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senzenwomen2025-01-03 08:30 pm
nnozomi) wrote in senzenwomen2025-01-03 08:30 pm
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Senuma Kayo (1875-1915)
Senuma Kayo was born in 1875 in Gunma, where her father ran a seed nursery; her birth name was Yamada Ikuko. She was raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church; upon her mother Yoka’s death in 1883, burial in the family plot was prohibited on account of her Christianity. Ikuko went to a church-affiliated girls’ school in Tokyo, graduating in 1892 and attempting a career as a writer while teaching at her alma mater.
Given books in Russian by Archbishop Nicholas, whom she had admired since childhood, Ikuko studied the language with Ivan Senuma Kakusaburo, the head of the Orthodox St. Nikolai Cathedral seminary (he had run away from home at sixteen to go into the church and attended seminary in Kiev), and married him in 1897; they were to have six children. After her marriage he introduced her to the writer Ozaki Koyo, who took her on as a disciple (his first female one) and gave her the pen name Kayo, which shares a character with his own pen name.
She became a well-known Russian translator, as the first Japanese woman to translate directly from the Russian. Her translations included works by Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, and others, as well as a joint attempt at Anna Karenina with her husband (who was among Tolstoy’s correspondents, although their religious beliefs clashed). Her style is said to have valued elegance in Japanese writing over absolute faithfulness to the source text.
In 1909, frustrated by being shut up in the house, Kayo set off on a trip to Russia and sent back a series of newspaper articles about her visit to Vladivostok. In 1911 she traveled there again, accompanied only by her baby daughter Fumiko if that’s how you read it; I never saw the name 文代子 in my life. Fuyoko? Ayoko?, traveling as far as St. Petersburg on the Siberian Railway. (There was gossip at the time that Fumiko was the daughter of a Russian exchange student ten years Kayo’s junior.) In St. Petersburg she worked as a shop clerk and a Japanese instructor.
Upon her return to Japan in 1912, she became a member of Hiratsuka Raicho’s feminist magazine Seito [Bluestocking], which published her translations of Chekhov (whom she enjoyed for his humor among other reasons) before they were released in book form. She died in 1915 from complications of a seventh pregnancy.
Given books in Russian by Archbishop Nicholas, whom she had admired since childhood, Ikuko studied the language with Ivan Senuma Kakusaburo, the head of the Orthodox St. Nikolai Cathedral seminary (he had run away from home at sixteen to go into the church and attended seminary in Kiev), and married him in 1897; they were to have six children. After her marriage he introduced her to the writer Ozaki Koyo, who took her on as a disciple (his first female one) and gave her the pen name Kayo, which shares a character with his own pen name.
She became a well-known Russian translator, as the first Japanese woman to translate directly from the Russian. Her translations included works by Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, and others, as well as a joint attempt at Anna Karenina with her husband (who was among Tolstoy’s correspondents, although their religious beliefs clashed). Her style is said to have valued elegance in Japanese writing over absolute faithfulness to the source text.
In 1909, frustrated by being shut up in the house, Kayo set off on a trip to Russia and sent back a series of newspaper articles about her visit to Vladivostok. In 1911 she traveled there again, accompanied only by her baby daughter Fumiko if that’s how you read it; I never saw the name 文代子 in my life. Fuyoko? Ayoko?, traveling as far as St. Petersburg on the Siberian Railway. (There was gossip at the time that Fumiko was the daughter of a Russian exchange student ten years Kayo’s junior.) In St. Petersburg she worked as a shop clerk and a Japanese instructor.
Upon her return to Japan in 1912, she became a member of Hiratsuka Raicho’s feminist magazine Seito [Bluestocking], which published her translations of Chekhov (whom she enjoyed for his humor among other reasons) before they were released in book form. She died in 1915 from complications of a seventh pregnancy.