In Mr. Kawabata’s works, delicacy joins with resilience, elegance with an awareness of the depths of human nature … they are modern yet directly inspired by the solitary philosophy of the monks of medieval Japan. … For many writers in modern Japan, the claims of tradition and the desire to establish a new literature have proved well-nigh irreconcilable. Mr. Kawabata, however, with his poet’s intuition, has gone beyond this contradiction and achieved a synthesis. …I feel honored to recommend him, who more than any other Japanese writer, is truly qualified for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mishima Yukio wrote these words to the Swedish Academy in 1961, officially nominating him for the prize. It was seven more years before Kawataba would win, with the committee citing his “narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind”:

True, of his production only three novels and a few short stories have so far been translated into different languages, evidently because translation in this case offers especially great difficulties and is apt to be far too coarse a filter, in which many finer shades of meaning in his richly expressive language must be lost. But the translated works do give us a sufficiently representative picture of his personality.

Kawabata’s banquet speech also addresses the issue of translation:

In view of the complexities presented by differences in language, and in view of the fact that my works, no doubt more than those of others, have had to be perused in translation, I must indicate my deep and undying gratitude and respect for the resolve shown by Your Excellencies of the Academy. This first award to an Oriental in fifty-five years has I believe made a deep impression upon Japan, and perhaps upon the other countries of Asia as well, and upon all countries whose languages are little known internationally.

Speaking to the Japanese media, he was even blunter:

If I could have been read by the judges in Japanese that would have been best, but … the fact is that I am heavily indebted to translation. (日本文で審査してもらえれば一番ありがたいわけですけども…翻訳のおかげを非常に被っているわけですね)

Kawabata’s love/hate — or, more accurately, want/distrust — attitude towards translation was expressed in many ways. He was, by all reports, very hands-on during the translation process, which is not to say helpful, necessarily. Edward G. Seidensticker’s Tokyo Central: A Memoir contains this anecdote about the translation of Snow Country:

“Do you not, my esteemed master, find this a rather impenetrable passage?” [I would ask Kawabata]. He would dutifully scrutinize the passage, and answer: “Yes.” Nothing more.

Similar themes are visible in Kawabata’s correspondence with Mishima Yukio, published in 1997 as Kawabata Yasunari/Mishima Yukio: Ōfuku Shokan (『川端康成・三島由紀夫往復書簡』). As early as 1951, Kawabata asked Mishima for the name of “that American translating Confessions of a Mask,” because he wanted his advice as “a Japan-based foreigner who reads Japanese literature” on the question of which short stories to send to the US college magazines that Wallace Stegner had put him in touch with.
Continued »