Republic of Letters Comes to Nagasaki: Record of a Translator’s Struggle
The essay is framed by the story of an early translation of the metaphorical expression “republic of letters” into an East Asian language. The story itself—reconstructed from primary archival materials—is then used as an illustration of the processes of transmission, translation, and communication that brought into existence something like a republic of letters on a Eurasia-wide scale.
Although scholarly consensus is no longer marked by the uncritical acceptance of the description of Tokugawa Japan as a “closed country,” the trope of isolationism continues not just to shape the popular awareness of the period, but to determine disciplinary agendas. This is particularly true of the disciplinary culture of intellectual history, which has mostly taken “Japanese thought” for its self-evident object.
Yet, in the face of considerable geopolitical and logistical odds, by the eighteenth century there was a quite densely interconnected sphere of textual culture that can be seen as Eurasian in its scope. Japan was part of this network to such an extent that the trope of a “closed country” is unfitting to characterize the intellectual activity of the early modern period.
This micro-historical study of a particular translation’s conditions of possibility is an attempt to demonstrate how we could do intellectual history differently, in this case by recasting Japan as a nodal point within a Eurasian network of the transmission of texts, metaphors, and imaginaries that partook in the generation of knowledge.
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Copyright (c) 2015 Transcultural Studies
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
