Having read it, I am simultaneously in ecstasy and despair.

Despair, because Eco has spelled out exactly what I have been trying to codify and explain for so long... While I can only praise what he has written, it is a bit of a shock to realize that he has already done what I had hope someday to do.

Still, he is discussing translation in general, while I am primarily interested in translation specifically from Japanese into English. If I stick to what I know perhaps I can use his expertise to help me get my own points across more clearly.

Before I can even begin to discuss specific examples, or the nuts and bolts of translation, however, it makes sense to define just what the point of it all is. The excellent Transubstantiation blog offers thoughts on what translation is, presenting the definition originally penned by John Dryden, poet and translator, who divided translation into three categories:

• metaphrase, where an author/translator translates word for word,
• paraphrase, where an author/translator translates sense for sense, and
• imitation, where an author/translator abandons the original text.

Given that Kurodahan Press's goal is to make Japanese and other literature accessible to the English-speaking world, it's pretty clear that the right flavor for us is paraphrase.

Eco says "...the aim of a translation, more than producing any literal 'equivalence', is to create the same effect in the mind of the reader (obviously according to the translator's interpretation) as the original text wanted to create. Instead of speaking of equivalence of meaning, we can speak of functional equivalence: a good translation must generate the same effect aimed at by the original."

He has clarified, in my mind, the goal of literary translation, but a closer look reveals a host of details. And, as Gustave Flaubert once said, that's where God hides. Or, if you're a realist, you could translate it as "the Devil is in the details."

I see three key areas for mischief here, namely (1) "create the same effect in the mind of the reader", (2) "according to the translator's interpretation," and (3) "the same effect aimed at by the original."

The way I see it, the same flaw underlies all three of these points. They certainly hold true in the theoretical and ideal sense, I agree, but in a practical sense they fail because they are based on the assumption that there is a single uniform type of person involved for the author, the translator and the reader. In fact we know that this isn't true... An author can assign a unique meaning to a word, or use it in several different and equally unique ways in a single work, making it effectively impossible to comprehend the intended effect, let alone replicate it. A translator can completely misinterpret what the author wanted to say. And every reader is different, and will color any piece of text with the hues of his own experience and values.

Next time I hope to take a closer look at, specifically, the Japanese words for aunt oba (叔母 or 伯母), and uncle oji (叔父 or 伯父). So why are there two different ways of writing each?

See you next time.

Consider for a minute what awful means. And then ask yourself what wonderful means. Why the difference?

The Collins English Dictionary defines "awe" (the noun) as "...the feeling of respect and amazement that you have when you are faced with something wonderful and often rather frightening." Look at this quote from Mark Taylor's article about the 9-11 disaster, "Awe and Anxiety," though:

"the reality confronting us is not only visual but, more importantly, visceral. There is only one word I know to describe the response to what we saw: awe. A strange religious atmosphere pervades Ground Zero. There has been much talk about the role of religion in this conflict but very little understanding of what religion--either our own or the religions of others--involves. There are, of course, many gods and many faces of gods believed to be one. While religion often gives people a sense of meaning and purpose in times of personal and social crisis, its symbols, stories and rituals also carry people to the edge of life where unmasterable power always threatens to erupt. Religion is associated as much with terror and anxiety as with love and peace. For a few brief moments on September 11th, the veneer of security was torn to reveal a primordial vulnerability that neither defense departments nor advanced technologies can overcome. The encounter with this awesome power is a religious experience that leaves nothing unchanged."

This quote deals with a very modern situation – terrorism – but reveals quite nicely what "awe" really is. It is in a sense religious, but actually quite a bit more fundamental than that: it represents something outside our understanding, something big on a "visceral" level and incomprehensible, and for that reason frightening.

Wonder, on the other hand, is something outside our understanding or at least outside daily life, but not frightening. Remember the "Seven Wonders of the World"? Again, according to Collins English, "Wonder is a feeling of great surprise and pleasure that you have, for example when you see something that is very beautiful, or when something happens that you thought was impossible."

