A translation of Mori Ōgai 森鴎外’s Honyaku ni tsuite 「翻譯に就いて」 (“On translation”), published in 1914 for a collection of essays by famous writers on literary technique.

ON TRANSLATION

Translation and fallacy

I have been asked to write something on translation for this book. It appears that I am considered a major figure among translators. Very well — but on the other hand, there are those who put it about that my translations are almost entirely erroneous, that I have no talent for translation, and that my translations have no value.

It has become fashionable of late for translators to bring their work to my home and have me write an introduction to it. Even those with no connection to me whatsoever come to make these requests. Some even admit that they do so despite reservations on their own part because the “vulgar masses” trust my introductions. Some only use my introduction after altering individual characters to meet some mediocre or even erroneous stylistic standards. It seems to me that many of those who request introductions from me are the very same people who claim to find errors in my own translations.

When I do examine some word or phrase identified as a flaw in one of my translations, I find myself in agreement only very rarely. Translation of novels and plays is not philological research. One’s work is not completed simply by translating each word individually and arranging the results in lines. And so complaints that words not in the original were added deliberately and accusations that words in the original were intentionally left out do not distress me in the slightest.

The real-life example of Nora

Complaints have been voiced of late about Nora, my translation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Here I shall discuss two or three of the most ridiculous examples.

The term used for the boy whom Nora has carry the Christmas tree home I translated denbin 傳便. This is an error; it should rather be what was once called a kobashiri 小走, a “messenger boy” in the West of today — so I was informed, with a knowing look. But the first city in our country to have “messenger boys” was Ogura Kokura in Kyushu, and this is where the word denbin was first coined. Ogura is a queer place in general, and one which also saw the first appearance in Japan of the advertising pillars known as “Litfass columns” in the West. As for what a kobashiri might be, I do not know. In old Edo there were men known as tayoriya 便屋 [“letter carriers”], but these were not the same as denbin.

Writing of Nora’s house, I mentioned a zenbō 前房 [literally “front room”]. This is actually something like a corridor, people told me, or “a small sitting room by the genkan,” or the genkan itself. What’s more, they took care to preface these remarks with “in the houses of Norway…” That the zenbō is something like a corridor is true in all the countries of the West. Every country, more or less, has a word corresponding to zenbō, and I have used it with this meaning for some twenty or thirty years. To translate “door to the zenbō” as “door to the genkan,” as I was urged, would be rather odd. Genkan, they say, originally referred to the gate of a zen temple. In a personal home, it is the front entrance. There may be a door in the genkan, but surely not a door to the genkan. And as for “a small sitting room by the genkan,” such phrasing is sheer self-gratification.

Amedama and macaroons

The sweets that Nora eats I translated makuron マクロン. Write rather amedama 飴玉, I was told. Advice like this simply boggles the mind. Tins of almond macaroons have been shipped here in great number so that you may buy them at Aokido whenever you please. Reflect, if you will, on the difference in situation between a woman of the West eating a macaroon and a child of Japan eating an amedama. I recall one scene in a novel by someone-or-other wherein two female university students in Paris’s Latin Quarter munch on macaroons as they trade stories of heartbreak. To switch those macaroons for amedama, of all things — well, it would certainly be comical. The gist of such teachings is that item should appear in translation as appropriately chosen items unique to Japan, but as for myself, I strive to avoid things unique to Japan, the better to produce an extraordinary effect. Furthermore, we only consider here cases where there is an appropriate corresponding item. When uniquely Japanese and inappropriate items appear, the results are quite unbearable.

These past few days have been uncommonly hot. I have been unable to write anything worthwhile. Besieged nevertheless with demands to write, to write, I dashed off this trifle. Please be assured that no offense is intended.

The thing about translating haiku into English is that almost none of the original haiku form survives the journey unscathed. Seventeen Japanese morae usually break down to half as many English syllables. Most editors prefer line breaks to authentic one-long-line renditions. And kireji like ya and kana have no obvious English equivalent at all.

This is awkward. Kireji are old and worn, with no particular meanings of their own, but as the links above explain they really tie the ku together. To ignore them entirely will not stand.¹ But what to do with them instead?

There have been many approaches. Punctuation is popular: em dashes for mid-haiku kireji, exclamation marks for haiku-final ones, and so on. Flat denial is another option: some argue that there is no way to simulate the effect in English and no need either. Some take the middle ground, believing that line breaks/phrasing/etc. will do the job without any special attention required.

