“ Translating the Untranslatable Self: A Comparative Study of Alienation, Shame, and Psychological Voice in Donald Keene, Mark Gibeau, and Juliet Winters Carpenter’s English Translations of Osamu Dazai’s Ningen Shikkaku ”

Osamu Dazai’s Ningen Shikkaku (1948) narrates the collapse of a man incapable of revealing his true self, who maintains a façade of hollow jocularity before descending into alienation and self-destruction. This study comparatively examines the three principal English translations by Donald Keene (1958, New Directions), Mark Gibeau (2018, Stone Bridge Press), and Juliet Winters Carpenter (2024, Tuttle Publishing) to analyze how each translator renders Yozo’s psychological voice, shame, and social alienation. Keene rendered the title as “no longer human,” a clinical, diagnostic choice, while Gibeau’s “a shameful life” functions as an inescapable value judgement, foregrounding shame differently from the start. (Dazai, Osamu. Ningen Shikkaku. Shinchosa, 1952, p. 1.) Compared to Keene’s translation, Gibeau emphasizes the protagonist Yozo’s voice, resulting in powerful feelings of intimacy and directness. Ningen Shikkaku offers a reflection upon the protagonist’s consciousness and fluctuating psychological states to which readers can relate, and each translator’s lexical and stylistic choices determine how acutely that psychological interiority is transmitted. Like Keene, Winters Carpenter also discusses western culture and how it permeates Dazai’s novel, yet her 2024 rendering brings fresh contemporary register to Yozo’s shame-saturated confession. (Tynan, Michael. “Translating Style in Dazai Osamu’s Ningen Shikkaku.” AALITRA Review, 2023, pp. 4-7.)

کلیدواژه ها:

alienation ، shame ، psychological voice ، untranslatability ، comparative translation