By now you're probably wondering what all this has to do with translation. Well, now that I've talked a bit about what these words used to mean, go back to my original point: the difference between awful and wonderful. They are generally used with quite different meanings in modern English, but fundamentally they are quite similar. They both refer to experiences outside our understanding, experiences that offer a glimpse of otherness beyond daily life.

The ability to capture awe or wonder in writing can make an author a master of the art. Expressing the wonder of a view or an event in a way that the reader can follow is the key to writing great literature. Last year I was lucky enough to watch the film Perfume, and was enormously impressed with how the whole world of scent, as a sense above and beyond what "normal" people use, was presented so that the viewer can really understand it. I haven't read the book it was based on, by Patrick Suskind, but I look forward to it when I get a chance. I suspect it will deliver the same sense of wonder.

No doubt this is why I like Ray Bradbury so much. PS Publishing in the UK has been putting out exquisitely-produced editions of some of his earliest and best works, like Dandelion Wine, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the same company also publishes Zoran Živković! No doubt the publisher, Pete Crowther, feels the same way I do about glimpsing "otherness" through cracks in reality.

And finally, to bring it all into focus by relating it to translation: The Vikings were awed by Thor chucking lightning bolts around, but we would probably find the image a bit amusing, rather than frightening. Many visitors to cathedrals feel awe at their surroundings, reinforced by the silence of the vaulting roof. Shrines deliver a quite different sense of awe, to me less of organized religion and more of saintly individuals. The point is, they are all different, and they are all so intimately related to our cultural backgrounds, and our experiences and beliefs as individuals.

Taking something as seemingly simple as a visit to the family grave on Obon, for example, could be astonishingly difficult to translate well, because what just about every Japanese learns in grade school and never has to explain – the awe inherent in a family grave and the Buddhist temple where it is located – are not mentioned in the text at all.

"...Meiji writers ... often faced the need for a word that did not yet exist, or was not yet in wide usage, in Japanese. Particularly in the case of Christian terminology, Anesaki chooses a Buddhist term that is a close approximation of the Christian meaning when there is not a "proper" (i.e., widely recognized by the readership) term available. For example, when referring to churches he uses the Japanese term tera (寺), which today is usually translated as "temple." The term kaidō (会堂 'church building'), popularly used now, never appears. ...I do not interpret this as an attempt on Anesaki's part to impose Buddhist ideas on Christian objects. Rather, I think he was simply creating the least awkward text possible given the linguistic limitations of the time... Thus, tera is "church," (not "temple"), yakusō is "sacristan" (not "attending monk"), and Seibo is the "Virgin Mary" or "the Holy Virgin" (not "Holy Mother").

The reasoning of the translator is solid, and, in my opinion, she has made the right choice. I am a believer that anything that can be expressed in one language can be expressed in any other language, but I have to recognize that it may be a lot more difficult. If you show a man in a kimono to someone who has never seen one before, the observer may well describe it as a bathrobe, or almost certainly a robe of some kind. Now go one step further... suppose you show a man using chopsticks to an observer who has never seen anyone who didn't eat with his fingers. It suddenly gets a lot harder to describe.

This does present a real problem for the translator, though. Anesaki, writing in the early 1900s, made the decision to use words that his readership could understand immediately, so that he could concentrate on the content rather than the presentation. In Japan at that time, shortly after the Meiji Restoration, Christianity was certainly present, but hardly well-known. By using the Japanese words for temple he made it instantly clear to the reader that this was some sort of organized religious facility, and with that out of the way could move on to more important things.

In Japan, though, the Buddhist temple is concerned with death, and what happens after death. Shinto usually deals with more auspicious occassions, such as birth and marriage. Christian churches, of course, are involved with every aspect of life, and death. As a result, the feelings held by a European toward churches are quite different than the feelings most Japanese have about temples.
And by using the word for temple in his writing, Anesaki unquestionably colored his writing, giving Japanese readers a word that came ready-made with all sorts of native references.

