A Conversation with Translator Michael Emmerich

Michael Emmerich is one of very few American scholars of Japanese literature whose research and translating bridgesthe modernand premodern divide,coveringtheclassical early modern, modern, and contemporary periods. As an undergraduate at Princeton, he translated a collection ofstories and a play byKawabata, someofwhichwerepublished inConjunctionsand Fiction. The entirecollection was subsequently publishedas FirstSnow on Fuji (Counterpoint, 1999). Emmerich wenton tostudy atKyoto's Ristumeikan University receiving anMA (Sh?shi)inclassical Japanese literature, returning to the United States to complete his doctorate at Columbia. He is known forhis translations and scholarly work inboth classical and modern Japanese literature. Peter Constantine: You are a specialist in classical Japanese literature but are also known for translat ing some of the newest and most inventive, even experimental, prose from Japan. How do you rec oncile these two extremes? Michael Emmerich:Actually, I don't see them as extremes, and I don't feel that they need to be reconciled. The real difficulty for me lies in figur ing out how to convince others of how deeply complementary the two sides ofwhat I'm doing are. Translating lots of cutting-edge contemporary writers and doing research on classical Japa nese literatureboth involve readingwidely, being moved and stimulated bywhat I read, and trying to engage with asmany differentkinds of literary experience as I can. Of course, both translation and scholarship involvewriting: eitherway I need to convey to readerswhat it is that I find interesting and exciting in whatever I'mworking on. So there really isn't any gap between the contemporary translation I do and the academic work, 'at least not inmy experience. PC: Could you say a little more about how classi cal and contemporary Japanese literature can be complementary? ME: Something fascinating is happening in con temporary Japanese literature that creates a par INTERVIEW ticular resonance with classical works. Ironically, this has to do with the fact that contemporary literature no longer seems as connected to classical literatureas itonce did. Beginning in the latenine teenth and early twentieth centuries, when the idea of a "national literature"began to crystallize in itspresent form in Japan, classical works such as theearly-eleventh-centuryTale ofGenji came to be seen as the most important precursors of mod ern Japanese literature?classical literature was seen as the pinnacle of Japanese literature, and modern Japanese writers could see themselves as descendants of thewriters of those times. The Tale ofGenji can definitely be read as literature in the modern sense. It is one of themost brilliant and complex books ever written, with a huge cast of well-developed char acters, powerful scenes, a great story. You can see why itwas appealing to think of modern Japa nese literature as having descended from classical literature, even though classical literature wasn't always verywidely read. PC: Is The Tale of Genji being read extensively by young Japanese writers today? ME: Actually, The Tale of Genjiwasn't widely read until the 1940s,but since then ithas been extremely popular. Itwas par ticularly so in 2008, its thousand-year anniversary. Whether young writers are reading it is a good question, though.Lately critics in Japanhave been talking about "the death ofmodern literature," which is to say thedemise of a certainunderstand ing ofwhat literature is and why it matters. Part ofwhat is disappearing, I think, is the old sense, or perhaps theold fantasy, that modern Japanese literature can be traced back to classical Japanese literature, that ideally it should be as important and powerful as classical literature.So in the first half of the twentieth century therewas a strong sense of literarytradition,but perhaps less actual interest in classical literature;nowadays there is more interest in classical literature, but a weaker sense of literarytradition.As I see it,the so-called "death of literature," the crumbling of a sense of a literarytradition that stretches all theway back to the classical period, has created an extremely productive environment in which all kinds of writers can try new experiments, and this creates a peculiar parallel with classical times, which were also an era of experimentation. PC:What kind ofnew experiments? ME: A big part of it is linguistic experimentation. Formost of Japan's longhistory, it was a bilingual culture. The elite used

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