Defamiliarizing translations of children’s literature in Meiji Japan: a study of Wakamatsu Shizuko’s Wasuregatami

This paper will examine Wasuregatami (‘The Memento’, 1890), Wakamatsu Shizuko’s Japanese translation of Adelaide Anne Procter’s poem The Sailor Boy (1858). is narrativized into the monogatari style and culturemes are assimilated target-culture context Japan in an apparently domesticating approach. Nevertheless, inclusion original source-culture items implementation experimental colloquial genbun itchi (vernacular) literary could also exemplify Venuti’s foreignizing “defamiliarizing” since it goes “beyond literalism to advocate experimentalism” by using “registers, styles already available translating language create a discursive heterogeneity” (Venuti 2000: 341). contend that used was cornerstone on which Shizuko would base her later, more acclaimed translations children’s literature Japanese.