‘To Adapt, or Not to Adapt?’ Hamlet in Meiji Japan

Abstract

Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere open their general editors’ preface to the Routledge Translation Studies series with this explicit challenge to all those who have tended to judge works of literature in translation on the basis of their ‘accuracy’ and of their ‘fidelity’ to the original text. The challenge has not gone unheeded and the past decade has witnessed a series of critical studies of various texts premised on the notion that all such ‘rewritings’ result in a new original, whether this assumes the form of a translation, an adaptation, a literary history or whatever. These new texts, whilst certainly open to comparisons with the original, have rightly been subjected to critical evaluation as pieces of discrete, internally consistent literature, and questions concerning the new insights offered and the extent to which these new interpretations relate to and illuminate the concerns of the audience, have inevitably been at the forefront of critical discussion.

Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. All rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate literature to function in a given society in a given way.¹