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Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 24 (2017)

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 24

(2017)– [tijdschrift] Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Hans Spijker
Deformations and mistranslations?
The influence of editors and translators on the French, English and Dutch posthumous editions of Isaac Titsingh's Beschryving van Japan

Isaac Titsingh (1745-1812) was still in the process of rearranging and correcting his study on Japan when he suddenly passed away in Paris at the age of sixty-seven. During his lifetime, the bulk of work that he envisaged to be published, remained unseen by a European public. Only a small number of his writings on Japanese culture and history had appeared in print, such as the treatises on the preparation of sake and soya, which were featured in the journal Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Konsten en Weetenschappen between 1779 and 1786.1 Since 1796, after a long period abroad in Asia as an employee for the Dutch East India Company (voc), Titsingh led a life of seclusion in Europe, mainly dedicating time to preparing his Beschryving van Japan for publication. Beschryving van Japan was Titsingh's magnum opus, a colossal bookwork which was to encompass all his findings on a country for which he felt a strong passion. It contained information on aspects of Japanese culture which were unknown in Europe at the time, such as detailed descriptions of marriage and funeral rituals and translations of haiku poetry. Beschryving van Japan, therefore, could be a source of new, valuable knowledge of a country that was isolated from western civilization.2 However, as a result of the author's death, the future of his uncompleted manuscript was uncertain. What did Tit - singh's death mean for Beschryving van Japan? Were his findings destined to wither away in the archives, far away from the public eye?

The short answer is no. In Europe, several publishers were willing to present Titsingh's legacy to a broad audience: twelve years after his death, two French, one English and two Dutch publications, based on the manuscript of Beschryving van Japan, had appeared on the European market.3 These books have been heavily contested, by current

Japanologists as well as by earlier figures engaged in scholarship on East-Asia.4 They have argued that these publications did not do any credit to Titsingh and his lifelong research. Charles Ralph Boxer, known for his research on Dutch and Portuguese maritime and colonial history, argues that the editors and translators of Titsingh's manuscript are to blame for these unsatisfactory publications. In his book Jan Compagnie in Japan, 1600-1850 (1950), Boxer accuses them of damaging and mangling Titsingh's manuscript.5 Frank Lequin, an historian and expert on Titsingh, shares Boxer's opinion and qualifies the posthumous publications as incomplete and disfigured.6



illustratie
Figure 1. Funeral procession of the Governor of Nagasaki, Tsuchiya Morinao (- 1781). Plate in I. Titsingh, Cérémonies usitées au Japon pour les mariages et les funérailles. Paris 1819


However, clarification to justify these harsh judgments is lacking. In what way did the editorial efforts of the translators and editors have a detrimental impact on the quality of the posthumous publications of Titsingh's work? Is it fair to blame them for deforming it? If so, why and in what way? Instead of taking the criticisms of Boxer and Lequin for granted, an in-depth study of the publication history of works based on Beschryving van Japan could prove to be conducive to a better understanding of the influence of editors and translators on Titsingh's manuscript. Moreover, such a study could reveal specific aspects of the difficulties of preparing the texts of a deceased author for publication. In this article, I will analyse the ways in which the editors and translators of Titsingh's manuscript transformed Beschryving van Japan into a text they deemed worthy of publication. First, I will examine the publication background of the French, English and Dutch versions of Beschryving van Japan and thereafter, I will examine the differences between these versions.

