Who Framed Yoritomo-Tashi? To be or not to be

Abstract

This article offers a case study of the early-twentieth century Portuguese reception of Yoritomo-Tashi, supposedly a Japanese philosopher who became known through the editing work of B. Dangennes, one of the pseudonyms of a French female author of self-help books by the name of Berthe Blanchard (18[-]–1940). Reception is examined on the basis of translational paratexts used as (re)framing devices to tell different stories about a same author figure and the books he is purported to have written, ultimately shaping the literary and cultural system to which Yoritomo-Tashi belongs. The first (European) Portuguese translation of his work to circulate, made by Bernardo de Alcobaça in 1912, whose paratext frames a Japanese source (con)text, will be discussed as an assumed translation of a non-existent (Japanese) original, that is, as a pseudo indirect translation. The other three existing adaptationswere translated by the end of the 1920s by a different agent, A.Victor Machado, who seems to be aware that Yoritomo-Tashi is a pen name and who gradually restores Yoritomo-Tashi/Dangennes to the French literary system via the paratext. Questions will also be raised about the complicity of the Portuguese translators with Dangennes’s fictitious translation project. This complicity, as shaped by the paratext, will be shown to influence the de facto belonging of an author’s work to the Japanese-Portuguese translation system and to be evidence of a persisting exoticism in early twentieth-century Europe.