Polyglot's anthology
慶応大学名誉教授のDe Wolf先生が来月 anthologyを出版されます。contributeはこのようにも使うのですね。（GP）
Multilingual ex-professor pours all his energy into translation, writing
Long focused on Japanese literary works, Charles De Wolf contributes his first original story to a March 11 anthology
By KRIS KOSAKA
Special to The Japan Times
Charles De Wolf, translator, writer and retired professor emeritus of Keio University, relaxes at the Seahawk Hotel in Fukuoka in September. COURTESY OF CHARLES DE WOLF
At the age of 15, he left his home in California to live a few years with relatives in Germany. "I never finished American high school — I went straight from a German high school to the University of California at Berkeley in the wild days of the '60s," De Wolf recalls. "I went back to Europe as a university exchange student in my junior year and improved my French."
Fluent in both languages, a Latinist with a rudimentary knowledge of Greek and Italian and admittedly Eurocentric, De Wolf decided to learn Spanish by joining the Peace Corps after he graduated with a degree in comparative literature. Despite his hope to be sent to Latin America, De Wolf's life instead forever veered to Asia.
"It was 1967. We were only the third group to be sent to South Korea, and the country was just emerging from Third World status. I remember it all in black and white, since the photographs of that time were in black and white," he says. "There were beggars on the streets and life was rather grim. We never would have guessed South Korea would turn out to be such a prosperous, democratic country."
De Wolf could also never have predicted a lifetime in Japan. For the 66-year-old translator, writer and retired professor emeritus of Keio University, Europe still holds fascination, but "Japan is home."
While in South Korea, De Wolf applied his talent in languages. He studied Korean, although it proved, at first, a challenge. "All the Western European languages seem like dialects of each other when you have fooled around with Korean and Chinese and Japanese.
"I became hooked on the Chinese characters. I started learning Chinese characters soon after my arrival and would eventually sit in coffee shops, struggling through Korean newspapers, which then contained more Chinese characters," he recalls. "The Chinese-Korean character dictionaries were badly printed, and the characters themselves were not of the simplified variety. I realized Korean syntax is remarkably similar to Japanese syntax."
When his time with the Peace Corps ended, De Wolf hoped to further his command of written Chinese by studying Japanese. "I decided to come to Japan to learn the language, stay a few years and then go back to the States for graduate school."
He first visited Tokyo in 1969 before returning to stay at the end of 1970. The capital was seething with Japanese literary history. "It was just the time Yukio Mishima exited the world quite grandly," De Wolf remembers. "I was already quite interested in all Japanese literature at the time. When I was in Japan on holiday in early 1969, I wandered into a foreign bookstore, and I saw Edward Seidensticker's translation of (Yasunari) Kawabata's "Snow Country" on display. I loved Seidensticker's introduction in particular. It was not the type of literature I thought I would like, but I was entranced by the novel, and I said to myself, 'I want to read this in the original.' "
Eventually, De Wolf would. He found a job in Tokyo teaching French and English, and soon accepted his first translation work. "I remember translating a contract on gold bullion from Japanese to French, and that was a good case of not knowing what I was doing on several levels."
