ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some rather idiosyncratic ways in which the challenging process of transcultural appropriation was conceptualized in the early years of Western exposure to Japanese literature, with a view to exploring its implications for translation studies, and for the circulation of World Literature in general. Translation has typically been conceptualized as a bridge, a mirror, a window through which we can gaze at the original, a fountain from which we obtain water when we cannot go directly to the stream, the action of carrying across, and so on. Setting aside such dead metaphors and instead trying to think of translation as the squeezing of a jellyfish, as one early English anthology of Japanese literature puts it cannot help but force one to come at the problem from a fresh perspective. The chapter thereby considers some of eccentric images, including the jellyfish one and a cluster referring to such chemical or alchemical processes as distillation, filtration and sublimation.
