistic structure-free indirect style, the stream of consciousness, melodramatic excess, whatever. But it's striking how little we know about the genesis of these forms. Once they're there, we know what to do; but how did they get there in the first place? [...] No one really knows. By sifting through thousands of variations and permutations and approximations, quantitative stylistics of the digital archive may find some answers" [Moretti 2013, pp. 164-165].
This study is based on textual material from the author's Russian-Japanese parallel corpus of Dostoevsky translations. The principles of creation of the present corpus are as follows. It includes the original sentences in Russian from the novel The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky and their five translations into Japanese, done between 1914 and 2015.
The data was balanced according to chronological criteria using the simple proportional quotas: Yonekawa Masao in 1914 (hereinafter referred as Idi), Nakamura Shozaburo in 1934 (Id2), Kimura Hiroshi in 1970 (Id3), Mochizuki Tetsuo in 2010 (Id4) and Kameyama Ikuo in 2015 (Ids). This range represents three translations from the twentieth century (Id1, Id2 and Id3) and two from the early 21st century (Id4 and Ids); the latter are the representatives of the new translation school. Corpus data includes, among other indicators, elements of meta-marking - attributed information about the author, translator, and the text, allowing for a diachronic analysis of the different choices of the five translators. So, in this study, we use parallel texts as source for studying the peculiarities of the translators' individual style and their Japanese perception of the original text. Firstly, we consider the words used to represent some key concepts of Dostoevsky.
The Concept of "Love" in Constructing Textual Image: Dostoevsky vs. Japanese Vision
The concept of love in Japanese is differentiated in detail linguistically. Kindaichi Haruhiko notes that, generally, feelings and emotions in Japanese have many shades, calling them "specific narrow meaning" or "delicate shades of meaning" [Kindaichi 1978, p. 176]. There are several basic Japanese words with the meaning of "love," which differ in the intensity and nature of this feeling. According to the results of the recent word frequency analysis, "For the concept § ai 'love', the most frequent collocations include God, compassion and pity, friendship and affection, parents and children, friend, kinship; and for M koi "love": feeling, admiration, sex, attraction" [Strizhak 2023]. These two basic concepts developed gradually within the historical changes of Japanese society, when the concept of § ai emphasized care and affection, while M koi emphasized attraction between people.
Corpus data collected from "The Idiot" and their Japanese translations in general confirmed these data. The results of quantitative and contextual analysis of the corpus examples showed that the word § ai is perceived in the Japanese consciousness as love-affection having a wide range of addressees and a positive connotation. The meaning of the word M koi conveys love-passion; its structure emphasizes the semantics of sensual and carnal pleasure, strong attraction, self-centeredness, and physical influence. Confirming this, the parallel corpus data demonstrated both the unity and variety in the translators' choice of words "love," extracted from The Idiot. For § ai, the translators agree when conveying into Japanese the concepts of ideal, love without selfishness, forgiveness, love for God, love for all humanity: Is it possible to love everyone, all people, all your neighbors -1 often asked myself this question?[...] Love is above any insult, above any personal indignation [...] to love without selfishness, to love not for yourself, but for the one you love [...] love makes people equal, etc. [author's translation].
In the translation of love as M koi, a unity between translators can be found, for example, in the following scene, revealing the carnal, real essence of a woman in love: Aglaya Ivanovna loved like a woman, like a person, and not like an abstract spirit. Another example of M koi: four translators out of five use it in the brutal formula "life for love" in Hyppolite's warning to Myshkin that he faces retribution for his wrong love choice: Ml^fiM koi ni wa koi "Love for love. [You took Nastasia Philipovna from him. He will murder Aglaya Ivanovna]." Both examples show love as a dramatic love-passion, far from the ideas of understanding and forgiveness, as would be the case with § ai.
