Of the heroes that I had when I was twenty, it seems it's the translators who remain now that I'm fifty or so. I've been carrying around Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature to the Nineteenth Century all that time, and volume one of his A History of Japanese Literature is on the bedside table.
Keene has taught Japanese literature at Columbia for 55 years and now, at 88, he plans to emigrate and take out Japanese citizenship. There's little chance that the Japanese will turn him away, as they have already designated him a Person of Cultural Merit, making him one of only three Westerners to be granted that honour.
(This is the 1500th Plenty of Nothing post.) D
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