Keith Vincent awarded U.S. Japan Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature

Keith Vincent, Assistant Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literatures at Boston University was recently awarded one of the two 2011 U.S. Japan Friendship Commission Prizes for the Translation of Japanese Literature for his translation of two novellas by Okamoto Kanoko: A Riot of Goldfish and The Food Demon, collected in a single volume published by Hesperus Press.

Okamoto (1889-1939) was a poet and novelist whose work wove together modernist psychological portraiture with Buddhist-inspired parables on the perils of desire.  When she died at the age of 49 she had only been writing for three years, but most critics agree that she would have been a major figure if she had gone on writing.  Donald Keene called her “a minor but unforgettable writer.”  The British novelist David Mitchell (author most recently of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), who wrote a preface to the translation,  said the stories “glint with greatness.”  Okamoto’s style is lush and borders on the campy in its over-the-top aestheticism.  This was a challenge to translate, both because of the sheer difficulty of the language and because of the temptation to tone it down in English. David Mitchell wrote that “while some Japanese critics find Okamoto’s style overwrought…her exemplary translator here, J. Keith Vincent, has not abused his position by removing blemishes of excess.  In a story about a frustrated striving for aesthetic perfection…such a demerit is a merit of a kind.”  Unpacking Okamoto’s “excessive” prose was made much easier thanks to the help of Professor Vincent’s colleague and BU Japanese language lecturer Hiromi Miyagi-Lusthaus.

The prize has been given since 1979 usually to two works, one modern and one premodern, by the Donald Keene Japanese Studies Center of Columbia University. The committee that awarded the prize to Vincent’s work included Donald Keene himself (Professor emeritus of Japanese literature at Columbia, and doyen of Japanese literary translation in the English-speaking world); Rosanna Warren (poet,  translator, and BU University Professor); Robert Gottlieb (former editor of the New Yorker); Lindsley Cameron (journalist and novelist); and Charles Inoue (translator and Professor of Japanese at Tufts).

For more information on the Keene Center, please click here: The Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture