Mori Ōgai’s (1862-1922) 1909 translation and the subsequent theater production of Henrik Ibsen’s 1896 play John Gabriel Borkman was in many ways instrumental in the formation of Japanese Meiji-era shingeki theater. Through his career as a translator, Ōgai’s translation approach shifted from one of decreasingly relying on domestication techniques to staying more faithful to the source text through use of foreignization techniques and arguably towards what has been identified by Eugene Nida and Jin Di as dynamical equivalence or equivalent effect, respectively, in drama translation. In this project, Ōgai’s translation of John Gabriel Borkman is examined using a set of categories peculiar to drama translation, as proposed by Chinese scholars Xu and Cui (2011), again based on the theories of Nida and Di. The categories are intelligibility, brevity, characterization and actability. The results from the analysis are used to do a qualitative analysis of Ōgai’s approach to drama translation. Results from the study indicate that Ōgai put large emphasis on the intelligibility of the play, and perhaps over the aspects of brevity, characterization and actability. However, wherever the brevity aspect seems not to be in violation of any of the other aspects, Ōgai seems to have tried to adhere as close as possible to the source texts in terms of speaking length.

This thesis is a study of the ways in which the fear of death, and its natural consequence, the desire for immortality, is manifested in the major characters of three post-Romantic works. In each case, the fear of death is unconscious, and has to "be interpreted from the dreams and illusions of the characters, which may not appear to have any immediate connection with death or immortality. In Madame Bovary, the blind man is the symbolic antithesis of Emma's dreams of finding a means of transcendence within the world itself. He is the embodiment of the horrifying vision of biological process that lies at the heart of her flight from reality. The pharmacist, Homais, is also considered to be attempting to establish a symbolic form of immortality for himself through the glorification of his reputation and his sentimental belief in scientific progress. In Niels Lyhne, the young hero attempts to free himself from the romantic influences of his childhood by proclaiming a new philosophy that is based, on atheism. However, his temperamental attachment to the idea of "infinity", and his inability to accept the physical nature of human beings betray his unconscious desire for a state of being in which he will be invulnerable to the forces of aging and death. In John Gabriel Borkman the three major characters attempt to find a means of denying the inevitability of their approaching deaths. Borkman tries to gain control over the forces of life through the exercise of power and through an identification with rocks and metal that seem to hold the promise of conferring their immutability onto him. Borkman's wife wants her son to devote his life to the glorification of the name of Borkman, that her husband has dishonoured. She hopes that her idealized self-image will live on"in the "monument" that Erhart will "erect" to the family name. Ella Rentheim, her sister, also plans to use Erhart for the establishment of a symbolic form of immortality, by trying to persuade him to adopt her family name after she has died. The method of this thesis could be applied to works from any age of literature, but I have chosen the nineteenth century because of the particular social and intellectual influences that existed in Europe after the Enlightenment'. All the artistic movements of the nineteenth century were conditioned by the legacy of metaphysical uncertainty that the religious skepticism of the Age of Reason had bequeathed to the future. In these three works, the characters devote the same religious fervour to the worldly objects of their desires as, formerly, man had devoted to God. The unconscious hope in all their attempts is that they will discover a means of being delivered from death. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate