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Wednesday, 6 April 2011

Japanese Literature: Online translations

The HathiTrust.org, is an online digital Library which has many texts provided by universities across the U.S.A, it's an astounding database, although I think you have to be at one of the partner universities to download books as PDF's, there are many books to read online using the page turner tool. Among translated Japanese texts that are availabe to view many are older texts that I presume are now, (due to their age), in the public domain, here's a list of some I  recently found, hope these are of interest. On the HathiTrust Access and Use Policies page it mentions that, 'users are encouraged to cite and link to digital content and are free to do so without asking for  permission', so I hope it's ok for me to provide these links.




A Handful of Sand
Ishikawa Takuboku
Translated by Sakanashi Shio


Art, Life, And Nature in Japan
Masaharu Anesaki


An Adopted Husband/Sono Omokage
Shimei Futabatei
Translated by Buhachiro Mitsui and Gregg M.Sinclair


Paulownia Seven Stories from Contemporary Japanese Writers
Translated by Toraro Taketomo, foreward by John Erskine,Phd.
Short stories from; Ogai Mori, (Takase Bune and Hanako), 
Kafu Nagai, (The Pier, The Bill Collector and Ukiyoe), 
and Toson Shimazaki, (A Domestic Animal and Tsugaru Strait).

















Kokoro
Natsume Soseki
Translated by Edwin McCellan




Although this is not a full translation of this famous novel it gives a great impression of this story, this edition comes with two other stories from Kobayashi Takiji and also other short stories of Proletarian Literature by Fujimori Seikichi, Kuroshima Denji, Kishi Sanji, Kataoka Teppei, Tokunaga Naoshi and Hayashi Fusao, whose story Cocoons is amongst my favourites in this collection.
A film on Kobayashi Takiji by Heather Bowen-Struyk can be seen here.






  
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7 comments:

  1. Mel u6 April 2011 at 12:00

    This post is an incredible resource-thanks so much-you are right it is very hard to find Japanese literature in translation on line

    thanks so much

    ReplyDelete
  2. me.8 April 2011 at 10:21

    There's a few more that I've found which hopefully I'll post on in the near future.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous11 April 2011 at 07:28

    What a great resource, especially for works that are not so readily available in the U.S.

    ReplyDelete
  4. me.11 April 2011 at 20:36

    Apart from Kokoro I think these are out of print, although some of the stories in Paulownia have appeared in other collections, it's really great to get the opportunity to read these, especially Kanikosen, I'll add a link for a film about Kobayashi Takiji by Heather Bowen-Struyk.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @parridhlantern17 October 2011 at 19:57

    just tried to access a couple of the books, it seems you need to login with some college id.

    ReplyDelete
  6. me.17 October 2011 at 21:33

    Double checked most of these links and the books still appear to be there and available to read online, but I think you do need to have a log in to download them as PDFs, which is a bit of a pity.

    ReplyDelete
  7. me.16 February 2015 at 10:42

    After recently checking on this post I noticed that some of these are now no longer available via the site, a factor beyond my control, apologies.

    ReplyDelete