Literacy in Translation Series
RICHARD DANFORD, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, Marietta College, and DANIEL REFF, Professor of Comparative Studies, Ohio State, have been invited to discuss their collaboration on the first critical English-language edition of The First European Description of Japan, 1585, by Luis Frois, S. J.
At the height of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan, which was begun by Francis Xavier in 1549, Luis Frois, a long-time missionary in Japan, drafted the earliest systematic comparison of Western and Japanese cultures, the original of which was discovered in the Royal Academy of History in Madrid after the Second World War. The book provides a translation of the text, which is not a continuous narrative, but rather more than 600 distichs or brief couplets on subjects such as gender, child rearing, religion, medicine, eating, horses, writing, ships and seafaring, architecture, and music and drama. Overall, the book represents an important primary source for understanding a particularly challenging period of history and its connection to contemporary Europe and Japan.