Or look at it from the other side, for a moment. I was reading Tom Clancy's The Teeth of the Tiger last week (sorry; I generally try not to talk about my vices in public...), and ran across a few gems:

• the Klu Klux Klan
• Some people at Langley
• as leaky as RMS Titanic
• a box of Cheerios
• security clearance up to TS

The list is endless, of course. I think the translator can safely assume that the reader is going to know what the KKK is, and the Titanic. TS can be handled easily enough because it won't be left in Roman letters anyway. But what about Langley? Sure, the CIA is famous worldwide, but is Langley? Does it demand a footnote? Or maybe change it to something like "Some people at the CIA" and leave out the Langley part, which is not at all important to the passage?

And what about those darn Cheerios... OK, boxes of cereal are getting pretty well known worldwide, even if they're not on the menu. Kids scarf down bowls of cereal in E.T., meaning that most of the world's population has probably seen it already (well, a bit of an exaggeration there, but anyway...). But in addition to being packed full of vitamins and nutrition, Cheerios are also packed full of decades of TV commercials rich in peripiheral information. Sure, we don't actually remember the majority of those ads (thank goodness!), but they're with us, I'm sure. Like Tony the Tiger, just eat a bowl and you're ready to take on the world. And that impression, probably unnoticed by most readers, is an important part of the atmosphere for a book about tough guys taking on baddies.

So how to you say all that in one word when you're talking to a Japanese reader who has never seen a TV commercial for Cheerios, and quite possibly never even had breakfast cereal?
I suspect the answer is, you don't. You mention a bowl of cereal, or even a box of Cheerios, and let it go. It is an accurate translation, sure, but you're just let some some of the air out of the tires.

People reading Tom Clancy aren't reading for the footnotes; they read for the action. So yes, it probably makes sense to just drop it and move on to more important things in the plot sequence. And in this day and age, where katakana accounts for a goodly part of everything in print in Japanese, it makes more sense to leave it as an unexplained Americanism rather than, as Anesaki might have done, to change it to a bowl of rice.

As I've quoted before, Grania Davis said in her afterword to Speculative Japan that "...the very best Japanese SF&F tends to be mood-driven instead of action-driven." Sure, action demands strong verbs in English, but most people learn that in their first creative writing course. "He ate the cake" is quite a bit different from "He wolfed the cake down." Mood, on the other hand, is influenced by cultural perceptions, word choice, sentence structure, story setting and no doubt lots of other things I haven't thought of.

Take the moon, for example. Why the moon? Well, I happened to see a very nice, deep orange full moon recently; what I would call it a harvest moon. It was a bit after the equinox, but that's OK. Not surprisingly, the Japanese also have a harvest moon (収穫月, minori-tsuki). But when an American looks at the full moon around this time of year the Man in the Moon looks back; a Japanese, on the other hand, may see a Rabbit in the Moon. And American children, of course, have Halloween to look forward to, while Japanese may prefer to think of sitting in the moonlight and eating omochi cakes.

If your story happens to mention October moonlight, then, an American reader might immediately have an image of hordes of bizarrely-dressed children running screaming from house to house claiming their prizes, while the Japanese author actually meant to raise the image of a calm, peaceful evening, sitting quietly and enjoying a sip of green tea while the children watch sparklers fizzle down to darkness. That's a pretty big difference in atmosphere for the reader.

Evening and night have their own meanings, of course, and I think most cultures fear the darkness to some extent (after all, if you can't see what's hiding in it, there's a certain degree of danger), and have native expressions relating dawn-day-dusk-night to the human cycle of birth-life-aging-death. That sort of usage could probably be translated without much difficulty. But the Japanese don't have a tradition of lycanthropy under the full moon, so cute English usages like "howling at the moon" or "he's a real wolf at night" when talking about lusty heroes may not work very well in Japanese.

What would an English-speaking reader make of a passage describing a character as having emerged from a peach, or a bamboo shoot, though? Probably not much, but a Japanese would get the allusion immediately. The folktale hero Momotarō emerged from a peach, later growing into a champion of the poor and performing great deeds, while Princess Kaguya was discovered in a shoot of bamboo by a poor woodcutter, later catching the eye of the emperor himself.

