TRANSLATING
MURAKAMI: an email roundtable
From: Jay Rubin
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 5:23 AM
To: Gary Fisketjon; Philip Gabriel
Subject: Re: An email roundtable: Translating Murakami
This week I'm
writing from Kyoto, Japan, where I have been since June,
running a joint research project on Noh, a dramatic
form that has survived in Japan since the middle ages.
Usually I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I teach
Japanese literature at Harvard.
Noh has been
a sideline of mine since I was in graduate school in
the sixties, but this year I'm going at it full time.
Most of my work has been on writers who flourished in
the early twentieth century, and I had little interest
in contemporary Japanese writing. Somehow, whenever
I sampled any, it seemed thin and immature in comparison
with the great Meiji-Taisho giant Soseki Natsume.
Then, in 1989,
I read Haruki Murakami. I had only been vaguely aware
of his existence--as some kind of pop writer, mounds
of whose stuff were to be seen filling up the front
counters in the bookstores, but I hadn't deigned to
read what was sure to be silly fluff about teenagers
getting drunk and hopping into bed. Some months before
A WILD SHEEPCHASE came out in English, an American publisher
asked me to read a Murakami novel to see if it was worth
translating; they had been evaluating a translation
but wanted an opinion on the original. The book turned
out to be what was later translated as HARDBOILED WONDERLAND
AND THE END OF THE WORLD, and it absolutely blew me
away--so much so that I have hardly worked on anything
besides Murakami for the past decade.
I told the
publisher that they should by all means publish a translation
and that, if they were not satisfied with the translation
they were considering, they should let ME do it. Well,
they ignored my advice on both counts, and Alfred Birnbaum's
translation came out a few years later from Kodansha.
After years
of concentrating on muted gray Japanese realism, I could
hardly believe a Japanese writer could be so bold and
wildly imaginative as I found Murakami to be. I can
still see the colors of the dreams escaping into the
atmosphere from the unicorn skulls near the end of the
book when I think back to that first reading of HARDBOILED
WONDERLAND, and I remember how much I regretted closing
the last page and realizing that I couldn't live in
Murakami's world anymore. I hadn't reacted to a writer
so strongly since I had been obsessed with Dostoevsky
as an undergraduate. I got everything of his I could
put my hands on and started reading him to the exclusion
of anyone else.
I especially
loved the stories. I found Murakami's address in the
library and told him I had half a dozen stories I wanted
to translate. His agent at the time got back to me saying
I could go ahead. I sent her one of my favorites, "The
Second Bakery Attack," and the next thing I knew Murakami
himself was on the phone, asking me if I minded publishing
it in Playboy. Used to publishing my academic
stuff for audiences of twelve, I leaped at the chance,
whatever scruples I might have had regarding the Playboy
"philosophy." What a kick it was to publish something
with the Swedish Bikini Team on the front cover! The
illustration for that first story was a masterpiece,
too, an ukiyoe-style depiction of the robbery
scene in McDonald's. The New Yorker took "The
Elephant Vanishes" around that time.
Murakami surprised
me one day soon after by saying that he was calling
from Princeton. I was probably the only professor of
modern Japanese literature in the country who didn't
know he was there at the time. In fact, he was going
to be coming to run in the 1991 Boston Marathon that
April, and we met in Cambridge the day afterward when
he attended a class of Howard Hibbett's that was discussing
my still-unpublished translation of "Bakery Attack."
We were later neighbors in Cambridge and saw a lot of
each other. I drove him crazy a few times asking him
to explain some dense passages and finding inconsistencies
that his Japanese editors had missed.
Since Alfred
seemed to be the exclusive translator of Murakami's
novels (the lively job he did on SHEEP CHASE was largely
responsible for the interest in Murakami in the U.S.),
I got Murakami's OK to do stories that Alfred hadn't
shown any interest in. To me, they were the best stories,
and Alfred was missing the boat. The ones that he liked
I usually didn't like. We almost never asked for the
same stories. It was downright strange. When Gary Fisketjon
at Knopf took on the job of compiling a volume of stories,
he chose from the backlog that Alfred and I had sent
in separately, and put them together entirely according
to his own taste. Then, stranger still, reviewers of
the book would almost invariably cite only stories that
I had translated or stories that Alfred had translated,
almost never both. There was some weird intuitive thing
at work in Gary's compilation that combined Alfred's
taste and mine, and then spoke to readers who were drawn
to one or the other.
Having translated
virtually all the novels, Alfred got tired just as Murakami
was beginning to serialize THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE
and Murakami asked me to do it. I actually got started
on it while Book 1 was still appearing in the magazine--something
of a gamble for a professor used to choosing canonical
works by long-dead authors in large part for their historical
importance. I still think the clairvoyant Kano sisters
detract from the book, but the war-related chapters,
especially, are some of Murakami's best writing, and
I'm glad I had the opportunity to translate what is,
so far, his most serious novel.
This maybe
leads into an answer to Phil. Sure, there's a jazzy,
jumpy quality to the early writing that is just about
gone by HARDBOILED WONDERLAND. I think I would not have
liked Murakami's writing much if I had first read anything
else, including NORWEGIAN WOOD (which I would have understood
only on the most superficial level). I've been able
to enjoy almost everything of Murakami's, knowing that
he was the creator of that incredible mind trip, HARDBOILED
WONDERLAND, echoes of which are to be found in everything.
I've just finished translating his collection of short
stories related to the Kobe earthquake, ALL GOD'S CHILDREN
CAN DANCE, which are probably the most nearly conventional
pieces he has ever written, with a third-person narration
in a muted style. They are wonderfully subtle pieces,
touching on the earthquake as a distant rumble in the
lives of people of the mid-nineties, as fragile as deja
vu (one of his most consistent themes). (Not all
the stories can be called "conventional"--especially
my favorite, "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.")
A final question?
How about it, Gary? Can you give us some insight into
your compilation of THE ELEPHANT VANISHES?
Phil, I have
absolutely no idea why Murakami became such a "breakthrough"
writer in the West. From the beginning, I felt he was
writing for ME, and I always assume I have quirky tastes
not shared by many others (Dave Barry surprised me that
way, too, by winning the Pulitzer Prize). I did not
choose to work on him after a judicious review of all
the current Japanese writers that convinced me he was
the best: I just knew that I was not likely to find
another writer anywhere in the world who spoke to me
so directly and personally, so I jumped into his world
without the least hesitation. How can so many other
readers be feeling that way? Murakami gets inside your
brain and does weird things to it. I remember one Murakami
moment I had after translating the passage in THE WIND-UP
BIRD CHRONICLE where little Nutmeg climbs into her veterinarian
father's lap and smells all the animal smells he brings
home on his body from the zoo. All of a sudden, I was
singing "Oh, My Papa, To Me He Was So Wonderful."
From:
Philip Gabriel Sent: Monday, December 18,
2000 5:28 PM |
From:
Jay Rubin Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000
5:23 AM |
From:
Philip Gabriel Sent: Wednesday, December
20, 2000 12:17 PM |
From:
Jay Rubin Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000
8:43 PM |
From:
Jay Rubin Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000
10:21 PM |
From:
Jay Rubin Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2001
8:22 PM |
From:
Philip Gabriel Sent: Tuesday, January 9,
2001 8:22 PM |
From:
Fisketjon, Gary Sent: Tuesday, January 16,
2001 2:14 PM |
From:
Philip Gabriel Sent: Jan. 18, 2001 |
From:
Gary Fisketjon Sent: Thursday, January 18,
2001 5:50 PM |
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