The author and the publication history of Beschryving van Japan

Titsingh grew up in Amsterdam, where he was born in 1745. His father was the renowned Amsterdam surgeon-obstetrician Albertus Titsingh (1714-1790).7 Isaac initially followed in his footsteps, entering the surgeons guild when he was just nineteen. Titsingh also studied law in Leiden and received his doctorate in 1765. His journey to Asia started in 1766, initiating three decades of employment with the voc.8 He first sailed as a regular trader, in the rank of under-merchant. Thanks to family contacts he acquired this relatively high starting position in the voc.9 After being stationed in Batavia from 1766 until 1779, Titsingh moved to Japan, where he arrived on the 15th of August 1779, to take on the role of opperhoofd, chief executive officer of the Dutch factory on Dejima.10 Titsingh was opperhoofd for three terms of office, from 1779 until 1784. Since an opperhoofd was allowed to hold his position for just one year, the periods of Titsingh's assignments as opperhoofd were separated by stays in Batavia.11 He returned to Europe in 1796, after having lived in several places in Asia, including Guangzhou, Beijing and Malacca. Once back in Europe, Titsingh lived for several years in London and Bath. After a short stay in Amsterdam, he moved to Paris in 1811. By then, Paris was the epicentre of orientalism and, therefore, an ideal intellectual environment for Titsingh to finalize Beschryving van Japan. During this last stay in France, he died in his Parisian home at the age of sixty-seven. He was buried in Père-Lachaise, where his gravestone can still be found.12

In Japan, Titsingh was the right man in the right place at the right time. He had at his disposal knowledge which was much-desired by the rangakusha, the Japanese scientists who conducted research on European medicine, biology, and technology.13 Titsingh himself became fascinated by Japan as soon as he entered the bay of Nagasaki and set foot on the island of Dejima. According to Lequin, Titsingh had a curious, scientific mind, a characteristic which not many of his former voc-colleagues possessed.14 During his stay, he strove to collect everything about Japan that offered him insight into the country's history, culture, religion, and language. He managed to build up friendships with several Japanese men, who were willing to provide Titsingh with items and information about their country. In addition, they also helped Titsingh with the interpretation and translation of the materials he received.15 Based on the numerous items Titsingh collected on Dejima, such as documents on the history of Japanese emperors and shoguns, he started writing his main study of Japan, under the working title Beschryving van Japan.

Beschryving van Japan was not supposed to be a travelogue. In a letter to his close friend William Marsden (1754-1836), a British scholar specialized in the fields of orientalism, linguistics and numismatics, Titsingh wrote that he ‘deemed it preferable to represent them [the Japanese] in their own dress, rather than to enter [himself] into particular details’.16 Beschryving van Japan was a study of Japan which combined Titsingh's analyses of contemporary Japan with translations of literature that already existed in the Chinese or/and Japanese languages, such as Nipon-o-day-tche-lan (Table of the rulers of Japan, 1663) and Yometori chōhō-ki (Treasury for getting a wife, [1697]).17 The translations of Japanese literature on politics, culture and national history were composed by Titsingh on Dejima, with the vital assistance of Japanese interpreters. Their help was much needed since Titsingh had little knowledge of Japanese characters and mainly understood the language at a conversational level.18

During the latter years of his life, Titsingh made several attempts to get Beschryving van Japan published. According to Timon Screech, professor of art history at the University of London, Titsingh translated his Dutch manuscript of Beschryving van Japan into French and English to increase chances of publication.19 His endeavours to get his work on the market were nonetheless unsuccessful. Lequin and Peter Rietbergen, emeritus professor cultural history at the Nijmegen Radboud University, both argue that publishers regarded Titsingh's voluminous, academic publication a risky investment.20

Money was not the only issue. Reluctance to get Beschryving van Japan on the market also stemmed from misgivings about the quality of Titsinghs' work. This was the case in The Netherlands, where Titsingh's manuscript was in the hands of the Royal Dutch Institute of Sciences, Literature and Arts. The Royal Dutch Institute, predecessor of the current Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (knaw), was established by King Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (1778-1846) in 1808. The organization aimed to perfect the sciences and arts in The Netherlands. It consisted of four classes, of which the Third Class was specialized in ancient and eastern literature. The Third Class had received exactly 1100 pages of the manuscript of Beschryving van Japan from Titsingh in 1811, shortly before he travelled to Paris. For Titsingh, the Royal Dutch Institute, located in Amsterdam, provided a secure place to store the Dutch original version of his manuscript, which he apparently did not want to take with him to France.21

After Titsingh's death, his manuscript remained property of the Royal Dutch Institute. Proposals to posthumously publish his works were quickly made by its members.22 In February 1812, Reinhard Falck (1777-1843), a member of the Third Class of the Royal Dutch Institute and predominantly known for his role as statesman during the reign of King William I (1815-1840), decided to take on the task of reviewing Titsingh's work.