In his Shiki collection Peonies Kana, though, Harold J. Isaacson showcases a unique solution, which you may already have guessed from the title: wave the kireji through exactly as they are. Here are two typical examples of Isaacson’s work, with originals added by me for comparison:

The caged insects
all start to cry,
Fine rain kana

[籠の虫皆啼きたつる小雨哉 = kago no mushi/ mina nakitatsuru/ kosame kana]

The coolness ya
Wind-bejumbled
rope curtain.

[涼しさや風にさばける繩簾 = suzushisa ya/ kaze ni sabakeru/ nawasudare]

The book’s blurb explains that Isaacson felt that haiku had, in previous translations, been

prettified […] losing much of the power of the original. To try to rectify this he has worked long in the mountains of Shikoku to present the work of Shiki, the last great haiku master […] in its thorniness and immensity as well as its beauty; and he has transferred into English the haiku particles, left out by previous translators.

“Left out” is a provocative way to put it. I am sure that the previous (and subsequent) translators here slandered would prefer “translated.” But Isaacson makes his position quite clear in his introduction:

As it is impossible to accurately understand a haiku unless one knows whether a particle was used in it or not, and if used, which particle and where placed, it will be seen that this is the first time that Englished haiku have ever been set before the Western reader.

Of course Isaacson also recognizes the need to provide an explanation of these “haiku particles,” and does:

They are three in number, “ya,” “kana,” and “keri.” They were originally Japanese grammatical components, but are used n a special way in the haiku […] In brief they have not exactly any meaning, or rather they have the meaning that lies in themselves as sounds, and in that way are as meaningful when set in the English translation as they are in the Japanese.

Setting aside the issue of number, which is irresolvable, these claims about “meaning” are dubious at best. Ya, kana, and keri cannot be “as meaningful” in English as they are in Japanese, because they are not English.

A Japanese reader may not know the long and storied history of kana and keri, but at the very least they are known to be Japanese words often found in haiku. They are not jarring to a Japanese reader. An Anglophone reader, on the other hand, cannot but be jarred upon encountering these words. They aren’t even in the italics that signal “foreign word coming through” in modern English orthography. And knowing Japanese only aggravates the situation: the spark of recognition impedes acceptance of Isaacson’s innovations as new loanwords. (Archaic English interjections — “Lo!” “Alas!” “O!” — would arguably have gotten Isaacson much closer to the effect he claims to be seeking.)

Transliterated kireji are only a symptom of a deeper idiosyncracy in Isaacson’s technique. Consider these two examples, original asterisks included:

From the water* dropper
water is poured out to
the fukujusō*.

[入の水をやりけり福壽艸]

Year’s* Day ya
All the remembered
crests*.

[元朝や皆見覺えの紋處]

To readers who don’t know the Japanese word fukujusō or at least enough Japanese to guess that -sō ending means that it’s some sort of plant, the first haiku turns entirely opaque at the most frustrating possible moment. (And shouldn’t a “keri” be in there somewhere too?)

The second one isn’t quite as obscure, but it does require that the reader be familiar enough with Japanese culture to realize that “Year’s Day” and “crests” must refer to the old tradition (now almost entirely replaced by nengajō) of paying New Year’s Day visits in formal crested kimono.

As the asterisks show, Isaacson does provide endnotes for “Year’s Day”, “crests,” and “fukujusō,” and these endnotes explain all. But for the casual reader the damage has already been done. This style of translating is almost passive-aggressive in its demands on the reader. Shiki is serious business, it says. If you want to read him, there will be homework. There is some truth in this, but it is also possible to lose sight of the forest here. In Isaacson’s own analysis, Shiki’s is a subtle œuvre, one heavily reliant on allusion. Strapping it into a hulking exoskeleton covered in blinking lights might be the only way to get it through the alien territory of English, but the effect on the reader will obviously not be the same. Isaacson’s attempts to preserve Shiki’s elegance and wit as perfectly as possible have made a Dalek of him instead.

Perversely, the ideal target audience for Peonies Kana is exactly those readers who do not need it: those who can read Shiki in the original, and appreciate Isaacson’s versions as covers produced under Oulipoic constraints. As an introduction to or universalization of Shiki, Isaacson’s book fails — but as an expression of what Shiki’s work meant to Isaacson personally, it is a glorious success. The sketches of transcendence in Isaacson’s commentary (“‘ya’ has a hard force like a concentrated bolt of out-going power, and ‘kana’ has a soft force, diffusing and thus pervading”), the attribution on the cover of the haiku within to “the Upasaka Shiki”; and the inclusion in the book of Isaacson’s translation of the Noh play Tōgan koji³ all suggest that this was the real goal of the work anyway.

