H. Hibbett Response (Matt)

I found the reading of Hibbett on the topic of Tanizaki to be very intriguing. One of the things that Hibbett mentions is how Tanizaki is a part of this "Big Three" of Japanese writers between Kawabata, Mishima,  and Tanizaki. The three of these writers seem to be criticized for their extreme writing and concern for tradition within their writings. More notably, Tanizaki's works would include a lot of erotic, and grotesque details compared to other writers. I feel that writing something like this is not something that should be necessarily criticized but rather embraced as being a part of the writer's style. It might make more sense in that the time period when Tanizaki wrote, these topics could be seen as controversial to write about which could be a part of the criticism. I feel like people writing about these extreme topics do tend to get criticized, in both good and bad ways. Hibbett also mentions how Tanizaki is regarded as a master storyteller, but was not awarded a Nobel prize. This he attributes could be the fact that he wrote about these extreme topics which caused him to not be considered. There are definitely politics behind awards like these, and despite Tanizaki being regarded as such a great writer, that is probably why he did not receive an award like that. Another thing Hibbett talked about was not looking at other translations when doing translations, at least not until completing a draft himself. I thought that this was particularly interesting since for a lot of things, I feel like taking a look at an example will help you with your process of whatever it is that you are doing. But in the case of translation, I think it could be seen as hindering. If you take a look at a translation before doing it yourself, you could introduce some biases in what you try to translate from whatever example you have looked at.  If you complete a translation yourself before looking, you can notice differences between how things were interpreted and even possibly find errors in previous translations. I think this is a good practice to do, but it does bring up a point of if in the translations, you could give to much of your own style in the writing, and change the style of the original text. This problem is something that can be difficult to deal with at times but can be helped if you don't look at a different translation beforehand.