Falck determined whether or not his writings were fit for publication. After evaluating the work, he concluded that this was not the case. In a report of the 8th of May, 1812, he mainly criticized the methodology which Titsingh employed in his research. The fallacy of Titsingh's approach was the very fact that he chose to incorporate literal translations of Japanese texts into his manuscript: ‘But, I venture to say, this literal translation of original works should be regarded as completely reprehensible (...)’.23 Japanese literature, Falck contended, had no scientific value and belonged ‘in the East of the Asias (...)’, a region in which texts usually were ‘filled with superstitious nonsense and miserable tales’.24 Falck argued that Titsingh falsely assumed that the Japanese matched Europeans in terms of civilization and that the translations of Japanese works incorporated in Beschryving van Japan could prove this statement.25

While Titsingh's manuscript initially was met with scepticism in The Netherlands, in France, the Parisian bookseller and publisher Auguste-Nicolas Nepveu showed more readiness to present Titsingh's work to a broader public. Nepveu knew Titsingh personally and had been fascinated by his collection on Japan for some time. However, after Titsingh's death, Nepveu had to wait for several years before he could finally see what kind of material this collection included.26 In his testament, Titsingh expressed the wish of transferring his Japanese collection to the British Museum in London. The collection consisted of predominantly two-dimensional items concerning Japan's and China's history, such as books, manuscripts, maps and drawings.27

At the time of his death, the vast majority of Titsingh's collection was in Amsterdam, which then belonged to the Napoleonic empire. A war between Great Britain and the French Empire was raging and the embargo against British trade, also known as the Continental Blockade, made the shipping of Titsingh's collection to London impossible. Titsingh's collection became French state property and ended up in the Bibliothèque Impériale in Paris in July 1812. Two years later, on November 21 1814, a part of Titsingh's collection was returned to his son and heir William Titsingh, who lived in Paris at that time.28 According to an article in the Asiatic Journal of 1832, self-inflicted financial difficulties necessitated William, who had a gambling habit, to sell a major part of the collection, which included Titsingh's French translation of Beschryving van Japan, to a willing buyer.29 This buyer was Nepveu.30



illustratie
Figure 2. Lithographic portrait of Abel-Rémusat by Achille Devéria (1800-1857). H. Maspéro, ‘La chaire de langues et littératures chinoises et tartares-mandchoues’ in: A.J.M. Lefranc, P. Langevin [et al] (ed.), Le Collège de France (1530-1930). Livre jubilaire composé à l'occasion de son quatrième centenaire. Paris 1932, 355-366


In 1819, five years after buying this collection, Nepveu released the first of two publications, based on several sections of Titsingh's French translation of Beschryving van Japan, entitled Cérémonies usitées au Japon, pour les mariages, les funérailles, et les principales fêtes de l'année. The book came along with an album with nineteen black-and-white prints, reprints of plates Titsingh had collected.31 A year later, in 1820, Mémoires et anecdotes sur la dynastie régnante des djogouns, souverains du Japon was published, based on parts of the manuscript which were not released before. The Parisian sinologist Jean-Pierre Abel- Rémusat (1788-1832) and the German linguist and historian Julius Heinrich von Klaproth (1783-1835), who had an excellent understanding of Chinese and Japanese, were in charge of editing Titsingh's manuscript for this 1820-edition.32

