Kazuo Watanabe (writer)

Kazuo Watanabe (渡辺一夫) born the August 25th 1901 and dead the May 10th 1975 is a humanistic Japan board, professor of French Littérature, translator in Japanese of Rabelais and Érasme, specialist in the thought of the Renaissance. He also wrote critical biographies of Sebastien Castellion, or of the women related to Henri IV, of Marguerite de Valois with Gabrielle d' Estrée.

Watanabe is recognized like theorizing a thought of Tolérance for the Nipponese generation of the post-war period. Indeed, its Japanese translation of the Pantagruel and the Gargantua of Rabelais, carried out during the Second world war and which was worth later to him the rank of satrap to the Collège of' Pataphysique, constituted a kind of dumb dispute against the Japanese military regime of the time.

The writer Kenzaburō Ōe, who was his pupil, said of him in his speech of attribution of the Nobel Prize: “Concretely, I learned from his translation of Rabelais, that Mikhail Bakhtine qualified system of image of grotesque realism or culture of the popular laughter , importance of the material and physical principles; the correspondence enters the cosmic, social and physical elements; the going beyond of died and the passions for the reincarnation; and the laughter which upsets the hierarchies”.

Random links: