Posted on 06/22/2003 9:33:49 AM PDT by blam
Researchers unearth ancient Japanese bible translation
OSAKA -- A 400-year-old Japanese translation of biblical literature has been found at a university in the old Polish city of Krakow, a researcher has told the Mainichi.
Courtesy of Jagiellorian University. The Japanese translation is written below the Latin text.
One of the oldest known translations of the bible in Japanese, several paragraphs were translated by a Japanese mission of boys that left the country in 1582 and arrived in Rome three years later to receive an audience by Pope Gregory XIII.
"European countries that received the mission showed great interest and numerous books about it were published there," said Koichiro Takase, a Keio University professor emeritus and expert on the history of Christianity in Japan. "The finding is an important document that shows details about the mission."
Takase added that the finding was probably the second oldest Japanese biblical translation, only after one made around 1580 and found in Portugal.
Liudmila Ermakova, a professor on ancient Japanese literature at the Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, said that she found an old Polish document in 2000 that mentions the Japanese translation at a Kumamoto Prefecture organization that collects documents on the history of Christianity in Japan.
She then asked Jagiellorian University's library in Krakow to make an investigation apparently because the Polish document mentions the school.
In reply, librarians at the university told Ermakova later that it had kept the 400-year-old document.
Now the researcher says members of the Japanese mission, dispatched by feudal lords in Kyushu to Rome, translated Latin phrases from the Psalms of King David into Japanese.
The translated Latin parts are: "The Lord reigneth," in Psalm 93 and "O Praise the Lord, all ye nations: praise him, all ye people," in Psalm 117, both of which the Mainichi Daily News cites from the Holy Bible, the King James version.
The document is kept in a glass frame, and on the back it tells of the Japanese mission that wrote the Japanese sentences in 1585.
Ermakova said that a Polish bishop probably asked the mission to translate some phrases when he was visiting Rome and later donated the document to the library.
The mission of four boys, led by a Jesuit missionary, left Nagasaki in 1582 and arrived in Rome in February 1585 after visiting Lisbon, Madrid and Florence. They returned to Nagasaki in July 1590. (Mainichi Shimbun, Japan, June 21, 2003)
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