| NOTA |
(★)(1.This volume contains the only available English translation of the prayers of Japan´s indigenous religious tradition, Shinto. These prayers,´norito´, are works of religious literature that are basic to our understanding of Japanese religious history. Locating Donald Philippi as one of a small number of scholars who have developed a perceptive approach to the problem of´hermeneutical distance´ in dealing with ancient or foreign texts, Joseph M. Kitagawa recalls Mircea Eliade´s observation that´most of the time [our] encounters and comparisons with non-Western cultures have not made all the´strangeness´ of these cultures evident ... We may say that the Western world has not yet, or not generally, met with authentic representatives of the´real´ non-Western traditions´. Composed in the stately ritual language of the ancient Japanese and presented as a´performing text´, these prayers constitute one of the authentic foreign representatives in Eliade´s sense. In the preface Kitagawa elucidates their significance, discusses Philippi´s methods of encountering the´strangeness´ of Japan, and comments astutely on aspects of the encounter of East and West. 2.Donald L. Philippi is highly regarded as a translator of Japanese into English. His works include´Kojiki [Princeton/University of Tokyo Press]´ and´Songs of Gods, Songs of Humans : The Epic Tradition of the Ainu [Princeton/North Point Press]´. Joseph M. Kitagawa is Professor Emeritus of the University of Chicago Divinity School and of the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations there ; he is also a former Dean of the Divinity School.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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