The Ghost in the Fame

The Ghost in the Fame: The Translator’s Management of Symbolic Capital in the Age of World Literature

By Hikaru Fujii

My paper, focusing on the Japanese translators of contemporary fiction in English, will examine how the reputation attached to some literary translators in Japan is “managed,” which means it is incessantly created, reviewed and reoriented in response to the contemporary sociopolitical climates of both the source and target cultures. It is customary in Japan that a few privileged literary translators in each generation enjoy a relative freedom in their selection of texts to work on, which have formed a certain readership. This proximity of the artist (the author) and the artisan (the translator) requires such translators to maintain their reputation with their résumé, as well as in their online presence, which is in step with the rise of “entrepreneurial self” in the creative economy in the neoliberal era: the each new text is an investment, and if successful, the translator gains literary fame as its returns. While enjoying this privilege, it is notable that those celebrity translators often work to negotiate with their own positions for personal and collective purposes. For instance, I (Fujii), a male translator working since 2010, has shifted his focus from American fiction written by white male authors such as Denis Johnson or Wells Tower, through immigrant writers born outside, and currently working in, the US (Daniel Alarcón, Ling Ma, Gina Apostol, and so on), to Anglophone writing in other regions (Alfian Sa’at in Singapore, Refaat Alareer’s project of Gaza Writes Back), a move that is at once a sort of diversified investment and the utilization of my reputation in order to strike a better gender and racial balance of the authors while retaining my personal obsession with narratives of war.