ABSTRACT
This chapter considers translation as a mode of transfiguration, a concept that elucidates cultural change emanating from transnational and transcultural flows of ideas and images, as well as of individuals. It elaborates the textual reverberations manifest and further engender the effects of the cultural work of translation. The chapter demonstrates the multilayered effects and reverberations that have sometimes emerged from feminist translation projects in Japan. To propose that the revolution sought by the ribu women was merely a translation of American second-wave feminism would be to grossly misunderstand the movement's goals and its history-as well as the nature of translation itself. The majority of women in the ribu movement, however, saw their activism as fundamentally rooted in their own life experiences in Japan, not in inspiration or ideas from abroad. It examines several other translation projects variously connected to 1970s radical feminism in Japan, drawing attention to their translators and the circumstances surrounding their creation.
