chiushingura loyal league japanese von dickins frederick (2 Ergebnisse)

Zustand: Used - Good. 1880. Hardcover. London: Allen & Co., Waterloo Place, 1880. Decorated cloth with gilt stamped lettering. Tall octavo. xv & 203 pp. Illustrated. Some shelf wear and mild scuffing to boards, corners moderately bumped. Both hinges starting. Portion of rfep torn away. Some foxing and toning to pages. Altogether a copy in Good condition. Good.

First edition, uncommon, of the second complete English retelling of the legend of the forty-seven ronin, with an appendix containing the first substantial English translation of a noh play. WorldCat and Library Hub locate just four copies in the UK (London Library, Royal Academy of Arts, Cambridge, and Sussex). The Chiushingura, literally "the Treasury of Loyal Retainers", tells the story of the 1703 "Ako incident", in which a band of leaderless samurai avenge the death of their master and demonstrate "the supreme virtue of the Bushi class" (p. i). The text was conceived by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) and revised in 1748 into a kabuki play, helping to popularise the story of the ronin. The first foreign-language translation (Chinese) was published in 1794 and the text was also one of the earliest works of Japanese literature to be translated into a Western language. The present translation employs a "novelistic" (Commons, p. 366) style familiar to Western readers. It went through five editions by 1910 and was translated into French in 1886. Four years before the publication of the present work, the story of the forty-seven ronin was included in A. B. Mitford's Tales of Old Japan (1871). Frederick Victor Dickins (1838 1915) was a naval surgeon and Japanologist closely associated with Sir Ernest Satow. Arriving in Japan in 1863 as medical officer on board HMS Coromandel, Dickens immersed himself in Japanese language and culture for three years. In this period, he began his lifelong friendship with Satow and began translating Japanese literature. He returned to Japan in 1871, staying until 1879, before settling back in England and devoting himself to Japanese studies and the University of London. He published many scholarly translations and studies including The Story of the Old Bamboo-Hewer (1887) and a life of Harry Parkes (1894); the 1999 edition of his collected works spans seven considerable volumes. The appendix presents a translation of the Ballad of Takasago, "almost all of which is presented in rhyming quatrains" (Commons, p. 366). The ballad is part of the noh tradition which melds poetry, dance, drama and music into an aesthetically rich experience. Written in the 15th century, it celebrates longevity and the union of husband and wife, and today is heralded as a masterpiece. Anne Commons, "Japanese", in Peter France and Kenneth Haynes, eds., The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 4: 1790-1900, 2005, pp. 363-370; John A. Tucker, The Forty-Seven R nin: The Vendetta in History, 2018. Octavo. Original beige wrappers, front cover lettered in black in English and Japanese. Xylographic title page, 5 similar specimens of the original preface and the Ballad of Takasago, 29 woodcut plates in black and blue. Contemporary Yokohama bookseller's ticket to front wrapper verso, contents with occasional contemporary underlining, corrections and marginal annotations (mostly "appendice"). Wrappers creased with couple of closed tears and small losses, more significant loss at foot of spine, moderate foxing internally, illustrations well-preserved. A very good copy.