Speakers

Alexander Vovin

Alexander Vovin was born on January 27, 1961 in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he earned all his academic degrees including PhD before escaping to the USA in early 1990. He is currently a Professor of East Asian Languages in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, having previously taught at the University of Michigan (1990-94) and Miami University (1994-1995). He was also a Visiting Professor at the International Center for Japanese Studies (Kyōto, 2001-02, 2008), National Institute for the Japanese Language and Linguistics (Tōkyō, 2012), and Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany, 2008-2009). He is a single author of nine books, a co-editor of one monograph, and an author of over 100 articles written in English, Japanese, and Russian. He is featured in English, Japanese, Korean, and Russian Wikipedias as well as in Who is Who in America from 2011. His scholarly interests are divided between premodern Japanese, premodern Korean, and Inner Asian historical linguistics, philology, and literature, but the major project of his life is a new academic edition and English translation of the Man’yōshū with all possible commentaries. Volumes 15 (2009), 5 (2011) and 14 (2012) have been published so far at the Global Oriental/Brill, with volume 20 forthcoming later this year.

Sessions

Pains of Translating the Man’yōshū and other Premodern Japanese Texts

This presentation addresses several issues pertinent to the translation of premodern Japanese texts into English: (1) problems of translating one culture into another culture, e.g. how does one translate a Buddhist term 三世 into English? (2) diachronically false friends, like...

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