Stylistic choices in the Japanese translations of crime and punishment

Hiroko Cockerill

pp. 63-81

in: Jean Boase-Beier, Lina Fisher, Hiroko Furukawa (eds), The Palgrave handbook of literary translation, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

Crime and Punishment (1866) was the first work by Dostoevsky to be translated into Japanese. The first Japanese translation was made in 1892 by Uchida Roan, from English, but the first translation directly from Russian, by Nakamura Hakuyō, was not made until 1914. Dostoevsky originally wrote the work as a first-person narrative and then changed to third-person. He frequently uses third-person pronouns to refer to the protagonist, Raskolnikov, and consistently uses the past tense to support a retrospective point of view. In this chapter Cockerill analyzes the use of the third-person pronoun "kare" and the use of "-ta" endings as past tense markers (both of which emerged in the Japanese language due to translation) in the six versions of Tsumi to Batsu [Crime and Punishment].