Today, Isaacson probably would have just put his work online, awaiting those who had proved their worthiness by digging deeply enough in the Google results for “shiki translation” to find it. We are fortunate that he managed to find a publisher to back his idiosyncrasies back in those days before the web had lengthened literature’s tail.

NOTES

¹ By “haiku” throughout this post I mean “haikoid works from both before and after the word haiku was invented” in accordance with standard English usage.

² On the other hand, one should never forget the typically farcical argument in the Kyorai shō (去来抄) between Bashō’s disciples over the master’s use of nite to end Karasaki no/ matsu wa hana yori/ oboro nite:

Some troll: Ending with nite sucks.
Kikaku: Nite is the same as kana. That’s why when the first verse in a chain ends with kana, the third shouldn’t end with nite. But using kana here would have sounded rushed, so it’s nite instead.
Romaru: I agree with Kikaku. Also, this is the third verse in a chain. Why are people thinking it’s the first?
Kyorai: This is a spontaneous expression of feeling, so it can only be the first verse in a chain. If it was the third in a chain, it would lose points for not being thoughtful enough.
Bashō: You guys are all overthinking this. I just thought it was cool that the pines were hazier than the flowers.

³ “Partly to throw more light on the character of the term Koji [the source of Isaacson’s ‘Upasaka’], but also because it makes clearer whatever Shiki was trying to do.”

Even the best translators are guilty of occasional mistakes, but few have been called out quite so publicly as Dimitry Kovalenin was at the workshop “The Joy of Murakami’s Works: From the Perspective of Translation” (「翻訳の現場から見る村上ワールドの魅力」), which took place in March 2006 as a part of a symposium entitled A Wild Haruki Chase: How the World is Reading and Translating Haruki Murakami 『世界は村上春樹をどう読むか』. The symposium — part of the motivation for which may have been to boost Murakami’s Nobel chances, as discussed previously — included workshops and speeches involving the collaborative efforts of over a dozen different Murakami translators from Western and Central Europe, North and South America, and of course, all over Asia. Kovalenin was there in his capacity as Murakami’s first Russian translator.

In June 2006, Bungakukai 『文学界』published two symposium workshop transcripts. The workshop in question centered around two stories from Yoru no kumozaru 『夜のくもざる』 (“Night of the Spider Monkey”), a collection of 2-to-3-page super-short stories (超短編小説). The title story is about a writer who is interrupted by a spider monkey that repeats everything he says. The story is a challenge to translate; Murakami makes full and creative use of all the Japanese scripts: the monkey imitates the writer “in katakana” but then is foiled when the writer switches back to speaking “in hiragana.”

During the workshop, Kovalenin mentioned how pleased he was with his own creative translation of the term kumozaru, “spider monkey”:

Dimitry Kovalenin: […] When I was translating “Yoru no kumozaru,” I was staying at a friend’s house, and I thought up a pretty clever translation with the family’s twelve-year-old kid. Basically, I decided just to leave it up to him (laughs). I asked the kid, “What kind of animal do you get when you combine a spider and a monkey?” So I had him write up a list of different types of spiders and monkeys and give me what he thought was the funniest combination. The result we thought best was obezyana (обезьяна) for the monkey and tarantul (тарантул) for the spider. Put them together and you get obezyantul (обезьянтул). The kid laughed whenever I said it, so I thought that was probably okay (laughs). (154)

The Japanese moderators Shibata Motoyuki and Numano Mitsuyoshi, both University of Tokyo professors, smoothly transitioned to the topic of wordplay in translation, but Czech translator Tomas Jurkovic returned to the issue soon after, and Malaysian translator Ye Hui was equipped with photographic evidence:

Tomas Jurkovic: […] I wanted to ask Mr. Kovalenin something. You chose to create an entirely different name despite the fact that spider monkeys actually exist and have a Russian name — why is that?

Kovalenin: What? Spider monkeys really exist? I thought it was imaginary, like the Sheep Man.

Ye Hui: No, they exist. I can show you proof. (Opens a magazine with a picture of a spider monkey.)

Numano Mitsuyoshi: If you look in Kōjien, this is what it says. “Mammals of the capuchin group. There are several species. Inhabit forests from Central America to northern South America.” Mr. Jurkovic has an important point here; do you use the official name of the actual animal, or do you use an invented word to bring out the humorous tone of it?

Kovalenin: How many people are there here in the audience today who knew that spider monkeys actually existed? Hardly any at all, right? I think Murakami used the word with that in mind.