The problem is how to work these references into the translation without destroying the narrative flow, or worse, what the author wanted to say. There aren't too many options here. Basically, you have a choice of dropping the reference entirely (whch might destroy the content), leaving the reference but skipping an explanation (which is certainly an accurate translation but the reader might never get the point), adding a simple in-line explanation (often the best solution, if you can find a quickly-digestible way to say it that looks like part of the original story), adding a more detailed explanation, as an aside or footnote (certainly gets the message across, but works best in scholarly texts, not fiction where flow is crucial), or adding a glossary later (also effective in scholarly work, but people rarely look at a glossary for fiction until after reading the story). The best solution will depend on the specific issue, and how good the translator is at explaining the cultural background in question seamlessly. Often, then simply is no good solution, and the translator must settle for the least offensive.

This situation, like so many of the other glyphs I've written here, is not unique to the Japanese-English language pair, or course, but the degree of difference between Japanese and Western culture and worldview is quite a bit larger than differences between, say, cultures with a common English language or Roman heritage. There are a number of blogs about the same thing, such as this truly excellent hands-on study by Daniel Hahn, an award-winning translator who works between Portuguese and English.

See you next week. I'm off to see the penguins!

I've always had a thing for Katō Naoyuki, and really wanted to ask him to handle it. Fortunately, he has a website, and that made it pretty easy to get in contact with him... Turned out we knew a number of people in common, and in fact I'd already worked with him, indirectly, about 25 years ago. A few emails later we had a deal, and a copy of the book was winging its way to him to read. (He returned the book months later, and I was fascinated to discover that he had read through it, inserting Post-Its on pages with highly visual scenes... it had never occured to me, but he had clearly read through it to capture not only the story, but the imagery of the author!)

It wasn't as clear-cut when it came to picking a cover artist for kaiki, though. We talked about having a cover set made especially for the book, like we did for our Lairs of the Hidden Gods series, and spent several weeks scanning through websites and checking likely cover artists on horror and weird story books at local bookstores. I really didn't see too much that thrilled me; most of it was either black on black or manga, but there were a few very nice ones. A painting by Uemura Shōen (上村松園) was perhaps the best of all.

It was used on the cover of on a book of weird stories on a theme of hair... and the cover suggested long, black hair. The collection was edited by Higashi Masao, who is also putting together our kaiki collection.

I spent a few days Googling and visiting local bookstores and libraries. His work is easy to find, but unfortunately I couldn't find three pieces that were suitably weird, or at least suitable for our anthology. A lot of very beautiful stuff, though, and I certainly don't regret the time spent looking.

While at Junkudō, though, I also looked through their bookshelf full of art books in the genre, and found a few more exciting artists. I'd run across many of them before, but never really sat down and looked at a whole book of pictures at once. Figuring I could justify the expenditure by claiming we might use them again in the future, I snapped up a few books featuring some really great artists:

• Itō Hikozō (伊藤彦造), a truly outstanding pen-and-ink illustrator. Most of his stuff is black-and-white and may never end up on one of our covers, but I sure enjoy looking at them. You can find samples here and there online.
• Kawanabe Kyōsai (河鍋暁斎), another outstanding artist who lived through the tumult of the Meiji Restoration. Incredible color and imagination. I was lucky enough to find an art book just packed full of his color work.
• Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳), a famous woodblock print artist who died just before the Meiji Restoration. I'm sure a number of his works will be known to many readers in the US and Europe already.
• And several collections of prints by multiple artists on weird themes.

I looked through all this material, passed it around to other people, and came up with a few ideas. One of the most promising was this delightful piece by Kawanabe Kyōsai, a superlative work of a beauty and her dancing skeletal friends. Unfortunately, a fair amount of detective work failed to find other pieces to make a set of three. Wouldn't mind having it over my fireplace, though. If I had a fireplace...　The same artist also had this delightful cat piece, but it is in landscape mode and just won't work on a bookcover, unfortunately.

