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On Translating Dead Languages vs. Living Ones
(copied from a reply I made to someone somewhere)
Historically the classical European languages (like Greek and Latin) have been taught (and since they're effectively dead languages, preserved) using a textual grammar-translation approach, and the texts that are usually highlighted have "proper" understandings that are in many cases tied strongly to systems of power that don't want people coming up with alternate interpretations. Translating the text the same as other people have translated it is used as a sign to confirm that you understand the language (and the important ideas of the text) properly. The historical value attributed to those texts is based in large part on a rigid and repeated understanding of what they mean; I've seen some people try to break with this tradition, but they're pushing back against centuries of people for whom rote repetition was literally the point.
Genji, by contrast, is mostly important for its aesthetics, and even modern Japanese has dozens(?) of translations that have taken different approaches to the text. That's not to say that it's not also political; in many ways Genji is tied to nebulous concepts about Japanese national identity, for example, but it's precisely because those ideas are nebulous and changing (and probably also because of the nature and our understanding of the Heian court language it was written in) that it is necessarily more open to interpretation than The Republic or whatever. Imagine a world where the ancient Greek or Roman states continued for centuries longer, and how that might have impacted their transmission and our understanding of their texts. Works like Genji and The Journey West are still part of living textual traditions and the bequeathal of cultures that are constantly changing and which possess a need to reincorporate their pasts into the narratives they create to explain their presents.
Historically the classical European languages (like Greek and Latin) have been taught (and since they're effectively dead languages, preserved) using a textual grammar-translation approach, and the texts that are usually highlighted have "proper" understandings that are in many cases tied strongly to systems of power that don't want people coming up with alternate interpretations. Translating the text the same as other people have translated it is used as a sign to confirm that you understand the language (and the important ideas of the text) properly. The historical value attributed to those texts is based in large part on a rigid and repeated understanding of what they mean; I've seen some people try to break with this tradition, but they're pushing back against centuries of people for whom rote repetition was literally the point.
Genji, by contrast, is mostly important for its aesthetics, and even modern Japanese has dozens(?) of translations that have taken different approaches to the text. That's not to say that it's not also political; in many ways Genji is tied to nebulous concepts about Japanese national identity, for example, but it's precisely because those ideas are nebulous and changing (and probably also because of the nature and our understanding of the Heian court language it was written in) that it is necessarily more open to interpretation than The Republic or whatever. Imagine a world where the ancient Greek or Roman states continued for centuries longer, and how that might have impacted their transmission and our understanding of their texts. Works like Genji and The Journey West are still part of living textual traditions and the bequeathal of cultures that are constantly changing and which possess a need to reincorporate their pasts into the narratives they create to explain their presents.