An black and white illustration of man sleeping on a cover

Title

Yume no Kyōyū (The Sharing of Dreams: At the crossroads of literature, translation, and cinema)

Author

NOZAKI Kan

Size

224 pages, A5 format, hardcover

Language

Japanese

Released

November 29, 2016

ISBN

978-4-00-025424-3

Published by

Iwanami Shoten

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Yume no Kyōyū

Japanese Page

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In addition to continuing my research on French literature (especially on Romantic novelist Gérard de Nerval) over the years, I have worked on translations of various modern and contemporary French literary works, published occasional reviews of and essays about Japanese literature, and written about cinema as well. Following my interests and tastes above all has yielded a rather scattered collection of writings, but nevertheless, there are some pieces to which I feel at least some degree of attachment upon revisiting them, and which would also (perhaps) appeal to readers interested in literature, translation, and films. This book is a compilation of those pieces. However, the idea of compiling them in a single volume was not mine by any means; rather, it was entirely the initiative of N.R., a young editor who visited my office one day.
 
Personally, I was not sure if it would be possible to come up with a somewhat cohesive vision for the scribblings I had accumulated, but to my surprise, N.R. helped me see that there is indeed an underlying thread among them, however loose it may be—it is the sharing of dreams alluded to in the title of a paper from the very beginning of my career, “Gérard de Nerval and the Sharing of Dreams.” No one can enter the dreams we have at night, but in de Nerval’s work, one can sense a longing to somehow share those dreams with another (which gave rise to the characteristic motif of “dreaming together” in his work). Upon further reflection, this longing probably underpins the foundation of the very “act” of literature, and I suppose the same could be said of translation as well, as it is an attempt to overcome the language barrier to share the original with others. And then there is cinema. Narrative films are nothing but a powerful medium for mediating dreams.
 
Through this retrospective reasoning, this book could be regarded as a compilation of pieces on dream-sharing written across multiple domains over approximately a quarter of a century. However, it is still an undeniably scattered collection of texts, and so, I humbly suggest that anyone who picks up this book freely skip around according to their interests, be they in literature, translation, or cinema. This book begins with Nerval and progresses through Breton, Freud, Barthes, Ōgai MORI, Jun’ichirō TANIZAKI, and directors such as Truffaut and Godard, though I seriously doubt there will be any readers who share my interest in all of them. Personally, I would be happy even with just one or two.
 

(Written by NOZAKI Kan, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2018)

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