This meant that I'd used up most of my options. While debating whether I should go back to the bookstore or just leap off a bridge somewhere, I happened to remember a book I had gotten as a gift years ago, featuring all sorts of bizarre Japanese woodblock prints. I dragged it out and leafed through, and was delighted to discover Yoshitoshi Tsukioka (月岡芳年). Not only were they great prints, I recognized the name because my father had collected over half of his famous One Hundred Aspects of the Moon series.

The prints that interested me were from his New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts series of prints. They are all available online here.

Now, Yoshitoshi himself died in 1892, so his works are all public domain, but since I don't own any I'd have to locate someone who had high-resolution photographs, and could sell me rights to use them. I called the (Japanese) publisher of the book I had, explained that I wanted to contact the photographer, and was delighted when they gave me his phone and fax. A detailed explanation of what we wanted went out shortly.

After giving them a few days to read it, I phoned. His wife answered, explaining that he was in his nineties and hard of hearing, but they did indeed have the photos. She said they would cost about US$800 apiece for usage, that she would loan me color prints (not negatives or files), and that I would have to come pick them up and return them in person. She didn't trust parcel delivery, and added that if I should happen to lose one it would cost me US$5000.
Well, that's a fair chunk of change, and when you add in airfare for two round trips to Tokyo it was pretty hard to accept. Especially for a color print.

But he wasn't the only photographer in print. I noticed that several books on Yoshitoshi had been written by John Stevenson, but couldn't locate the man himself. I did discover that he had served as curator for exhibitions of Yoshitoshi's prints in a few places, and sent e-mail off to an art museum, asking them to forward my letter to John. I had a response from the man himself within 24 hours.

Even, better, I had permission to use the art on my covers within a few days after that, along with rough scans. High-res scans are coming later. Everything went amazing smoothly once I decided to go with Yoshitoshi!

Now that that's all settled (well, we still have to do the detail design on the covers, and figure out what to say where, but that's all minor stuff...), I can get back to work on finding a cover for Crystal Silence! ]]> tag:www.kurodahan.com,2008:/mt/e//3.458 2008-10-19T14:55:49Z 2008-10-18T06:09:23Z

I think the first time I encountered this was when the first Perry Rhodan novels came out in English, decades ago. I remember that one of key characters in the early books in the series was an elderly scientist named Khrest... and read later that in the original German his name was spelled Crest. Is that a reasonable alteration? I'd say it was, because the Crest spelling would strike entirely the wrong chord in American readers (the publisher was Ace Books, which meant they were only interested in the US reader). The translators chose a different spelling that preserved the sound of the original name but neatly eliminated the (highly misleading) suggestion that he had something to do with oral hygiene.

So does that mean it's OK to change names? Apparently, perceptions of whether or not it is appropriate to change a name have changed over the years. In Mark Silver's excellent Purloined Letters, he discusses a translation of Émile Gaboriau's The Lerouge Affair (1866) by Kuroiwa Ruikō (黒岩涙香,1862-1913), saying

In deference to his Japanese audience, Ruikō feels compelled not only to transliterate [proper names] into the Japanese sound system but to assign them ateji, or Chinese characters that approximate their sounds. As he says in his preface, "Things like place names and names of persons, since they differ from those commonly used in our country (wa ga kuni), are especially difficult to remember." Thus, he explains, Commarin, the legitimate son, will be referred to as "Komori." Noel becomes Minoru, Claudine because Oden, Clair become Kuretake...and so forth.

His use of ateji is perfectly reasonable, I think, because that was an accepted way to represent foreign words at the time in Japan. But was he justified in replacing, for example, Commarin with Komori? Commarin could have also been written, for example, Komarin and appropriate ateji selected. The jump from Clair to Kuretake is even more severe.

I would say this is unacceptable in modern translation, that Kuroiwa left the realm of translation and entered into a creative enterprise drawing on work in another language.

