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A brief note on Donald Keene
Mar. 7th, 2019 10:42 amIn one of those coincidences without further meaning, just before reading recently about the death of the noted translator of Japanese literature Donald Keene, I rediscovered Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, which I had bookmarked to a page regarding the difficulty Japan’s nationalists had in overturning the popularly supported globalist perspective of 1931 that led to Tokyo’s being awarded the 1940 Olympic Games in conjunction with an accompanying World’s Fair. Both were cancelled in 1937 when the nationalists, who had by then dominated the government, asserted that the two projects required too much of the raw materials needed to conduct the newly launched war with China. We know the rest of the history.
Donald Keene had read Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji as a university freshman shortly before Pearl Harbor and become enamored of the “beautiful and distant world” (his words) reflected in its pages. So it is less surprising than it otherwise might be that he volunteered to study Japanese to act as a wartime interrogator, and between the direct experience and study of a box of bloodstained personal diaries recovered from the battlefield, emerged from the war with such an empathy for Japan and its people that he became the foremost postwar American translator of Japanese literature.
Philip Kapleau, who became the Zen roshi of a number of my college friends, gained his empathy for Japanese culture while serving as translator at postwar trials of some of the nationalists who had squelched Japan’s prewar manifestations of multinationalist outreach.
Tooze’s book has the distinction of offering a vertiginously global version of the dozen years following World War I; just opening the book at random again, I encountered a description of Argentine disorder as indicative of the wave of far-left activism of 1919-1921 that resulted in the counter-rise of fascism in a few countries and a “return to order” in the rest as a result of what Tooze terms “the Great Deflation” creating a few years of economic stability that lasted until the Great Depression. I recall having bought the book in 2014 with the feeling that it would completely alter my vague impressions of the world between the wars and its relevance for today, but now I feel like I really need to read it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/obituaries/donald-keene-dead-at-96.html
Donald Keene had read Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji as a university freshman shortly before Pearl Harbor and become enamored of the “beautiful and distant world” (his words) reflected in its pages. So it is less surprising than it otherwise might be that he volunteered to study Japanese to act as a wartime interrogator, and between the direct experience and study of a box of bloodstained personal diaries recovered from the battlefield, emerged from the war with such an empathy for Japan and its people that he became the foremost postwar American translator of Japanese literature.
Philip Kapleau, who became the Zen roshi of a number of my college friends, gained his empathy for Japanese culture while serving as translator at postwar trials of some of the nationalists who had squelched Japan’s prewar manifestations of multinationalist outreach.
Tooze’s book has the distinction of offering a vertiginously global version of the dozen years following World War I; just opening the book at random again, I encountered a description of Argentine disorder as indicative of the wave of far-left activism of 1919-1921 that resulted in the counter-rise of fascism in a few countries and a “return to order” in the rest as a result of what Tooze terms “the Great Deflation” creating a few years of economic stability that lasted until the Great Depression. I recall having bought the book in 2014 with the feeling that it would completely alter my vague impressions of the world between the wars and its relevance for today, but now I feel like I really need to read it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/obituaries/donald-keene-dead-at-96.html