Shibata Motoyuki: The Japanese version of Yoru no kumozaru has a drawing of a spider monkey in it by Anzai Mizumaru. It looks quite similar to the picture that Ms. Ye just showed us (laughs). (155-156)

Kovelenin is undoubtedly an impressive translator. He put a translation of Wild Sheep Chase online in 1996 before getting the money to publish it in 1998. During that two-year period it developed a notable readership. You can read a short article about his experience translating Murakami here. As they say in Japan, even monkeys fall from trees: Murakami’s long history of using the fantastic in his fiction, especially when it comes to animals, may invite a creative reading of kumozaru, but unfortunately they are real animals.

Murakami, on the other hand, knows how to take advantage of mistranslation. He made use of the legendary mistranslation of the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).” The album Rubber Soul was released in Japan in 1966 and translated the second track as “Noruuei no mori” (ノルウェイの森) — the translator believing that the “wood” meant “forest” opposed to “lumber.” (According to Wikipedia, “‘Norwegian Wood’ refers to the cheap pinewood that often finished the interiors of working class British flats.) Japanese Wikipedia desperately makes the case that either interpretation of “wood” is possible (“This bird has flown…from the forest.”) but ends by noting that the original translator admitted he/she misunderstood the meaning. Murakami himself knew it was mistaken, but utilized the original translation as a metaphor for a dark, encapsulated psychological cavity — one of his pet images.

In the supplementary commentary to the Norwegian Wood volume of his Complete Works 1979–1989, he admitted to knowing about the possibility of another translation but also emphasized that he preferred the mistranslation, calling it true to the original song:

Even reading the original lyrics, I think that the words NORWEGIAN WOOD themselves have tendency to sort of expand naturally. They’re quiet and melancholy and even feel a little high. Of course I know there are several interpretations, but when you change it into Japanese, I feel like『ノルウェイの森』 is closest to the flavor of the original language. I once heard from a Norwegian that in Norwegian, the words “Norwegian Forest” mean something along the lines of that mood. I wonder if Lennon and McCartney knew that? (XII)

Odds are they didn’t, but poetic license acquits this extrapolation of a classic mistranslation.

Thanks to Languagehat for help with the Russian in this piece.

In Mr. Kawabata’s works, delicacy joins with resilience, elegance with an awareness of the depths of human nature … they are modern yet directly inspired by the solitary philosophy of the monks of medieval Japan. … For many writers in modern Japan, the claims of tradition and the desire to establish a new literature have proved well-nigh irreconcilable. Mr. Kawabata, however, with his poet’s intuition, has gone beyond this contradiction and achieved a synthesis. …I feel honored to recommend him, who more than any other Japanese writer, is truly qualified for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mishima Yukio wrote these words to the Swedish Academy in 1961, officially nominating him for the prize. It was seven more years before Kawataba would win, with the committee citing his “narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind”:

True, of his production only three novels and a few short stories have so far been translated into different languages, evidently because translation in this case offers especially great difficulties and is apt to be far too coarse a filter, in which many finer shades of meaning in his richly expressive language must be lost. But the translated works do give us a sufficiently representative picture of his personality.

Kawabata’s banquet speech also addresses the issue of translation:

In view of the complexities presented by differences in language, and in view of the fact that my works, no doubt more than those of others, have had to be perused in translation, I must indicate my deep and undying gratitude and respect for the resolve shown by Your Excellencies of the Academy. This first award to an Oriental in fifty-five years has I believe made a deep impression upon Japan, and perhaps upon the other countries of Asia as well, and upon all countries whose languages are little known internationally.

Speaking to the Japanese media, he was even blunter:

If I could have been read by the judges in Japanese that would have been best, but … the fact is that I am heavily indebted to translation. (日本文で審査してもらえれば一番ありがたいわけですけども…翻訳のおかげを非常に被っているわけですね)

Kawabata’s love/hate — or, more accurately, want/distrust — attitude towards translation was expressed in many ways. He was, by all reports, very hands-on during the translation process, which is not to say helpful, necessarily. Edward G. Seidensticker’s Tokyo Central: A Memoir contains this anecdote about the translation of Snow Country:

“Do you not, my esteemed master, find this a rather impenetrable passage?” [I would ask Kawabata]. He would dutifully scrutinize the passage, and answer: “Yes.” Nothing more.

Similar themes are visible in Kawabata’s correspondence with Mishima Yukio, published in 1997 as Kawabata Yasunari/Mishima Yukio: Ōfuku Shokan (『川端康成・三島由紀夫往復書簡』). As early as 1951, Kawabata asked Mishima for the name of “that American translating Confessions of a Mask,” because he wanted his advice as “a Japan-based foreigner who reads Japanese literature” on the question of which short stories to send to the US college magazines that Wallace Stegner had put him in touch with.
Continued »