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Yale Margellos
The Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters series identifies works of cultural and artistic significance previously overlooked by translators and publishers, as well as important contemporary authors whose work has not yet been translated into English.
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Portraits of a Mother is an English translation of a newly discovered novella and five short stories of love, grief, and maternal longing by Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996).
Here, translator Van C. Gessel explains how the author’s Catholic faith and familial relationships manifest in the book.
The Japanese novella translated as Portraits of a Mother was discovered in 2020 by a curator of the Endō Shūsaku Literary Museum in Nagasaki. Who is Endō Shūsaku and what led you to translate this novella into English?
VCG: There was considerable excitement in Japan when the unpublished novella was discovered. (The novella is translated as Confronting the Shadows in the collection Portraits of a Mother, which also includes five short stories.) As a translator and scholar of Endō’s works for almost fifty years, I was eager to read the unearthed work, which appeared in print in Japan shortly after its discovery.
Endō Shūsaku was one of the most widely read and admired writers in the second half of the 20th century in Japan. As a Christian, he often wrote of early Japanese martyrs, most famously in his 1966 novel, Silence, which was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film adaptation. Endō also wrote popular works that attracted a wide reading audience.
Many of Endō’s works portray mother figures, whether based on experiences with his own mother or his depiction of Christ as a loving, forgiving, even maternal personage. But he almost never mentioned his father in his writings until Confronting the Shadows, and the uniqueness of that portrayal and the sensitivity with which he wrote about characters based on his own parents led me to want to translate the novella.
Endō was part of a tiny Catholic minority in Japan. This group had been persecuted and scorned since Jesuit missionaries arrived to Japan in the 16th century. How does Endō’s sense of being a religious or cultural outsider figure in his novella?
VCG: Suguro, the protagonist in Confronting the Shadows, is the character who most resembles Endō. Suguro once had aspirations of writing a major novel but ultimately ended up as a translator of foreign detective novels. That inability to achieve the status of a major novelist makes him something of an outsider in the Japanese literary world, and he is galled by his father’s insistence that Suguro take a historical work he has written to a leading publishing house.
The novella is atypical of Endō’s work in that it makes no mention of Christianity, either directly or obliquely. But Catholicism plays a prominent role in several of the short stories translated in Portraits of a Mother.
What was Endō’s relationship with his mother like, and why does he compare her to the Virgin Mary?
VCG: Endō’s relationship with his mother was very complex, in some ways even contradictory. As she appears in the works in this collection, she is a woman of extraordinary intensity, so focused on her goal of becoming a concert violinist that she practices hour after hour, virtually ignoring her husband and her son. But after converting to Catholicism, she became an almost zealous follower of Christ, and she urged Endō, who was only eleven years old at the time, to also accept baptism.
At some point in his life, Endō began forming an idealized image of his mother in his mind, almost to the point of veneration. Where in reality he had been a lackadaisical student in his youth, frequently disappointing her expectations of him, he started seeing her as a mother who forgave all his weaknesses and led him to a reconciliation with God. As a mature writer Endō began studying the 17th century Christians, who had to go into hiding to avoid torture and execution, and he was moved by their worship of a Mary-like deity who felt only love and acceptance of those who chose apostasy over death. These experiences and feelings led him to compare his stern mother to an eternally forgiving Mary, a figure who merges in his writings with Jesus.
In what ways is Portraits of a Mother an autobiography, or not?
VCG: There are unmistakable autobiographical elements, especially in the short stories in the collection as Endō reminisces about his childhood growing up in Manchuria with an absent father and an inattentive mother. For years after he reached adulthood, Endō was estranged from his father, and in Confronting the Shadows we see the protagonist struggling between feelings of duty to his father and resentment of him. Autobiographical elements are subtly woven into the novella, but I would have to say that it is actually a fictionalized semi-autobiographical work.
Japanese and English differ greatly in terms of grammatical structure and word-meaning. What syntactical features, phrases, or passages were hardest to convey in English and what was your process in translating them?
VCG: To start with the most glaring example of the challenges of word-meaning, the title that Endō gave to his novella is devilishly (and I use the word advisedly, given Endō’s Christian beliefs!) difficult to render in English. I consulted many Japanese people, including scholars of Endō’s work in Japan who knew him very well, and even they were baffled about the meaning of the title. In Japanese, it’s Kage ni taishite. Okay, “kage” is simple enough; it means “shadow(s).” But “ni taishite”? What?! The standard dictionary translations include “in response to,” “regarding,” “on this matter,” “towards,” “in contrast to,” “against.” I can’t tell you how many months I struggled to come up with a proper translation for the title. After I finished a draft of the translation, the word that came to mind as perhaps the best expression of Endō’s ambivalence toward both of his parents and his struggles with memories (“shadows”) of his past, was “confronting.” I ran that translation past the two most prominent Endō scholars in Japan, and they both agreed with my interpretation.
I don’t mean to sound boastful, but prior to this collection, I have translated eight other full-length Endō works into English. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of his style, his syntactical features, and so on. I have the advantage that some other translators have: If you stay with one author and translate a number of their works over time, I think it becomes easier to recognize tropes that are repeated, usually in very different ways. You get a feel for the rhythms and sense of what an author is saying. There can be surprises and challenges along the way, of course, but familiarity in this case breeds appreciation.
The post Shukasu Endo’s Portraits of a Mother: A Conversation With Van C. Gessel appeared first on Yale University Press.
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