J. Keith Vincent

J. Keith Vincent is a translator and scholar of Japanese and Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies.

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. He has translated classic essays by Japanese feminists into English and co-edited one of the first anthologies of US queer theory into Japanese. His abridged translation of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book is available as an audiobook on Alexander.

He is currently completing 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 genjipoems.org, a collaborative database created with his students of five very different English translations of all 795 poems appearing in Lady Murasaki’s thousand-year-old novel The Tale of Genji. See recent press on this project here.

Forthcoming from Tuttle Publishing are a retranslation of  Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s masterful novella “Portrait of Shunkin” under the new English title, “From the Life of Shunkin,”　「春琴抄」and the previously untranslated novel fragment, “A Record of Cruelty” (「残虐記」). Currently, he is at work on a retranslation of Natsume Sōseki’s 1915 novel Michikusa.

Professor Vincent taught the BU Translation Seminar in 2011 and again in 2024. He co-taught TL540 with Professor Sassan Tabatabai, and he has taught several iterations of TL551 Topics in Translation: Lives of Translators, in which students read translators’ memoirs, biographies, and novels about translators to ask why and how it matters who translates. This fall (2025), he is teaching TL500 History & Theory of Translation.

Personal website: jkeithvincent.com