The next examples show the variety of understanding of translations for to fall in love:
(Id1) he got lost in her
(Id2) ^SV^^itfc he gave his feelings to her (Id3) he gave his heat (passion) to her
(Id4) he fell in love with her
(Ids) he admired her
Different approaches are found here: (Idi) emphasizes the idea of "no way out" for Prince Myshkin; (Id2) and (Id3) carry a hidden meaning of the special strength of feeling, which is especially due to the characters %% netsu "heat, passion" and ^ kakeru "to do something with special passion and diligence"; (Id4) and (Ids) give more colloquial versions horekomu and zokkon of the original idea of falling in love. These five variations show the complexity of the concept associated by Japanese people with the "first step in love," with the everyday manifestation of this powerful feeling which is rarely openly expressed in traditional Japanese culture. The tendency is that the intensity of the expressed feeling increases sequentially from (Id1) up to (Ids), starting from more abstract and broad meanings "to lose, to think, to give" up to the explicit terms in (Id4) and (Ids): horekomu meaning "to be enamored, captivated by" and zokkon coming from the ancient sokokon "the very bottom of the heart" therefore connotating "total irresistible love." This also can illustrate that (Id4) Mochizuki Tetsuo and (Ids) Kameyama Ikuo represent the new school, explicitly stating the open manifestation of love.
The same difference between the two schools is visible in the next several examples describing the mistress status of Nastasia Filippovna. The first and the most convincing example is the following. Aglaya ran to him the very next day after he left her, while he was sitting with his mistress [author's translation]: to convey the meaning of the word mistress, which is used here as "a woman having an extramarital sexual relationship, especially with a married man," Japanese translators choose two different ways: (Idi) (Id2) (Id3) used the Japanese equivalent ft® jofu, which has a well-established connotation of physicality and sexuality. It is noteworthy that this word does not contain any variant of "love" and consists of two characters ff jo "feeling, passion, empathy" and ® fu "woman, with the focus on her respective gender and social [wife] identity," resulting in the total meaning of jofu as "[a man's] woman for passion."
In contrast to this, (Id4) and (Ids) use the word §A aijin, which connotes less passion, more deep feeling with the flavor of an illegal
secret connection with a married partner. As a result, the textual image of Nastasia Filippovna - originally a femme fatale - is clearly differentiated in the two groups of translations, being much more dramatic in the new school translations as a "secret woman for love."
Other examples indicating the role of mistress in the structure of Nastasya Filippovna's textual image (in total seven entries of her status as mistress in the novel, e.g. The worst thing is that he openly keeps his mistress) confirm the same tendency: (Id1) (Id2) (Id3) in total use jofu or koibito (also love-passion as mentioned above) in 86 percent (18 entries out of 21) while (Id4) (Ids) applicate aijin for her in the same ratio, 86 percent (12 entries out of 14).
The representation of her textual image as a rival in love to Aglaya was also transformed over the 100-year diachronic period and acquired new subtle shades of love in the recent translations. The traditional school of (Id1) (Id2) (Id3) use the simple basic equivalent kyososha "rival," which has no difference whether used in sport or in love; in contrast, (M4)2 and (Ids) use a strong word for rival Mi^ koigataki "love enemy," explicitly highlighting the "love struggle." This may also indicate the tendency of the gradual detailing of the love sphere in modern everyday Japanese. The use of M koi here also proves by contradiction the essence of § ai, which is non-competing love with no rivals.3
A similar trend of changing the understanding of a concept, connected with "women" in the new translation school can be seen with the issue of "the role of women in society." The classical translations of this concept in (Id1) (Id2) (Id3) prefer the version fujin mondai
which highlights the idea of feminine nature (due to the character which emphasizes the traditional gender role in Japanese society. The new translation school tends to focus on the opposite connotation
2 In (Id4) it is accompanied by the phonetic clue raibaru from Eng. rival, which gives a more modern flavor as a loanword.
3 The term §№ aiteki in Japanese has the only meaning 'Love your enemy' in the context of Christianity.
of a feminist agenda using the collocation ^'ЙЙЩРрШ josei kaiho mondai "the emancipation question" when translating the concept of "the feminine question."
Essential and Social in the Nature of 'Strangeness' in Japanese Translations
Another key idea of Dostoevsky is the problem of "self and others," which is a widely debated issue in Japan as well. Takahashi Seiichiro notes that it "put questions to Japanese readers as to one's own self and the means of enlightenment" [Takahashi 2004, p. 77]. In The Idiot the concept of "alienation" from the world is paradoxically combined in two textual images: Hippolyte, an atheist and nonbeliever, claiming "I am the sole outcast," being separated from and humiliated by the crowd in one of the key scenes of the novel, and Prince Myshkin, who gets upset several times in the story because of his "being outside" of the surrounding world and his inability to fit into society. According to R. Lord [Lord 1967, p. 36], Myshkin "has short-circuited the normal paths of living" and is afraid of normalness: the mere thought of life "full of normal individuals remains intolerable." As in [Saisu 2017, p. 85], "Hippolyte suffered from the fact that he felt like he did not understand people or sounds, a miscarriage of nature. Myshkin also had this feeling. Such feelings are born from internal nihilism, and Myshkin understands the suffering of nihilists, therefore he can feel the pain of other people." No doubt this is an important feature of both characters, constructing their textual images.
