Historical Manga Translation Challenges: Satonaka Machiko’s Abe Kōtaishi

Speaker:

Barbara Hartley is an honorary researcher with The University of Queensland. Her publications relate to girls and women in modern Japan and modern Japanese narrative, in addition to representations of Asia and Asian women in the cultural production of modern Japan. Barbara is co-editor with Akiko Uchiyama of the 2023 Routledge publication, Border-Crossing Japanese Literature, in which she has a chapter on Tawada Yōko. Over several decades, she has produced translations of literary and social activist materials. These include solely and jointly translated (with Tomoko Aoyama) essays for the collection Women Critiqued (2006, University of Hawai’i Press), a co-translation (with Tomoko Aoyama) of Kanai Mieko’s Koharu biyori (2012, Cornell University Press; trans. Indian Summer), and several chapters in Aftermath: Fukushima and the 3:11 Earthquake (2017, Trans Pacific Press). She recently translated an excerpt from a Satonaka Machiko manga on the Nara era (710-794) Empress Kōken for a forthcoming Hiromi Tsuchiya-Dollase and Masami Toku collection on women’s representation and voice in manga. Her presentation discusses the process of translating Satonaka’s work.