In the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, his works remain vividly alive. The ongoing stream of translations and editions of the il Somma Poeta, continuing to hold the world in rapture, is evidential of the text’s mutative and evolving qualities as it immerses itself in each discrete language. With this curiosity in mind, we are presenting a new Dante-centric series on the blog, taking a look at the Italian master’s works through the prisms of its variegating, global journey. First up is Professor Hideyuki Doi of Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University, an accomplished expert on Italian literature. In the following essay, he traces the history of Dante’s presence in Japan, and discusses why the ancient texts continue to fascinate contemporary writers.
In order to understand Dante’s fortune in Japan, we must travel backwards exactly seventy years, when the first volume of Dante gakkai shi—annals curated by the Japanese Dante Society, founded the year before in collaboration with the Italian Dante Society of Rome—was published.
This release represented a validating acknowledgement of Dante Studies, or Italian Studies, in Japanese academia, reborn anew in the post-war period. For a long time, if the figure of Dante represented for the Italians questions of identity, for the Japanese, it posed questions of existence. In contributing to this cultural conception, there is a poem inspired by Dante’s work, composed by Akiko Yosano in the concise style known as waka or tanka:
Hitori ite hoto iki tsukinu Shinkyoku no Jigoku no kan ni warewo miidezu
Alone I breathe a sigh of relief having not found myself in the Inferno of the Divine Comedy.
This fragment, composed in 1921, restores the ancient form of thirty-one syllables subdivided into five units, and also shows how Dante touched Japanese readers closely. Yosano, today counted among the greatest modern poets, is the highest representative of that Japanese romanticism of the early twentieth century—considered a non-naturalistic aestheticism.
To draft that “Dantesque” poem, Yosano had read the first complete translation of the Comedy, edited by Heizaburō Yamakawa (1914, 1917, 1922), a Christian-inspired man of letters. Yamakawa, like many other Japanese people of that time, was spurred by a worldwide interest in the Florentine poet upon the sixth centenary of his death, as well as a curiosity cultivated by certain writers who had referenced Dante in their own works. For example, the modern novelist par excellence, Sōseki Natsume, in his autobiographic short story London tō (The Tower of London, 1905), described the imposing image of the famous Tower standing in the memories of his years spent studying in the capital—an image compared to that of Dante’s famous gate, which condemns to “eternal pain” those who pass through it.
Among the earliest references to Dante in Japanese literature, we can also mention Ōgai Mori, another great proponent of Japanese literary modernization in his translations of European classics, and who, while studying medicine in Berlin and elsewhere, had the opportunity to read the Comedy in German. In the first Japanese literary magazine Shigarami-zōshi, founded by Ōgai himself, he explained Dante’s “third rhyme” in an 1891 article. The following year, Ōgai began to publish in installments the translation of The Improvisatore (1835) by Hans Christian Andersen, in which the protagonist Antonio finds a copy of the Commedia, hated by his Petrarchist master, on a Roman stall. It is there that, for the first time, a passage from Dante is rendered in Japanese—the first tercet of the third canto of the first cantica. Ōgai coined a new word to introduce the Divine Comedy: Shinkyoku, combining the two ideograms representing “God” (shin) and “song of taste” (kyoku).
From a cultural perspective, in those last years of the nineteenth century, the westernization of the country was underway following the Meiji Restoration—comparable, simplistically, to the Italian Risorgimento as a movement of renewal, however extraneous to any subversion of a revolutionary nature. Through various channels, Dante’s fame spread among the Japanese elite and intelligentsia. The young political class studied the writings of Thomas Macaulay on John Milton and Dante, and the Anglicists read the criticism of Thomas Carlyle—in particular On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History (1841), in which Dante and Shakespeare are elected “hero poets”. In addition, John Aitken Carlyle, brother of Thomas, published the first prose translation of the Commedia in 1849. That text was the version read by Jorge Luis Borges at the relatively advanced age of thirty-eight, in the trams that traveled between his house and the library where he worked near Buenos Aires, as told in the Siete noches (1977). The Japanese Anglicists also read other English versions, the 1814 text translated by Henry Francis Cary, and the 1867 text translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
One of the readers, Bin Ueda, published in 1905 an anthology of translated poetics, Kaichō on, or The Sound of the Tide, wherein he practiced various experiments with twenty-nine European poets: starting from the Romantics, then passing through the Symbolists to the classics. Included were three Italians: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Arturo Graf, and Dante, of which there was only one sonnet—the first that appears in Vita Nuova: A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core, concerning the visionary dream that occurred following the second meeting with Beatrice. Ueda, who had already published Shisei Dante—Dante the Bard (1901), the first Dante monograph in Japan, obtained the first professorship dedicated to Dante in 1908 at the Imperial University of Kyoto. This is why the most important line of Italian studies continues nowadays in the ancient Japanese capital, and not in Tokyo.
A few years after Ueda’s work, the first complete translation by Heizaburō Yamakawa was published. Then, by the end of the Second World War, three other versions were released (by Masaki Nakayama in 1917; Sōfū Taketomo in 1923, 1948, and 1950; and Chōkō Ikuta in 1929). During this period of crisis, scholars read and studied the Comedy frequently alongside Japanese classics, as if it presented a solution to their problems, or an escape from their reality. After the war, four more translations followed (Soichi Nogami in 1964; Sukehiro Hirakawa in 1966; Itsuo Miura in 1970-1972; and Bunshō Jugaku in 1974-1976). The latest was released in 2014 by Motoaki Hara, who gave a lecture on his translation criteria of philological correctness on the occasion of the seven hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Dante’s birth at the Kansai Association of Italian Studies (ASIKA in Italian acronym).
Therefore, Dante’s work has been translated into Japanese a total of nine times thus far. One of the most profound reasons why it continues to be translated can perhaps be attributed to a question that remains open: what register should be used to translate a work so ancient, and yet so new (for Japanese people)? Before the Europeanization of Japan, an older form of written Japanese language was in use, today called kobun or bungo; in the first half of the twentieth century, it was believed that, in order to translate a European classic, it was necessary to resort to classic Japanese, even if that language was already out of use in contemporary literature. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, the Commedia was roughly translated into today’s “standard” Japanese. It is necessary to consider, nowadays, how far that poetic Tuscan is from the so-called Italian koinè. Some Japanese translators still favour the classical style employed by the first translator, Yamakawa, while the latest version by Hara is based in contemporary Japanese. it is very significant that the historical and the latest versions coexist, that the predecessors are not overwhelmed by the successors. It remains a curiosity, raising many doubts and hesitations about our linguistic conception—a fact that Dante himself examined via different “vulgar languages” in the treatise De vulgari eloquentia.
This year, in commemoration of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, I will organize an international conference in Kyoto, together with new and veteran colleagues, to discuss new hypotheses, unrevealed to the Dantists of the world. This symposium is supported by the Association of Italian Studies in Japan, the Italia gakkai, whose previous formation, Dante gakkai, was founded seventy years ago in Kyoto, the city that gave birth to Italian studies in Japan.
Hideyuki Doi is an Italianist specializing in contemporary poetry. His most recent publication is Interlinee: studi comparati e oltre, a collection of comparative literary studies, from Franco Cesati Editore of Florence.
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