In fact, this is exactly what he did: he changed storylines and endings to suit his personal taste, or what he believed the reading public would most enjoy. He is recognized as an excellent writer of the time, and unquestionably did much to bring Western culture into a modernizing Japan, but by our standards I'm afraid he just took too many liberties with his pen.

Unfortunately, the practice continues. Publishing companies are in business to sell books, for the most part, not bring literature into other languages. Their loyalty is to selling, not to translation accuracy. For example, Rebecca Copeland, the translator of Kirino Natsuo's Grotesque, commented in the July 2008 issue of the SWET Newsletter

From the outset the editor was tasked with shortening the book. Minor characters were eliminated and scenes were cut, all in an effort to streamline the novel. I hated to see the deletions, having spent time with the chartacters that were cut. But I also understood that a novel like Grotesque would tax most American readers. The length wasn't the biggest obstacle; rather it was that the work is a "concept novel." It is not plot-driven.

I'm facing this problem myself right now, in my own translation of a short story by Tanaka Kōtarō (田中貢太郎) for our kaiki anthology. The story concerns a strange encounter in pre-Meiji Japan, and during the course of the encounter the main character sees a weird and unsettling face peering out from under a kamado, a Japanese stove generally consisting of a stone enclosure with a place on top to put a pot or teakettle. In fact, this kamado is also in the title of the story, and while it really has little to do with the story flow (it could as easily be a part of the house, for example) I feel it has to be preserved in the translation. But how?

Stove or oven, as the wikipedia article suggests, are simple answers, but to modern readers they suggest big lumps of steel, which is certainly not the right image. The word hearth came to mind, but a hearth is set into the floor, and there is no place for a face to peer out under from. Fireplace? Far too Western, especially for this particular setting. Now I'm thinking of using something like a "log rack" located under a hanging teapot, for example.

I don't have a good answer yet, and welcome suggestions, but it's proving quite difficult to come up with a clean way of explaining what this is without derailing the reader, or adding a boring footnote somewhere...

The book is obviously geared toward language teaching and acquisition, but take a look at some of these quotes:

"We do not learn from word as mere word, that is as sound and noise. Those which are not signs cannot be words. If I hear a word I do not know whether it is a word or not until I know what it means. Once we establish its link with things, we come to know its meaning." – St. Augustine, AD 389

"Once things are known knowledge of words follows. Hearing words does not result in learning. We do not learn words we know; be we can not hope to learn words we do not know unless we have grasped their meaning. This is not achieved by listening to the words, but by getting to know the things signified." – St. Augustine, AD 389

"Even supposing one has a perfect grasp of the theory it is the production of the sounds that counts." – Lockhart and Jones, 1908

"All languages, both learned and mother tongue, be gotten, and gotten only, by imitation. For as ye use, so ye learne to speake; if ye hear not other, ye speak not yourself; and whome ye onlyi heare, of them ye only learne." – Ascham, 1570

There are lots more, not to mention the fascinating text of the book itself, but I think you get the point. All these people, whom the author obviously thought were imporrtant enough to quote in his own book, feel that study is insufficient to master a language. This is a point I cannot stress enough, and have touched on here again and again... even if you master the dictionary and the grammar books, you will still not really grok the language, because you'll miss all the cultural referents.

Like the word "grok," for example... many people reading this blog may have recognized it, but basically I think it is limited to people who read that particular Heinlein in English, or possibly a few Western European languages. I don't think it ever really gained popular usage in the computer industry, for example, as emphasized in that link. If you've read the book then you'll have a good understanding of what the word means; if you haven't, running into an unannounced "grok" on the page could cause quite a problem for the reader.

I am a firm believer in translating into your native language.
I was recently chided about that by a Chinese translator who moved to the States in middle school and has been there since... "since" being like forty years, I think. I admitted that I should have said "native-level" and not "native," but in any case entering a culture in your teens and living in it for a couple decades is probably an excellent way to go native. It's about what I did, now that I think of it.

