yuriko memo
Dec. 10th, 2011 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiI'm hoping to have more time next year to use on translation-for-pleasure, and I want to start with the Yuriko-Yoshiko letters, mentioned here before. 1924 to 1929, Chujo Yuriko, up and coming young novelist, and Yuasa Yoshiko, budding Russian translator, enjoying a Boston marriage in Tokyo and then Moscow, with excursions elsewhere in Japan and Europe. I'll put their love letters up against most anybody's.
Right now I'm trying to make a chronological list of all the stuff to be translated, letters and diaries, based on the Yuriko complete works (and you ain't kidding about "complete": there's an older and a more recent edition, and I was able to pick up all thirty-six volumes of the older edition for about sixty dollars total a few years back) and on a compilation which Kurosawa Ariko edited a few years back (unkindly, a year or two too late for my MA thesis on the topic). Kurosawa-sensei focused mostly on Yoshiko's side of the exchange, hitherto unpublished, and so I'm going through Yuriko's diaries in the complete works to find what else I want to put in. I haven't read them in a long time, except for scattered excerpts, and I'd forgotten how damn good they are, funny and thoughtful and sad and contemplative and energetic.
I have real problems with Yuriko's later years, when she got caught up in Communist ideology (not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but I don't like the way it worked out in her life), nearly died for it in prison, and wasted her remaining, shortened life on a dictatorial bastard of a husband. But I love the years she spent with Yoshiko, in her late twenties and early thirties, when her mind was at its sharpest and widest open.
Right now I'm trying to make a chronological list of all the stuff to be translated, letters and diaries, based on the Yuriko complete works (and you ain't kidding about "complete": there's an older and a more recent edition, and I was able to pick up all thirty-six volumes of the older edition for about sixty dollars total a few years back) and on a compilation which Kurosawa Ariko edited a few years back (unkindly, a year or two too late for my MA thesis on the topic). Kurosawa-sensei focused mostly on Yoshiko's side of the exchange, hitherto unpublished, and so I'm going through Yuriko's diaries in the complete works to find what else I want to put in. I haven't read them in a long time, except for scattered excerpts, and I'd forgotten how damn good they are, funny and thoughtful and sad and contemplative and energetic.
I have real problems with Yuriko's later years, when she got caught up in Communist ideology (not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but I don't like the way it worked out in her life), nearly died for it in prison, and wasted her remaining, shortened life on a dictatorial bastard of a husband. But I love the years she spent with Yoshiko, in her late twenties and early thirties, when her mind was at its sharpest and widest open.
