TRANSLATING MURAKAMI: an email roundtable

----------
From: Jay Rubin
Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2001 8:22 PM
To: Gary Fisketjon; Philip Gabriel
Subject: Re: An email roundtable: Translating Murakami

Some additional thoughts on translating from Japanese to English -- in general, the Japanese have a far more sensitive and sophisticated awareness regarding food than most Americans. The number of food-preparation shows on TV--PRIME TIME--is amazing. So when a Murakami character makes himself an egg salad sandwich, Japanese readers are going to feel something a little different from what American readers are going to feel about it. There is no way to convey the cultural context regarding that sandwich in a translation, except perhaps through scholarly footnotes, which would only succeed in destroying anyone's enjoyment of the text. So you just have to have the character make his sandwich in English and figure it's not going to be THAT different. The fact that the word "sandwich" is written in a phonetic script reserved for recording foreign terms, that the Japanese reader's eye travels vertically down the page to take in that word and the other words of the sentence, that the Japanese word for "cut" has a tiny picture of a sword in it: all these facts about the Japanese writing system are fascinating but are of interest only to foreign students of the language and are no more exciting to a Japanese reader than the snake-like shape of the "s" in the word "sentence." As I pointed out in my book Making Sense of Japanese (Kodansha International), the Japanese language is not processed in either hemisphere of the brain but in the left elbow, which makes for a certain calcification of style in literary works, but no translator has yet figured out how to convey this in a foreign language. The Japanese language is SO different from English--even when used by a writer as Americanized as Murakami is--that true literal translation is impossible, and the translator's subjective processing is inevitably going to play a large part. That processing is a GOOD THING; it involves a continual critical questioning of the meaning of the text. The LAST thing you want is a translator who believes he is a totally passive medium for transferring one set of grammatical structures into another: then you're going to get mindless garbage, not literature.