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.

Enryo (遠慮) is one of the most quintessential Japanese concepts. Japanese dictionary Kōjien provides the definition “restraining speech/actions towards people” (「人に対して言語・行動を控え目にすること」). Enryo is central to the image of Japan as a passive society, where people work to avoid conflict through self-restraint. Enryo means not using your mobile phone on the train, not throwing out all of your trash in one big bag, and recently, not lighting up that cigarette wherever you want.

In everyday language, enryo is often used to avoid an unpleasant linguistic phenomenon — the dreaded negative form. Japanese verbs come in four basic varieties: present/future, past, present/future negative, and past negative. Here’s a quick example how this works with the verb taberu, “eat”:

Present/future	taberu
Past	tabeta
Present/future negative	tabenai
Past negative	tabenakatta

Those bolded endings on the negative verbs are the offenders: nai, nakatta, and their more polite distal cousins masen and masen deshita. Shiver when you hear them, for they mean no. Not only are they negative in meaning, they also tend to have negative connotations, especially when combined with directness and applied to a topic brought up by the other speaker.

But then, how do the Japanese talk about avoiding things? Are they constantly accepting invitations to boring events? (“Yes, I’ll go see a Noh play with you, darling.”) Eating things they don’t want to eat? (“Yes, raw horse sounds lovely.”) And drinking things they don’t want to drink? (“There is a venomous snake in that distilled liquor? Fantastic.”)

No, in fact, they have very little difficulty in refusing to do these things, and it’s all thanks to enryo. Through enryo, they are restraining themselves from doing something else (i.e. not doing it). Enryo shimasu is the ultimate refusal: it allows the speaker to admire the offer as a tempting one while regretfully declining it for the sake of some implicit greater good, all without any negativity whatsoever. For this reason, it also works great as sarcasm: “Will you sing ‘Country Roads’ for us at karaoke?” Enryo shimasu.

Similarly, go-enryo kudasai (“Please enryo”) is the polite way to keep people in line. Rather than telling them not to do something, which would involve mucking around with nai (e.g. Tabako wo suwanaide kudasai, “Please don’t smoke”), you can appeal to their higher nature and ask them to proactively refrain from it (e.g. Kitsuen wa goenryo kudasai, “Please refrain from smoking”).

This concept is not totally foreign to the English language. Rather than saying “I can’t,” people (often very annoying people in service positions) use “I am unable to,” and “please refrain from” is a useful alternative to the negative imperative. The ultimate example comes from Pirates of the Caribbean, where Captain Barbossa denies Elizabeth Swann’s request for parlay with “I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request.” Very much like enryo shimasu: “IT MEANS NO!”

Genki is the first Japanese word most learn upon arriving in the country. It’s fun, it’s useful, it’s easy to pronounce. It means “energy, pep, health,” and you can usually find someone on hand to explain that the kanji 元気 mean “original spirit” or similarly, are indicative of a positive worldview in which the default state for a human is to be in good health and high vigor.

This may be what genki means today, but the history of the word is far more complex. A 1988 paper by Ran Chikumin (栾竹民), modestly entitled “Some thoughts on three spellings of genki” (「減氣・験氣・元氣」小考), goes back thousands of years to lay out the facts for us:

• The term 元気 was used in ancient China, but not to mean “health” or “vitality”. Instead it referred to a ubiquitous, primal energy that made up all things: “元氣者、天地之始、万物之祖” (“Genki is the beginning of heaven and earth and the ancestor of the myriad things”).
• In Japan, the word 減気 (also pronounced genki) was invented by Heian scholars writing in Chinese to describe a reduction (減) in the energy (気) of an illness. 減気, which bore no relation to the much less common 元気 despite the coincidental homophony, soon spread from straight kanbun to other forms of writing. And so, for example, you find Dōgen in the 13th century saying things like 「種々ニ療治セシニ依テ少キ減氣アリシカレドモ」 (“Following a range of treatments, there was some remission in his illness, but…”). In other words, unlike ancient 元気, classical 減気 was very close to the genki of today.

• Sometime in the Muromachi period, a trend began towards writing genki with the characters 験気. These had the same pronunciation but had previously been used for a different genki meaning a positive effect observed after ritual or prayer.
• By the Edo period, 験気 had more or less taken over from 減気 as the preferred spelling for genki as in “get well”. It had also obtained an extra, related meaning: “be well”, without any implied recovery from an unwell state.

• Later in the Edo period, the spelling changed to 元気, bringing the modern meaning and spelling together for the first time. Ran suggests that this may have been for a combination of reasons: the shift in meaning away from the subsiding of an illness and towards health in general, influence from dictionaries and other authoritative texts (including medical texts), and most intriguingly, collateral damage from the ongoing Neo-Confucian debate over whether ki (気, energy) and ri (理, principle) were of equal importance (理気二元論), or whether ri was secondary to the primal ki (気一元論).

In other words, Ran argues, modern genki is a chimera, a relatively recent combination of a straightforward word that describes illness receding and a philosophical concept with millennia of metaphysical baggage. To the extent that it has a deep philosophical meaning, it acquired it by phonetic accident.

Never forget: a kanji is a lie.