Conversations with Translators: Meredith McKinney

This week, another interview in the series of Conversations with Translators. My guest is Meredith McKinney, a translator from Japanese whose anthology of classical Japanese travel writing was published in Penguin Classics at the end of last year.

I was alerted to her book by an excellent review of it by PD Smith in the Guardian:

‘In this remarkable work of translation and scholarship, filled with wonderful vignettes of Japanese life and sensibility, McKinney introduces readers to the nation’s rich and unique literary tradition.’

The anthology takes the story of Japanese literature up to the late 17th century and the poet Basho, who wrote The Narrow Road to the Deep North, having begun around a thousand years earlier. In this interview, Meredith explained that the Western reader needs to set aside certain preconceptions of what travel writing is in approaching her book:

We think of travel writing really as writing about adventure; the traveller going off and witnessing new things, discovering new things about themselves and other people and other places. Newness is probably the essence of what we think about in travel writing, whereas this travel writing is hugely about its own tradition: going back and touching the things that earlier travellers had touched was really the touchstone, as it were, of so much of this writing.

Meredith lived and taught in Japan for around twenty years, then returned to Australia in 1998 and now lives near the small town of Braidwood, in south-eastern New South Wales. She is currently an honorary associate professor at the Japan Centre, Australian National University.

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