Futabatei Shimei

Futabatei Shimei

Futabatei Shimei ( Japanese 二 葉 亭 四 迷 ; * April 4, 1864 in Tokyo Prefecture ; † May 10, 1909 on the Bay of Bengal), actually Hasegawa Tatsunosuke ( Japanese 長谷川 辰 之 助 ), was a writer and the first artistic translator of Russian literature into Japanese.

Life

Futabatei came from the lower feudal nobility. He studied literature and Russian from 1881 to 1886 at the Tokyo Foreign Language School (today: Tokyo Foreign Language University ). Until 1887 he worked as a translator in the civil service; from 1899 to 1902 Russian lecturer at the Tokyo Foreign Language School. Travels to Vladivostok , Harbin and Beijing . Futabatei became friends with Tsubouchi Shōyō , the author of Japan's first modern theory of romance. He translated Russian literature ( Gogol , Turgenew and others) and wrote short stories and novels .

After the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War (1904) he worked as a journalist for the daily Asahi Shinbun . In 1908 he went to Saint Petersburg as a special rapporteur for the Asahi Shinbun . There he fell ill with pulmonary tuberculosis. He subsequently died on his return trip to Japan.

Works

• 1886 Shōsetsu sōron ( 小説 総 論 ) - (elements of prose)
• 1887/89 Ukigumo ( 浮雲 ) - (Ziehende Wolken, English Japan's first modern novel - Ukigumo , 1967)
• 1906 Sono omokage ( 其 面 影 ) - (That face, Engl. An adopted husband , 1919)
• 1907 Heibon ( 平凡 ) - (German partially translated from Mittelmess , 1965, 1982)

literature

• Bruno Lewin : Futabatei Shimei in its relations with Russian literature . Hamburg, Society for Nature and Ethnology of East Asia 1955.

Web links

• Digital copies of his works at Aozora Bunko (Japanese)

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Futabatei is the family name, Shimei the first name.