In contrast to the people Titsingh tried to convince during his lifetime, Nepveu did not consider the publication of Titsingh's works to be a precarious undertaking. In the advertisement of Cérémonies, Nepveu quotes a description of Titsingh's collection that appeared in Annales des voyages, de la géographie et de l'histoire (1814), published by the Danish-French geographer Conrad de Malte-Brun. The original text in the Annales des voyages reads: ‘La collection formée par M. Titsingh offre les matériaux d'une nouvelle Histoire politique, civile, géographique et naturelle du Japon. Elle mérite l’attention de tous les gouvernemens jaloux d'accroître les connoissances utiles.’33 This citation explained why Nepveu was interested in acquiring Titsingh's collection and why he thought it should be presented to a broader European audience. Nepveu's edition of Titsingh's work seemed a sound investment: Cérémonies did well on the French market, considering the

fact that Nepveu reissued it in the same year.34 This second version was more luxurious, with full-colour plates instead of the first version's black-and-white prints.35



illustratie
Figure 3. The title page of the first volume of Bijzonderheden over Japan. 's-Gravenhage 1824


In 1822, two years after the publication of Mémoires, the English version of the first two parts of Beschryving van Japan, entitled Illustrations of Japan, was published with fullcolour plates in London, by Rudolph Ackermann (1764-1834), an Anglo-German bookseller specialised in producing aquatint prints.36 Illustrations is a translation of both Cérémonies and Mémoires by the English journalist Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853). Shoberl was known for introducing French authors to English readers.37 Instead of releasing the two parts separately, the translations of Céremonies and Mémoires were merged into one book. Shoberl used the French editions for his translation, not the English translation which Titsingh had made of Beschryving van Japan.38 Titsingh's English translation was in the hands of his friend Marsden, who had received it from Titsingh personally.39 Both Mars-

den and Shoberl lived in London, thus the translation was within the latter's reach. According to Screech, however, publisher Ackermann was unwilling to let Shoberl use Titsingh's translation because he did not trust Titsingh's command of English.40

Finally, in 1824 and 1825, the first and second part of Bijzonderheden over Japan were published in The Hague. The publisher was the widow of Johannes Allart (1754-1816), Suzanna Martha Hebert (1783-1871). Allart was one of the leading booksellers in the Netherlands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Following his death, Hebert took up ownership of Allart's bookstore and publishing house and remained in charge for around a decade.41 The Dutch two volume edition was not based on Titsingh's original Dutch manuscript, but on a translation of Shoberl's Illustrations of Japan.42 According to the Dutch translators, they had been unable to obtain both the Dutch and French manuscript of Beschryving van Japan.43 For unknown reasons, the original Dutch manuscript had been lost during the period of Hebert's publication, only to be rediscovered more than a century later. In 1977, Lequin identified an autograph of Titsingh, deposited at the National Library in The Hague, as the original Dutch manuscript.44

The translators also had interest in the French manuscript, but after doing some research, they concluded that the French manuscript, and the publications based on that, simply did not exist. Because the Dutch manuscript was missing, the Dutch translators, much to their own regret, had had to rely on Shoberl's English translation.45 The names of the men who translated Shoberl's work are undisclosed. However, it is clear that more than one interpreter was involved in the process. The title of the foreword of Bijzonderheden over Japan, which reads: ‘Preface of the Dutch translators’, reveals this.46

Differences between the French, English and Dutch versions of Beschryving van Japan

There are numerous differences between Cérémonies and Mémoires, Illustrations and the two volumes of Bijzonderheden over Japan. To start with, the arrangement of chapters in Bijzonderheden over Japan differs from that in its French and English counterparts. For example, the Dutch translators argued that a section on traditional Japanese marriages and funerals, entitled ‘Introduction to the description of the marriage ceremonies of the Japanese’, could be better placed at the beginning of the first part of the book. They

chose to do so, since the chapter does not solely contain a description of marriage and funeral practices, but also a more general, more personal, description of Japan and its inhabitants by Titsingh himself.47 The first pages serve as an introduction in which Titsingh seeks to convince his audience of the similarities between European nations and Japan, especially in terms of politeness and modernity. With these assertions in mind, the reader would be better able to read the rest of his book.48 The English version, on the contrary, starts off with Titsingh's tough, lengthy treatise on the history of Japanese emperors and shoguns, while his view on Japanese civility is placed at the beginning of the second part of the book.49

