Professor
Ciaran Murray
Ciaran Murray was born
in Carlow, Ireland, residence of Sir William
Temple, who went on to become British Ambassador
to the Netherlands. Here he had opportunities of
meeting the Dutch of Deshima, who on returning
from their annual visits to Tokyo were taken to
the gardens of Kyoto. These, at a time when
European gardens were geometrical, caused
astonishment by their irregularity, for which
Temple reports the term sharawadgi (evidently the
modern sorowaji). His description, seen through
the press by Temple’s secretary Jonathan Swift
(whose Gulliver, it will be remembered, visited
Japan), became the basis for the irregular
English garden and the Romantic return to nature.
For his exploration of
this subject, Ciaran Murray was awarded a
doctorate by the National University of Ireland,
and his book Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to
Nature (Rowman & Littlefield) has been welcomed
in such countries as China, Russia and the United
States as well as Japan and England, most
recently in the Times Literary Supplement. Dr.
Murray has been informed by the editors of the
Oxford English Dictionary that, as a result of
his representations, their third edition will
give the origin of sharawadgi as Japanese
(previous editions having described it as
“unknown”). He points out that the Japanese
antecedents of the word were first noticed (as
long ago as 1931) by a member of the Asiatic
Society of Japan.
He is currently working
on a sequel to Sharawadgi, which is to continue
the story from Romanticism through the
Aestheticism of Whistler and Wilde to the
Modernism of Pound, Eliot and Hemingway. The
forthcoming lecture is intended as a preview of
this study. Dr. Murray is a professor at Chuo
University, former Editor-in-Chief and current
Consulting Editor of the Transactions of the
Asiatic Society of Japan, and a member of the
Society’s Council.
Source: The Asiatic
Society of Japan
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