To describe this psychological state of the heroes, Dostoevsky firstly uses the word chuzhoi "stranger, alien" in the meaning close to "outlier," as in "a person or thing situated away or detached from the main body or system." In Japanese translations, it is translated descriptively ШЬ
"the other with no connections," which fits well the textual image of both heroes, underlying their detachment from society. The second expression to describe the "alienation" of a person
is the physiologically accented vykidysh "miscarriage," and Japanese translations of this concept are inherently different. The classical variant is |ft# nokemono "a person who is excluded and removed being unfit," emphasizing the idea of rejection. In contrast to this, Kameyama Ikuo in (Ids) offers a literal variant shisanji "miscarriage" with
the characters "dead," "born," and "child," maybe connoting loss as the essence of Prince Myshkin's existence. It sounds very specific and creates a painful feeling despite his overall textual image being "a wonderful man." So, Japanese readers have two different types of creation/person/ character to perceive in the two translation schools: one is rejected and removed by the environment; the other is lost by nature.
More discrepancies are observed when conveying the concept of "alien, strange" in another context. Dostoevsky uses chuzhoye when describing the foreign environment "killing" Myshkin on his way abroad. Myshkin, being unfit for Russian reality, has a similar feeling regarding foreign reality, saying that the strange (chuzhoye) was killing him: "My first impression was a very strong one, repeated the prince. When they took me away from Russia, I remember I passed through many German towns that weighed terribly upon me; I could understand that it was all foreign and strange." [The strange was killing me]." [author's translation]. If we explore the details of meaning of five Japanese translations, we find four different interpretations of the strange that kills:(Idi) (Id3) ^fc
unusual, unacquainted, not used to, not comfortable things/persons/objects
(Id2) Mfcofck^W^^Lfefc] different things/persons/ objects
(Id4) ftfc] things/persons/
objects from another country
(Id5) unrelated things/
persons/objects
Four sides of the phenomenon of "the strange" are distinguished here. The question of which interpretation better corresponds to Dostoevsky's original idea is beyond the scope of this study. Here I show that the extensive polysemantics in Japanese for the concept
"strange" gives Japanese translators a wide scope for its interpretation. In turn, the range of Japanese translations makes us think about the multidimensionality of this concept: what actually is the nature of the strange? Strange as different in its essential features (natural aspect); strange as outside a given community (physical aspect); strange as unusual is a psychological aspect and strange as a lack of communication (social aspect). This diversity of choice provides great opportunities and enriches the language of the target text; on the other hand, such shades of meaning oblige the translator to choose one option, which can confuse the complex formation of the textual image of the characters. In fact, in the Japanese perception of the textual image of Prince Myshkin in his otherness we have four different types of strangeness which may make the reader think deeply about the nature of his alienation from any society.
Thus, the analysis of the concept of "love" as a tool for the construction of textual images, firstly, confirmed that the Japanese perception of this concept differentiates selfless love-affection and self-centered love-passion; secondly, the textual images of the heroes and feminine concepts associated with them in the novels often differ depending on whether the translator belongs to the classical or new school of translation. Recent translations construct the female image of Nastasya Filippovna more essentially, not just as the "woman for passion" but revealing the complex concept of a secret irresistible love with the flavor of empathy; these "new" images are more dramatic and influenced by the social change in the way feelings are expressed. The textual representation of Prince Myshkin in his strangeness also differs depending on the translator, and this concept of "strange" in relation to him varies between "alienation from society" and "essential alienation," which makes the reader wonder about the nature of otherness.
"To Save" or "To Be Saved": The Author's Language or the Reader's Language?
Exploring the example above of "the strange was killing me," we can also detect a difference in Japanese sentence structure, demonstrating the alternation of two interpretation strategies: foreignization and domestication. The domestication strategy, according to L. Venuti [Venuti 1995, p. 20], is "an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values," bringing "the author back home" in contrast to the foreignization strategy as "an ethnodeviant pressure" on those cultural values "to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad."