Apart from the changes in the arrangement of Titsingh's text, translators and editors have also expanded the original manuscript. The additions are different in each version. The three hundred pages of Mémoires contain a total of sixty footnotes which are denoted by the initials ‘A.R.’, meaning they were added by Abel-Rémusat. Screech suggests Abel-Rémusat's pride withheld him from merely operating as a translator of Titsingh's findings. Abel-Rémusat consequently took the opportunity to display his expert knowledge of Japan in the form of footnotes.50 Illustrations is an almost literal translation of Cérémonies and Mémoires, without any noteworthy additions by Shoberl. One of the few changes Shoberl did make was the removal of the initials ‘A.R.’ from Abel-Rémusat's footnotes, making it hard to distinguish them from Titsingh's footnotes.51 Compared to Illustrations, over seventy new footnotes were added to the Dutch version of 1824-1825. The Dutch translators gave their own footnotes the reference ‘Vert.’, an abbreviation of the Dutch word for translator (‘Vertaler’), but did so inconsistently.52 These footnotes provide further context to the translations of Japanese and Chinese literature and Titsingh's observations, express commentary on Titsingh's text or serve as a more in-depth explication of Japanese terminology.53

In the footnotes, the translators also compare Titsingh's findings with European publications of earlier times. As mentioned before, Titsingh principally regarded Beschryving van Japan as a work in which he intended to present Japan's history and culture from a Japanese viewpoint to a European audience.54 References to European works on Japan which had been published before Beschryving van Japan were practically absent from his manuscript. Readers of Cérémonies, Mémoires, Illustrations and Bijzonderheden over Japan nonetheless encounter the names of other European proto-Japanologists on several pages. On some occasions, the editors have mixed entire passages from other scholarly works on Japan with Titsingh's findings. The purpose of the inclusions of works of

other proto-Japanologists such as Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716) and François Caron (1600-1673) was to contextualise Titsingh's research and to integrate it into the European historiography on Japan.



illustratie
Figure 4. Left: Titsingh, Mémoires, 280. Middle: id., Illustrations, 154. Right: id., Bijzonderheden. Eerste deel, 243. Notice how the initials ‘A.R.’, present on the left image, have been omitted from the English and Dutch versions. Also, notice that the Dutch translators have added an extra footnote


It can be called into question if Titsingh would have approved the inclusion of other European authors in his texts. In his manuscript, he never mentions the names of other proto-Japanologists. Only once he refers to another European author, namely Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix (1682-1761), a French Jesuit and historian who never visited Japan. Charlevoix and the fifth chapter of his first book on Japan, Histoire du Japon. Tome premier (1736), are briefly discussed in Titsingh's description of Japanese society at the beginning of the chapter ‘Introduction to the description of the marriage ceremonies of the Japanese’. Titsingh classifies Charlevoix's writings on Japan as a mixture of good and bad.55 Even though Titsingh seemed to be largely indifferent towards Charlevoix's research, the French editors decided to incorporate an excerpt from Charlevoix's Histoire du Japon, namely a description of Japanese houses, into Cérémonies.56 This excerpt remained in both Illustrations and Bijzonderheden.57 An inserted text by the editors of the French version on page xxxvi states that they assumed this passage would grant the reader knowledge that would better enable them to understand Titsingh's treatise on wedding ceremonies.58

Translators and editors did not merely expand Titsingh's text. Regularly, they chose to omit certain words and even entire passages of texts accredited to Titsingh. A clear example of this can be found on the final pages of the chapter ‘Great Festivals’, a chapter on the origins of the five greatest festivities in eighteenth-century Japan. In Titsingh's manuscript, this chapter included a section on the court banquets (‘hoffeesten’), which Abel-Rémusat and Klaproth, and Shoberl, included in its entirety in Mémoires and Illustrations.59 The same does not apply to the Bijzonderheden over Japan, in which only a fraction of the section ‘hoffeesten’ appears. It is shortened to a mere seven pages, compared to 29 and sixteen respectively in Mémoires and Illustrations.60

