The Transnational in Translation : Reading Hideo Levy’s A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard in English

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For decades, publishers of English-language translations of modern and contemporary Japanese literature consciously selected texts that were broadly representative of an imagined Japanese nation-state conforming to the expectations of the Anglophone reading public. The recent emergence of transnational Japanese literature — often referred to as “Japanese-language literature” (nihongo bungaku) — as a trend in translated Japanese literature appears to challenge this relation, but do the selection and translation of transnational texts represent a break with the existing canon of Japanese literature (kokubungaku) in English, or do they reflect shifting contemporary Anglophone projections of a robust nation-state model? This paper examines the English translation of transnational author Hideo Levy’s debut novel, A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard (2011, original 1987). Through a reading of the translation, the paper seeks to examine how translation and consumption of transnational Japanese literature may paradoxically reinforce the image of the nation-state.

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