In the example above, the classical school uses the foreignization strategy retaining a text close to the original, and the new school fundamentally change the structure, shifting the focus from the strange that kills to a human: it kills him becomes (Id4) he was overwhelmed by "ft ni uchinomesarekaketa
and (Ids) he was about to be killed by ni
korosareyo to shita. Such passive voice language patterns, when attention is focused on the object passively accepting the impact of external forces (here - the strange, that guides a person's behavior), are highly conventionalized in Japanese. Corpus analysis demonstrates this asymmetry to kill ^ to be killed and shows the difference in the 'subject-object-action' triad between two schools of translations. For example:
Terrible impressions [suddenly overtook Rogozhin and thereby] saved the prince from the inevitable knife blow.
(Id1)(Id2) (Id3)[■••] osoroshiiinsho
ga [...] koshaku wo sukutta "the terrible impressions saved the prince from the inevitable knife blow"
(Id4) (Ids) ^^^iot&Ift [■••]
sore ni yotte koshaku ha [...] naifu no ichigeki wo manugareta/nigerareta "the prince escaped the knife blow because of this" (was saved because of this)
Something was haunting him, [and it was reality, not fantasy].
(Id1) (Id2) (Id3) hS^O^^^HRLT^fc-^KotttoT aru mono ga kare wo tsuikyu shite ■ tsukimatotte "something was pursuing him/following him"
(Id4) (Ids) i^^O^KittitbK T-itfcftT&D nani mono ka ni tsukimatowarete • owarete "he is being followed/chased by something"
All corpus data generally confirm the tendency mentioned above: the new school tends to shift the focus from the inanimate subject to the person. As a result of such domestication, the original text of Dostoyevsky is fundamentally transformed, focusing on the person and their state with less emphasis on the causation, e.g.: an irresistible desire captured the prince ^ the prince was captured by an irresistible desire / the prince became a slave of an irresistible desire; something unpleasant seemed to hurt the prince ^ the prince felt as if he had been hurt by something unpleasant; a terrible fear attacked me ^ I was attacked by a terrible fear, etc. These examples illustrate and clarify that the result and not the process, a state and not an action tend to be emphasized in Japanese. Such an interpretation brings the original Dostoevsky text closer to the Japanese reader: the less the action is focused upon, the more Japanese-like the text is (Numano Mitsuyoshi calls such strategy a "reader-friendly approximation" in [Numano 2012, p. 189]). This may contribute to the discussion of such a widely debatable feature of Japanese in its preference not to indicate something intensive as a process, but to present it as a resulting state; and this is one of the main differences of the new school of translation.
Another important observation is when the two translation schools interpret Dostoyevsky's ideas in the same way. It could be said that such unity (in violation of the cultural and language norms of the Japanese text) shows the most stable fragments of the original textual image, as it remains unchanged. In this sense, it could be guessed that all translators recognize the image of Nastasya Filippovna as the strongest one in the novel, because even the inanimate causes associated with her actions or belongings have a strong impact on those around her, which is reflected in the Japanese translations.
First, the image of Nastasya Filippovna influences Prince Myshkin the most from the very beginning of the story. Starting from her face on the portrait: something was hidden in that face and struck him just now; then the first glance at her: his first impression almost never left him; her face struck him even more now. Throughout the story, this impact continues unabated and even becomes stronger: that month in the provinces, when he saw her almost every day, had a terrible effect on him. Nastasya Filippovna has a strong impression on the other characters of the novel as well. For example, on the passionate Rogozhin: her appearance produced a marvellous effect upon him. In her young years she had a strong effect on her patrons: Nastasya Filippovna's reply astonished both of the friends (patrons). This unity in the choice of interpretation by Japanese translators once again proves by language means that Nastasya Filippovna herself, and even her portrait have a magical effect and strong impact on everyone around her.
