Soseki and Western Modernism

Abstract

Analyzing translations-even in the era of the misreading (strong or otherwise)-can lead one into the comical situation in which it is the translator (in this case, V. H. Viglielmo) whom one is, in reality, comparing to Henry James, all the while imagining oneself to be thinking about Soseki. What has disappeared is not merely the resistance of the original language (its untranslatable sentence structure, or, the other way around, what it cannot, as one individual language among others, structurally do) but, above all, its historicity. Adorno is not the only one to have thought that the most immediate experience of history afforded by a literary work lies in the very texture of its language. But translations do not yield that sense of the passage of time any Japanese reader must feel on confronting a text written in 1916. Yet, whatever has become outmoded in Soseki's last, unfinished novel, Meian,1 is an index of its historical situation fully as much as those