The Old Capital Critical Essay | Critical Review by Nobuko Miyama Ochner

SOURCE: A review of The Old Capital, in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 197-203.

In the following review, Miyama Ochner analyzes the problems involved in translating Kawabata's work and asserts that J. Martin Holman's translation of Kawabata's The Old Capital "emerges as a generally faithful and competent work."

There have been many English translations of novels and essays by Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972), Japan's only recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1968) to date. Seven titles (The Izu Dancer and Other Stories; Snow Country; Master of Go; Thousand Cranes; The Sound of the Mountain; Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself; and House of Sleeping Beauties) have been translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, who, since he has also translated other short stories by Kawabata, is the person most responsible for introducing Kawabata's works to the West. Other book-length English translations of Kawabata's works, all of which appeared...
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