Translation is always a tricky business, especially when it involves the folk tales, legends, and ghost stories that come from a rich oral tradition. Add to this the broader, wrenching historical transition that industrialization brings, which the translator’s country has already capitalized on, but which the country from which his material comes is just approaching. The disjunctions here can raise issues, not only in terms of what to translate and in what style but also, perhaps more importantly, from where to do the work.
For Lafcadio Hearn, translation is not only a literary act. And the resolution he finds to the issues mentioned above is quite personal: so thorough an immersion into the land and culture he writes about as to become its citizen—and, later, in recognition of his work, a national treasure. The land is Japan at the end of the nineteenth century and the place, Matsue, then a...