An annotation, inserted by the Dutch translators on pages 219 and 220 of Bijzonderheden over Japan, offers a straightforward explanation for the omission of the majority of the text. The Dutch translators dismiss Titsingh's description of court banquets as monotonous (‘eentonig’) and tedious (‘vervelend’) and, therefore, inappropriate for complete publication. An abbreviated rendition of the section is inserted instead, only including fragments the translators deemed to be noteworthy (‘merkwaardige bijzonderheden’).61 Another example of elimination of certain passages under the guise of improving the book's readability can be found on page 252 of the second part of Bijzonderheden over Japan, in which the translators have omitted a major part of the chapter ‘Division of the year among the Japanese’. Again, this omission is clarified in the footnotes, in which the Dutch translators judge Titsingh's use of Japanese to be unnecessarily lavish.62

While these adjustments may have enhanced the readability of Titsingh's text, the author would certainly not have appreciated it. In a letter to the aforementioned Marsden, Titsingh justifies his tendency to repeatedly write out Japanese terms in full:

A number of Japanese words, inserted through the whole, may appear superfluous, and, to prevent all distraction, to be easily spared with: but please to observe my dear Sir! By the dedication to the Prince of Tamba, this has been done on purpose, in order, if ever the work will be publish’d, and reaches Japan, the natives, studying the Dutch language, may be the better acquainted with the subject.63

This letter reveals the audience Titsingh was aiming for; not only Europeans but also rangakusha in Japan were part of the envisaged readership. Titsingh was not concerned

with readability, he considered the completeness and accuracy of his texts of higher importance.64

It can be concluded that the editors and translators of Titsingh's work have rearranged and expanded Titsingh's text in ways that conflicted with the writer's intentions, and from that perspective, criticism of their practices is justified. However, it should be stressed that Abel-Rémusat and Klaproth had to work from a manuscript which was far from finished. Shortly before his death, Titsingh sent several letters which reveal the state of his manuscript. He did not yet consider Beschryving van Japan to be ready for publication. In a letter to Jean Henri van Swinden (1746-1823), the first president of the Royal Dutch Institute, Titsingh describes the intended, yet to be written content of the unfinished and never published third part of Beschryving van Japan: ‘The third part, ending at page 158, will be continued in Paris with the description of Golden, Silver and copper coins, plants and crops, Japanese dialogues, vocabulary, and other subjects related to that Empire.’65 As stated before, the Institute received exactly 1100 pages, including the unfinished third part.66 On February 2, 1812, 76 days after writing the letter to Van Swinden, Titsingh passed away, leaving the third part unfinished.67

Not only the third part was incomplete, but also the first two parts of Titsingh's manuscript were flawed. One of the main flaws was the inconsistent and puzzling spelling of names and book titles. Titsingh's spelling was something with which one of the first editors, Abel-Rémusat, struggled heavily. In a review of Cérémonies in Journal des Savans (1819), he explains what he considered to be the extreme difficulties of editing the French version of Titsingh's Beschryving van Japan. First of all, the manuscript was translated by Titsingh from Dutch to French. He had no full command of that language, which resulted in many stylistic errors (‘l'extrême incorrection de son style’).68 It is possible that Ackermann did not want to use Titsingh's English translation of Beschryving van Japan for this very reason, as already mentioned above. To make matters worse, Tit - singh did not translate everything into French. Dutch spelling of Japanese words added to further confusion.69 Moreover, several passages seemed to be missing (‘lacunes nombreuses’) and translations of Chinese and Japanese works appeared so blatantly wrong to Abel-Rémusat, that a revision of these translations seemed necessary to make a publication of Titsingh's work possible:

les erreurs palpables qui avoient échappé aux interprètes, pouvoient rendre une publication complète impossible, à moins que les traductions ne pussent être revues et comparées avec les originaux par une personne exercée à la lecture du chinois, et un peu familiarisée avec le japonais.70

