I’ve long believed that the art of translating, or even the simple act of translating, is more or less a literary magic-act. The reader understands that what’s being presented is only the outward face of the show; what’s actually going on behind the red curtain, or between the severed legs of the showgirl-in-waiting, is equally important to the aesthetic outcome, but it’s not the kind of knowledge, as mere observers, that we’re supposed to be privy to, and it shouldn’t affect our enjoyment of the experience. We know it’s not ‘real’ magic – whatever that might be – yet when done well, it sure as hell looks like it. Still, every now and then it’s fun to look inside the magician’s bag of tricks, if only to see if we can spot something recognizable, a familiar object or two that might allow us to imagine the first form of the façade. Yosuke Hashimoto , a Japanese professor specializing in the Chinese language, but who also dabbles in studying various other languages from French to Italian, has written a book detailing the study habits of those interested in pursuing multiple languages simultaneously. At one point he quotes the first sentence of Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata’s famous novel SNOW COUNTRY , attempting to illustrate the tricky craft of translation. The English version – which I’m assuming he cribbed from Edward Seidenstecker’s translation – sounds pretty straightforward: ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.’ He also includes the German translation; I don’t understand German, but some of you might, so I’ll include it here: ‘Als der zug aus dem langen Grenztunnel her auskroch, lag das Schneeland. Now, what’s interesting is that in its original Japanese, the sentence doesn’t include mention of a train at all – which seems to be the main subject of the sentence. Here’s the Japanese version, written in romaji, or English characters, for those who know a little bit of Japanese: ‘Kokkyo no naigai tunneru o nukeru to yukiguni de atta.’ As Hashimoto points out, here’s what that sentence would read like, in English, if it was translated DIRECTLY from the Japanese, and not necessarily ARTISTICALLY : ‘Coming out of the long tunnel, it was the snow country.’ In English, that sounds slightly awkward – where’s the main subject, is what I’m thinking. And ‘it was the snow country’ sounds more than a little strange, as if a ‘snow country’ suddenly just appeared. There’s an abruptness, an oddness, that I don’t think is present in the original text. In Japanese, it’s perfectly acceptable to omit obvious subjects; therefore we don’t NEED to be told that it’s a train that’s coming out of a tunnel, if we can safely assume that that would normally be the case. (There’s a hell of a lot of assumptions in Japanese.) What I’ve always found interesting about this opening line in Japanese is that there are two representations of the identical Chinese character ‘country’ to be found in this sentence – one in ‘kokkyo’, which means border, and one in ‘yukiguni’, which literally means ‘snow country’, and is a familiar expression which means the northern, cold, snowy part of the land. Because these kanji characters in Japanese act as their own artistic and aesthetic symbols, the reader, in one sentence, instantly is confronted with the notion that one ‘country’ is being crossed and traversed, while another ‘country’ is being entered. The English word ‘border’ is somewhat vague and generic; its Japanese counterpart integrates the symbol for country directly inside of its meaning, so there’s a bit of a grander feel to its nuance. The English phrase ‘snow country’ is, for me, a little bit clumsy, and not exactly a familiar, lexical friend from our childhood, whereas all Japanese will have grown up with that phrase, adding some quiet, historical heft to the visual image of the Chinese characters themselves. So right away we can observe that, in merely one sentence, to make the overall meaning work grammatically AND artistically, a main subject – a train -- has had to be actually ADDED to the English version, while much of the power of ‘country’ as a signifier for both ‘border’ and ‘region’ has, unavoidably, been lost when converted from Japanese. And that’s only the opening line. It’s said that literary translators must not only know their adopted language with a level of facility equal to a native speakers, but they also must be exceedingly agile and comfortable with their own language, possessing the instinct of a true artist, able to sense the gaps between the two tongues, what must be subtracted and added, and often omitted. The good ones are the real deal. Wandering around a suburban Kawasaki train-station bookstore the other day, I noticed that there was a sizable-amount of English works in translation – a compilation of Don Delillo’s short stories, and a recent biography of Kurt Vonnegut, complete with an afterword by Haruki Murakami, who has translated much of Carver’s fiction. There was also a collection of literary love stories translated by Murakami himself into Japanese, and I was trying to think of even one Western novelist, famed for his own fiction, who also dabbled in translation on the side. Paul Auster, as a young writer, used to translate from the French, and I guess Jonathan Franzen has dabbled in German translation in the past, but I can’t think of too many others. I read a recent translation of MADAME BOVARY by an American writer named Lydia Davis, whose own fiction, in English, is apparently quite well-regarded, but other than those, I’m stumped. The Japanese are voraciously interested in translated works, while us Westerners – aside from the Russian classics, and a recent boom in Nordic crime fiction, initiated by the success of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO – don’t seem all that interested in what the world has to say via made-up stories. That’s a shame, I think. And I’m as guilty as anyone, often feeling that translated works feel stilted and stunted and missing some oomph. However, there are a lot of magicians out there in the world, with an enormously varied range of tricks. A bevy of literary show-girls are patiently waiting for us to watch their petite frames in large boxes being slowly sawed in half. Magic is magic, no matter where it comes from. And if we can’t always understand what was originally intended, or what was lost in translation, that’s perfectly fine – a magician’s not supposed to reveal his tricks.
Posted on: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 05:54:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015