Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 1: From Earliest Times to 1600.

• Author: Miller, Roy Andrew
• Position: Book Review

Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 1: From Earliest Times to 1600. Second Edition. Edited by WM. THEODORE DE BARY, DONALD KEENE, GEORGE TANABE, and PAUL VARLEY. Introduction to Asian Civilizations. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2000. Pp. xxvi + 517. $39.50.

This first half of a projected two-volume revision and expansion of the Japanese materials in Columbia University's Sources series cannot but put readers of this journal in mind of a characteristically vivid comment by E. Adelaide Hahn on the first printing of these materials: "I remember clearly the horror that I felt when attending ... a meeting held at Columbia in September 1958 ... where I learned that what was contemplated was the offering of courses in various Asiatic literatures, to be conducted by persons not conversant with the languages involved." And Franklin Edgerton agreed with her, "emphatically, when I told him about it" (JAOS 85 [1965]: 5).

Despite such reservations, the Sources series went on to great success. The Japanese volume especially has been enormously popular. Few in the field of "Japanese studies" have not had to use it more than once in this course or that. In the process, it became apparent to many of us that the translations in the 1958 edition were frequently inaccurate or misleading. This was hardly surprising. Most had originally been done years before, using what would now be regarded as inadequately annotated editions of the texts, and without the many important lexical tools that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. When students asked questions about the meaning of this or that puzzling passage in the translations, a check with the original usually showed that the translation was simply incorrect. Once the great commercial success of the 1958 edition had made possible the revision and expansion of the entire Japanese volume, the time had obviously come to go through all the old translations in order to ameliorate their more str iking errors. Curiously and unfortunately, this has not been done.

A representative case in point is the translation of the Kaifuso preface (1958, pp. 90-92), reprinted intact (pp. 97- 99), and still as in 1958 with reference only to the venerable but virtually useless 1914 edition in the Yuho-do series. A modicum of attention to the text even in that primitive edition would have obviated the most egregious misreading of the old translation now reproduced here intact: the text does not say that "Shinji later spread his teachings in the field of translation," but rather that a Korean from Koguryo named [Wang] Sin-i "later taught widely" in a place named Osada (< OJ wosada certain arcane literacy skills earlier introduced from Paekche by the celebrated Wani. The ci-devant "field of translation" turns out to have been a rice-paddy, deeded earlier to one of the Korean immigrant families (see Kojima Nonyuki, NKBT 69 [1964], 450a; Endo Yoshimoto & Kasuga Kazuo, NKBT 70 [1977], 70 n. 3.) Other problems in this old translation, still uncorrected here, were discussed in JACS 107 (19 87): 756-60; add to those the error in understanding the dated-colophon of the text, not as here "[with] the stars at the juncture of metal and hare" but "with the Planet Jupiter in the third of its twelve-year cycles, the twenty-eighth of the sexagenary progression."

To perpetuate these and the other mistakes of the 1958 translation in a new edition is bad enough; worse is the repetition (p. 97) of the 1958 denigration of the language of the original as "clumsily handled by the unknown compiler [and] imperfect in style and technique." A translator who this badly misunderstands a text is in no position to bad-mouth it, much less to run counter to the received evaluation of Japanese scholarship that continues to find the Kaifuso preface "a superlative masterpiece, excellently representing [the best of] the Nara court" (thus, Inoguchi Atsushi, Nihon Kanbungakushi [1984], 80).

Other passages where this new edition merely...