The Existence and Discovery of Beauty

by Yasunari Kawabata, V.H. Viglielmo (Translator)

Translated by VH Viglielmo

Genres: Japanese Literature

10 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成) was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read today.
Nobel Lecture: 1968
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prize...

Reviews

[Melville Proust]

In truth, I don't know how to rate this. I've wanted to read it for years. I've read about it, or extracts from it, so much that my expectations were high. Unfortunately, I think it belongs to another era and is perhaps outdated—John Young's preface sets a jerky and irritating tone of formality that is difficult to not be affected by. The translation is decidedly creaky and old fashioned, and I suspect many nuances are lost. Without Japanese, I've only a foggy idea of what's going on—though I'm intrigued enough to want to find out more. My son, who is a translator and fluent in Japanese, thought it was hopelessly old fashioned and opaque, and I'm happy to leave it at that. My two atars is for the translation, not the lecture/book 'itself'.