The convention of including/omitting ‘no zu’ (之圖) in translations


It appears to be common, but by no means universal, for artists/publishers to
include 之圖 in _ukiyo-e_ title cartouches (sometimes ノ圖; written のづ in
accompanying furigana; occasionally seen 圖 without the ‘no’). In terms of
various print genres I am looking at, you might see 川中嶋大合戰之圖, a _Picture of
the Great Battle of Kawanakajima_ ( _Kawanakajima ō-kassen no zu_ ), or
川中嶋大合戰, _The Great Battle of Kawanakajima_ ( _Kawanakajima ō-kassen_ ).
Statistically I would hazard a guess that it’s 60:40 in favour of the ‘no zu’
in _musha-e_ , but don’t quote me on that!

So, I’m interested in understanding why most institutional museums and auction
houses would simply drop ‘View of’ or ‘Picture of’ from their English
translations, as if 之圖 never existed in the title. You would think that there
was a very specific, scholarly reason for doing this. Surely a historically
arbitrary or idiosyncratic practice would not become a largely conventional,
Western translation practice? For me, the omission is problematic, since I
would always aspire to faithful character transcriptions, transliterations,
and translations, but I might be ignorant here. Relevant to this language
stack exchange (I trust), my question is whether it’s a **reflection of the
way the phrase is understood and regarded by a Japanese reader?** For
instance, using ‘no zu’ might well have been part of a cultural convention,
but conceptually it is ‘redundant’ and therefore not translated. Some kind of
anachronism? Something almost tautological in a visual/textual sense? Hence,
irrelevant in an English translation. I’m not sure when ‘no zu’ found its way
into visual art titles (at least mid-17th century), and if there is a
correlative in fiction or other creative or performing arts.

For context:

  1. Most museums record the Japanese characters as well as _rōmaji_ , albeit with the _shinjitai_ 図 instead of the _kyūjitai_ 圖, e.g. _The Great Battle at Kawanakajima_ ( _Kawanakajima ôgassen no zu_ ), 川中島大合戦之図, MFA Boston. However, they rarely write their titles beginning ‘Picture of ...’, as this example attests. This is especially so of the MFA Boston. Yes, there are exceptions: the MFA lists an artwork as _Picture of a Hakutaku_ ( _Hakutaku no zu_ ), 白澤之図. The Met lists in its collection: _Views of Foreigners_ ( _Gaikokujin no zu_ ), 外国人之図. Again, mentioning ‘Views’ is uncommon, unless it is a landscape with 景, けい, _kei_ (view, scene) in the title, or 勝景, しょうけい, _shōkei_ (scenic view), e.g. the Lavenberg collection’s _View of Nihonbashi Bridge in the Eastern Capital_ ( _Tōto Nihonbashi no shōkei_ ), 東都日本橋之勝景. 

  2. The only ramification I can see for including ‘Picture of’, is that you need to occasionally change the active present participle, e.g. it sounds better to write _Picture of the ‘Four Heavenly Kings’ Entering Ōeyama_ , instead of _Picture of the ‘Four Heavenly Kings’ Enter Ōeyama_ ( _Shitennō Ōeyama iri no zu_ ), 四天王江山入之圖.

  3. Would love to know if anyone has insights into this, since from a Western perspective, it would seem strange for a museum or a catalogue raisonné to omit ‘View of’ from a C19th artwork that has clearly been labelled ‘View of the River Thames’ by the artist him or herself. Or, change an C18th title ‘Map of Van Diemen's Land’ to ‘Map of Tasmania’, simply because no one refers to it as Van Diemen’s Land any longer!

Not quite sure how to tag this question... it might be an outlier.




Because "translation", in the best sense, means replacing some writing in one
language with writing in another language which gives, as far as possible, the
same information, and much more, the same subjective impression as the
original. If the original is pedantically straightforward, the translation
should be pedantically straightforward. If the original gives a tinge of
shock, so should the translation. (And so on.) Note that there is nothing here
about what most people seem to think "translation" means, i.e. "Replace each
source language word with its corresponding target language word, then
reshuffle a bit, until it looks passable."

Now there is really no question to be answered: to the English reader a
"Picture of ..." is (often) going to be surprisingly pedantic, in a way that
the original was not to a reader of the time. (That is another interesting
point: translation typically goes from a source of whatever period, to the
target of the current day, making translations more immediately understandable
than the original.) And as you point out, it is often grammatically
inconvenient to stick "Picture of..." in front, since this forces the rest of
the title to be a noun phrase, which may be a serious constraint on the
translation of the rest of the title.

Although exceptions are extremely common, I think there is a general tendency
for the referent of a Japanese title to be the document (the picture, the book
in your hand, etc) whereas the referent of the English title is the _subject_
of the document. Sorry, I can't immediately give a reasoned basis for this
with lots of good examples; this is based on experience of translating many
documents (mostly technical, so this is not a curiosity of the art world).

I don't really understand your point 3: obviously, if you are writing the
original title, you don't change it. The problem is that translation ''means''
changing the title, and complaints about the translation being "different"
almost always go back to the misunderstanding of translation as a "word-
replacement" operation. As for the geographical name problem, if you are
including and 18th century map of Tasmania, calling it that seems utterly
appropriate, since this is a description of the document, rather than a
"title" as such. Of course, if this is in an article, you would expect to
mention somewhere what Tasmania was called in the 18th century.