There are just so many cultural referents that are buried in literature, so difficult to ferret out and equally difficult to express in fluid English. People I met in Japan would sometimes refer to me as "Mr. Ed," and wonder why I winced every time they said it. But if a character in a book winced for the same reason, how would a translator put that into Japanese without either adding a boring footnote or just sounding like he'd missed the point entirely? If you have a suggestion I'd love to hear it...

Some Japanese have asked me how I expect to be able to capture all the Japanese referents in a source text, even assuming I can translate what I understand perfectly. Excellent point, and I agree: I admit that there are probably places I missed what the author meant entirely. With practice and enough egg on my face, though, I have reached the point where I can usually tell when something looks funny. A sentence doesn't seem to jive, a word seems to be missing, a character doesn't respond naturally to what I perceive as the situation... and because some element of the scene doesn't ring true, I can ask a Japanese to check. Once the meaning is clear, the ability to express it accurately in readable English is crucial.

What is important to note here is that sometimes I am wrong and there was no meaning I missed. Sometimes there is an obvious (in retrospect) meaning I totally overlooked. And sometimes a number of Japanese will disagree on the possible meaning(s) of the piece entirely... pointing up, once again, that the interpretation of the reader (and the translator) is crucial and exceedingly difficult to pin down.

Let me close this with another great quote, this one courtesy of Steven Venti:

"A word is not a crystal – transparent and unchanging; it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used." – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

]]> tag:www.kurodahan.com,2008:/mt/e//3.455 2008-09-28T14:00:22Z 2008-10-25T03:14:20Z

Having fallen behind on my reading, I had a chance this weekend to do some catching up... quite a stack to choose from, and instead of picking up one of those books just itching to be read, I happened to...

Kurodahan Press Having fallen behind on my reading, I had a chance this weekend to do some catching up... quite a stack to choose from, and instead of picking up one of those books just itching to be read, I happened to notice my copy of 光の帝国ー常野物語 (Hikari no Teikoku – Tokono Monogatari) by Onda Riku (恩田陸) jumping up and down, demanding to be read for at least the third time. Wimp that I am, I fell for it.

]]> I first read Hikari no Teikoku back in 2003 or 2004, at the recommendation of a friend... and she was quite right, it is a really superb book, worth publishing in English. Before I started she warned me not to read it on the train or in other public places, because I'd probably cry. She was right about that, too, because it is a very powerful book, and quite sad in places.

Onda Riku, of course, is sort of a wonder child in Japanese literature. She appeared on the literary scene in 1991 or 1992, and has been writing an absolute flood of books and short stories since, in science fiction, fantasy, mainstream and other genres. And winning a healthy stack of justly-deserved awards along the way, I might add. Her page at JLPP has a good introduction.

As Onda writes in her own introduction, she modelled the series after the famous "People" series by Zenna Henderson, now available in a complete edition, thanks goodness! It is not intended to be a successor to the People series, but rather a very different interpretation of the basic themes and conflict in the Japanese milieu. Both authors write about a group of special people with special powers (read ESP), trying to live within human society. They interact with normal people, and their powers make it much easier and simultaneously much more difficult to live normal lives. Especially for the children this presents real problems, and both authors drag the reader into their stories, and the character's problems, by their heartstrings. I read The People: No Different Flesh (as it was called then) many, many years ago and still recall how it moved me. Hikari no Teikoku affected me the same way.

It has since been followed up by two other volumes, by the way: Tampopo Sōshi – Tokono Monogatari (蒲公英草紙ー常野物語) and End Game – Tokono Monogatari (エンド・ゲームー常野物語). Personally, I hope she continues writing in the series, even if most of the stories are not directly connected to each other.

Onda suggests that there was once a unique clan in Japan with these special powers – flight, telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, something called "tsumuji" legs, which translates as maybe "vortex" or "whirlwind" and is what she calls being able to run(?) very rapidly. They had problems with Imperial Japan during World War II, not surprisingly, and in modern Japan are scattered throughout the country, still doing their best to live normal lives.

