Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection: An Introductory Manual with Selected Texts by Naohiro Ōta (review)

IF 0.2 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY
Daniel J. Lauro
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

A chief challenge that all scholars of premodern Japan are bound to encounter in the course of their careers is acquiring sufficient skills to read and understand komonjo, a term used to describe various types of documents produced before the Meiji period (1868–1912). The challenge is twofold. First, komonjo feature grammatical structures and words that are no longer in use or that have assumed different meanings in modern Japanese. Second, premodern documents are often written using kuzushiji, a cursive style in which the original shape of the characters is altered, thus making the task of reading texts particularly daunting. In Japan, where the field of paleography emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, an abundance of komonjo manuals and dictionaries have been published over the years. Additionally, Japanese universities, museums, and other research institutions routinely offer classes for the study of premodern documents. Outside of Japan, however, opportunities are more limited, despite the initiatives launched in the past decade by European and American universities. In this context, Naohiro Ōta’s volume, Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection, possibly the first komonjo primer in English, is a longawaited and muchneeded contribution. Ōta, a professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature (Tokyo), developed the volume as a byproduct of an international project involving Japanese and European scholars to catalog and digitize a forgotten collection of premodern Japanese documents donated by Mario Marega, a Salesian missionary to Japan, to the Vatican Apostolic Library in the 1950s. The approximately 14,500 documents that Marega collected during his time in Ōita Prefecture were produced between the seventeenth and the nineteenth
从Marega Collection中阅读日本文献:Naohiro精选文本入门手册Ōta(评论)
所有研究前现代日本的学者在他们的职业生涯中必然会遇到的一个主要挑战是获得足够的技能来阅读和理解komonjo,一个用来描述明治时期(1868-1912)之前产生的各种类型的文件的术语。挑战是双重的。首先,komonjo的语法结构和词汇在现代日语中不再使用或具有不同的含义。其次,前现代文献通常使用草字书写,这是一种草书风格,它改变了汉字的原始形状,因此使得阅读文本的任务特别艰巨。在19世纪末出现古文字研究领域的日本,多年来出版了大量的komonjo手册和词典。此外,日本的大学、博物馆和其他研究机构定期提供前现代文献研究课程。然而,在日本以外,尽管欧美大学在过去十年中推出了一些举措,但机会却更为有限。在这种背景下,直宏Ōta的《阅读Marega Collection中的日本文献》可能是第一本英文komonjo初级读本,这是人们期待已久且迫切需要的贡献。日本国立文学研究所(东京)教授Ōta开发了这本书,这是日本和欧洲学者参与的一个国际项目的副产品,该项目旨在对被遗忘的前现代日本文献进行分类和数字化,这些文献是由驻日传教士马里奥·马雷加(Mario Marega)于20世纪50年代捐赠给梵蒂冈Apostolic图书馆的。Marega在Ōita县期间收集的大约14,500份文件是在17日至19日之间制作的
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
0.00%
发文量
16
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