Cultural Translations

The reception of Ethical and Aestheticalvalues of Japanese Culture in the WestThe translations of Nitobe´s Bushidô and Okakura´s Book of Tea into Spanish.M. Teresa Rodriguez NavarroUniversitat Autònoma de BarcelonaAbstractThe aim of this paper is to analyse and compare the context, pretext and some examples of tworepresentative works of the nihonjinron discourse at the beginning of the 20th century in Japan:Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe (1900), and The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō(1906). These Japanese authors-translators were pioneers in both inter-cultural studies andtransmitting values and concepts of Japanese culture to the West. Like Nitobe’s Bushido, Okakurawrote The Book of Tea in English, already a sort of self-translation -a self translation “in mente”-(Tanqueiro, 1999, 2002).These texts will be analysed to see how the context as well as the reader influence the receptionof the text as discourse through the translation process both the translator the selftranslator,a privileged translator (Tanqueiro, 1999). We also present a diachronic study of sometranslations of the above mentioned books published in Spanish between 1909 to 2007. Theparatextual elements of these translations will reflect the interaction between contexts, pretextsas well as the ideology and “visibility” of the translators influencing the interpretation of the textas discourse. The translators “rewrite” the texts censoring when necessary, to make values andconcepts of the beginning of the 20th century. This analysis may also shed light on the receptionof Nitobe’s Bushido and Okakura’s Book of Tea in Spain during the last 100 years as well as thechanging images that Spaniards have had on the “Culture of Bushidō” and the “Culture of Chadō”.41