3,000 Leagues in Search of Cuore: Edmondo de Amicis Travels to Japan

Date: Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Time: 12:30-1:30 PM
Venue: Asian Centre, Room 604 (1871 West Mall)
By: Dr. Melek Ortabasi, Director, World Literature Program, Simon Fraser University

Part of the CJR Lunchtime Lecture Series

Abstract:

Cuore (Heart, 1886), by popular travelogue author Edmondo de Amicis (1846-1908), was the first bestseller in its home country of Italy. Almost immediately recognized as a children’s “classic,” it was translated and adapted into many languages. Japan was not immune to the book’s charms, and the popularity Cuore has enjoyed there reaches back to the first partial translation of the book, which appeared in 1902. This talk will trace Cuore’s rich afterlife in Japanese and in so doing test a number of theories about how translation functions to produce world children’s literature.

About the Speaker:

Melek Ortabasi is Associate Professor and Director of the World Literature Program at Simon Fraser University. Her teaching and research interests include translation practice and theory, popular culture and transnationalism, and internationalism in children’s literature. Her latest book, The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation and Modernity in the Work of YanagitaKunio, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Asia Center. She is currently working on a comparative historiography of world children’s literature at the turn of the 19th century, tentatively entitled “The World Republic of Childhood: Transnationalism and Children’s Literature, 1870-1930.”
See the event poster.