The same unity of interpretation is found with the other key concepts of the novel as well, e.g. "love makes people equal": (Id1) (Id2) (Id3) (Id4) (Ids) ai wa hito o byodo ni suru "love
makes people equal." Another striking example is the moment describing Myshkin's painful feeling of happiness and insight during an attack of epilepsy in a collision with Rogozhin: "an extraordinary inner light illuminated his soul" became (Id1) (Id2) (Id3) (Id4) (Ids)
ijona/odoroku beki uchigawa kara no hikari ga kare no kokoro o terashita "an abnormal/amazing inner light illuminated his soul." The strength of feeling, the importance of this moment is one of the key points for the textual description of the mental and physical characteristics of Myshkin's personality - perhaps this is the reason to retain this "inner light" in the very focus of the moment as the main subject of the sentence.
To compare, we can also observe the same kind of translator unity in the two key scenes of another novel of Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment. The first powerful concept to guide human behavior is "love": in the finale scene of the novel, in the proclamation
"Love resurrected them", "love" is interpreted by all translators as the strong external force retaining the main subject of the sentence:
ga karera futari o fukkatsu saseta/yomigaeraseta "Love brought them back to life." Second is the scene of Sonya and Raskolnikov reading the Gospel and his confession of the crime: An unfamiliar feeling [..] rushed into his soul in a wave and immediately softened it: [...]
X'ffli h&^-UX [■••] kanjo ga kare no kokoro/
mune he nami no yoni oshiyosete/michiafurete [...] kare no kokoro wo yawarageta "feeling like a wave flooded/overflowed his heart/chest, and instantly softened his heart." In literary studies, the significance of these two scenes is emphasized many times; see, e.g., the discussion in [Blake 2006, pp. 260-265] about Sonya's interaction with the Gospel narrative, where E. Blake defines this Bible story as multivalent, providing "that a higher justice will prevail through God's direct intervention in human affairs" [Ibid., p. 265]. K. A. Stepanyan notes that this is an indication of the Path to Christ, and Sonya "seemed to see the event described by Ioann with her own eyes" [Stepanyan 2007]. It could be presumed that, in the Japanese version, such significant situations and powerful feelings, expressed in Dostoevsky's texts, are such irresistible forces that even the domestication-oriented new school retains these 'linguistically non-friendly' original patterns unchanged, probably to underline their importance.
Conclusion
To investigate why great controversies about the Japanese translations of Dostoevsky have not subsided, we analyzed five translations of the novel The Idiot using corpus analysis methods to identify the degree of their divergence, and to find possible reasons for such discrepancies. Three main conclusions were drawn.
Firstly, the analysis of the concepts "love" and "strange" as tools for the construction of textual images confirmed that the Japanese
translations of these concepts differ significantly. Love-affection or love-passion and "strange" as an essential human feature or as a social characteristic are used by the traditional and new translation schools respectively to shape the textual images of the heroes. Secondly, corpus analysis confirmed that the new school predominantly adheres to the principles of domestication, bringing the foreign text closer to the Japanese reader and making it more readable. As a result, the new "Japanese-like" textual images sometimes look more dramatic or less active than the original but are more understandable for the Japanese reader. This results from the tendency not to indicate something intensive as a process, but to present it as a resulting state. In the Japanese vision, Myshkin and other characters are persons who "sense" and "feel" more than they "act." This conclusion may be a starting point for more research on the Japanese understanding of Dostoevsky's images. Third, corpus analysis revealed several images and concepts that were not the subject of domestication because of their key literary importance to the text: the less transformed the textual image, the stronger it is in the Japanese perception. Corpus data highlight the domesticable and non-domesticable scenes in the Japanese understanding, either the particular concepts like "love," "insight," "inner soul light," etc., or the textual image in total.
Digital corpus analysis made it possible to identify some tendencies in the construction of the textual images in different Japanese translations of Dostoevsky. Statistically significant patterns in the description of the textual images in the novels The Idiot and Crime and Punishment confirmed in general the data of the qualitative literary analysis of Japanese translations, but also made it possible to draw new non-trivial conclusions about the essence of the translations of the new school, about the features of the textual images in the Japanese perception. This is the potential of digital corpus methods in literary studies: using corpus data in the literary analysis of Japanese transformations of Dostoevsky's textual images provides researchers with a new tool and scope for analysis.
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STRIZHAK Uliana Petrovna - Cand. Sc. (Pedagogy), Associate Professor, Academic Supervisor of the Asian Studies Educational Program, National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University), 11 Pokrovsky Bulvar, Moscow 109028, Russia
E-mail: ustrizhak@hse.ru ORCID 0000-0002-4129-448s
