J. Keith Vincent

J. Keith Vincent is a translator and scholar of Japanese literature. His translation of Okamoto Kanoko’s A Riot of Goldfish (Hesperus Press,  2010) won the 2011 U.S. Japan Friendship Commission Prize for the  Translation of Japanese Literature, and his translation of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novella Devils in Daylight was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize in 2018. Much of his scholarly work has focused on how ideas about gender and sexuality inform how we read, talk about, and practice translation. He has translated classic essays by Japanese feminists into English and co-edited one of the first anthologies of US queer theory into Japanese. He is currently completing Shiki: A Life in Haiku, a biography of the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) told through translations of dozens of Shiki’s haiku with close readings of the poems in the context of Shiki’s life and work. Other current projects include a collaborative database created with his students of four different English translations of over 500 poems appearing in the thousand-year-old novel The Tale of Genji; and a back-translation with commentary of a section of Tachibana Sensaburo’s Seibutsu shigen: Shugen-ron (1895), the first Japanese translation of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Professor Vincent taught the BU Translation Seminar in 2011 and looks forward to teaching TL551 Topics in Translation: Lives of Translators for the MFA in Spring 2021, in which we will read translators’ memoirs, biographies, and novels about translators to ask why and how it matters who translates.

Watch Professor Vincent’s lecture “’Out Gays’ or ‘Shameless Gays’: What Gets Lost and What is Gained, When US Queer Theory is Translated into Japanese” here.

Personal website: jkeithvincent.com