2023-24 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation Presented to Cornell University - Cornell East Asia Series

The Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago is proud to announce the 2023-2024 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation to Cornell University Press - Cornell East Asia Series imprint for their upcoming book By the Waters of Babylon by Japanese philosopher and literary critic, Mori Arimasa (1911-1976), translated by J. Thomas Rimer (Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature, University of Pittsburgh). 

By the Waters of Babylon is a memoir and travelogue by Mori Arimasa, the influential Japanese philosopher and intellectual who interpreted European culture to postwar Japan. A professor of French philosophy, Mori visited Paris and came to the realization that to truly understand the significance of French and European civilization, he would have to live there and immerse himself in French culture. Abandoning his Tokyo professorship, Mori remained in France for over two decades, teaching, translating, and writing. This publication is forthcoming in April 2025. 

Mori Arimasa (1911-1976) was a Japanese philosopher and literary critic. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1938.  Mori’s particular significance in Japan lies in his position as one of a small number of intellectuals who struggled to be individuals in the Western sense of the term. 

J. Thomas Rimer is Emeritus Professor of Japanese Literature, Theater, and Art at the University of Pittsburgh. He has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis and at the University of Maryland, and he served for several years as head of the Asian Division of the Library of Congress. He is the author, coauthor, editor, and translator of several works, including Traditional Japanese Arts and Culture: An Illustrated Sourcebook and A Reader's Guide to Japanese Literature.

The William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation is an annual competition coordinated by the Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Sibley was Associate Professor Emeritus in East Asian Languages & Civilizations and a renowned scholar and translator of Japanese literature. He is best known for his work, The Shiga Hero, first published in 1979 by the University of Chicago Press, which introduced Western readers to the fiction of Shiga Naoya, one of Japan’s foremost modern writer. In keeping with Sibley’s lifelong devotion to translation and to the place of literature in the classroom, up to $3,000 is awarded each year as a publishing subvention for translations of Japanese literature into English.