A chapter on the works of Confucius in Titsingh's Cérémonies contains one of these ‘erreurs palpables’. This chapter contains a translation of the Japanese version of the Xiào jing (entitled ko-boun-ko-kjo), also known as the Confucian treatise The classic of filial piety.71 In this translation, a certain O-Joosi is mentioned, who, according to Tit singh's translation, had written a piece of one hundred verses in praise of the sabers of Japan.72 This work was however completely unknown to sinologist Abel-Rémusat and his colleagues, even though O-Joosi, whom Abel-Rémusat refers to as ‘Eou-yang-sieou’ (1007-1072), was rather well-known among him and his fellow sinologists.73 After reviewing the ko-boun-ko-kjo himself, Abel-Rémusat concluded that these hundred verses on the sabers of Japan were non-existent and that the misattribution to Euoyang- sieou of this made-up work occurred because of a mistranslation. Together with the Japanese interpreters, Titsingh had translated a sentence as ‘(...) lequel composa une centaine de vers à la louange des sabres du Japon.’ whereas it should have been translated as ‘(...) Eou-yang-sieou composa des poésies, et cent volumes sur la littérature (...)’.74

Besides these translational errors and the unusual spelling of names and titles, from time to time complete passages were missing from Titsingh's interpretation of Chinese and Japanese works. An example of such an incomplete translation is that of Nipon-o-day-tche-lan (Table of the rulers of Japan, 1663), which was intended to serve as the main text in the paragraph on the Japanese emperors and shogun, entitled ‘Private memoirs and anecdotes of the reigning dynasty of the djogouns, or sovereigns of Japan’.75 Tit - singh's original translation of this work was rife with dashes. In a letter to Marsden, Titsingh explains what these dashes meant and why he put them there: ‘The stripes [---] occuring in different parts, are to remain so: if ever the work will be printed - they denote the laziness or indolence of some of the Japanese interpreters who have assisted me.’76 It shows Titsingh reliance on Japanese interpreters in the process of interpretation of texts. He could not translate these works by himself since his Japanese was insufficient.77 In the end, only references to Nipon-o-day-tche-lan appeared in the French, English and Dutch versions of Beschryving van Japan, not the content of the book itself.

Conclusion

Ultimately, it remains the question to what extent Lequin's and Boxer's sharp criticism of the translators and editors of Beschryving van Japan, and their supposed mutilation and distortion of Titsingh's original manuscript, is justified. To determine this, it is important to keep Titsingh's intentions in mind. Titsingh preferred completeness over readability. His work was supposed to be a comprehensive study on Japan for scholars of Japan, and he even included the rangakusha in Japan to his intended readership. He did not want to make any concessions to reach a more general audience. One of the main objections he could have held against Cérémonies, Mémoires, Illustrations and Bijzonderheden over Japan, the publications based on his manuscript, would be the fact that the editors and translators of these works left out several passages from his original manuscript and often omitted words when they deemed it necessary.

The Dutch translators especially took great liberties in editing Titsingh's work, deleting passages of the original text. Of all the discussed editors and translators, their publication was least faithful to Titsingh's original manuscript. This is not surprising, considering the fact that the two volumes of Bijzonderheden over Japan effectively were a Dutch translation of an English translation of Mémoires and Cérémonies, which in turn were interpretations by Nepveu, Abel-Rémusat, and Klaproth of Titsingh's French translation of his original Dutch manuscript, Beschryving van Japan. At the same time, the criticism of those who took the effort to examine, correct and eventually publish Titsingh's manuscript seems unnecessarily harsh and unfair. The texts Titsingh left behind were far from perfect, containing numerous spelling mistakes and incorrect translations of Japanese and Chinese texts, making it all the more difficult to compile a book that did credit to Titsingh's intentions.

All in all, the history of the posthumous publications of Beschryving van Japan offers a curious case study of how publishers and editors deal with texts left behind by a scholar. It sheds some light on the difficulties they encountered in editing the writings of the deceased, the choices they made in the process of preparing the texts for publication and how the eventual publication may conflict with the intentions of the author. Instead of qualifying certain posthumous publications simply as incomplete or inadequate, it proves fruitful to determine how and why certain posthumous publications differ from their original manuscripts.


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