We met with Onda in 1994, and over a delightful fish dinner at Ikkokudo in Fukuoka talked about publishing the book in English. Unfortunately, we were unable to agree on just how it should be published. Too bad, but I reallly hope this book does eventually get published in translation because it richly deserves to be. Until then, at least I have a signed first edition, which reads "Let us both keep loving SF in our lives," or words to that effect (これからもSFを愛して生きていきましょう). Sounds like good advice to me.

]]> tag:www.kurodahan.com,2008:/mt/e//3.454 2008-09-21T14:35:07Z 2008-09-23T06:41:51Z

Sometimes I wish I could clone myself. There is simply so much to do and not enough time to get it done in. And that's just the things I really must do, not even including all the things I merely...

Kurodahan Press Sometimes I wish I could clone myself. There is simply so much to do and not enough time to get it done in. And that's just the things I really must do, not even including all the things I merely want to do. Work can really be all-consuming if you let it, and especially when you happen to enjoy the work you do.

]]> At present, Kurodahan Press is merely a division of Intercom, Ltd., the translation and production company I started over twenty years ago. A lot of the resources developed by Intercom happpen to be an excellent fit for Kurodahan, too, and that was a lot of the reason Kurodahan was born: the rest of the reason was simply that it looked like (and still looks like) a worthy thing to do.

Well, it's been a couple years now, and we have a couple books out. Things are pretty much on track, and there are (as always) a bunch of exciting prospects in the air. Some good books are under way, such as Crystal Silence that we just signed this month.

Trouble is, it all takes time. I have to keep hammering away at technical translation to get the bills paid, and that takes a lot of time. Usually technical translation is performed on the client's schedule, which means they call up whenever they darn well please and set whatever deadline they like. It's impossible to plan for, and can be very difficult to handle without turning your schedule into a train wreck.

When I do have time to work on Kurodahan projects, there is always a lot to do... Himiko is undergoing a thorough developmental edit, and requires an awful lot ot English work, not to mention inputting and checking a host of Chinese characters, many of which are no longer found in most font sets (and if we can't find them, we have to make them: another fun and time-consuming chore). The manuscript is currently off with the author, who is studiously addressing the issues raised by the editor. It's taken a long time to get here, but the end is finally in sight.

What takes perhaps the most time, though, is finding new books to think about publishing. I have been working through the list of Best SF generated by Hayakawa SF Magazine every year. They actually produce two lists, one of novels and the other of shorter works, and while they obviously change every year the core titles remain almost untouched. Sad to say, I have still not read many of these crucial works. The 2006 version of the short story poll is up in English on the Locus site, by the way. The original Japanese list, which is considerably more complete, offers a good view of just what the Japanese consider good. (The numbers shown are merely the number of visitors to this page who read each story, and not especially meaningful in terms of what Japan as a whole thinks.)

Authors are constantly sending me new novels, or recommending someone else's books. That's how I was introduced to Takano Fumio's Musica Machina, remember? I probably get two or three books a month from people to read, although a number of them are books translated from English by friends, sending me copies because I helped them decode the author's English. I have all of David Brin and Michael Crichton in Japanese hardcover for exactly that reason...

And of course there are stacks and stacks of books that I want to read myself. New books are always coming out, and there are still dozens and dozens of books that I've bought and want to read right away... even though they've been on my shelf for years already. I would love to spend time wandering through Aozora, for example, an online site with a massive number of public domain Japanese texts, and a lot of really great stuff. The story being translated for the Kurodahan Press Translation Prize, in fact, is up on Aozora. I try to read books in English, too, which means reading Locus regularly. Again, far too many books that I really want to read but simply don't have the chance to get to. I make exceptions, of course, so if there's a new Caitlín Kiernan or Laurie King or Iain Banks or Zoran Živković, it usually gets bumped to the head of the list

When I was living in Tokyo, many years ago, it was a 90-minute commute one-way, and that gave me plenty of time to read, even if it was on a sardine-packed train. I was tall enough that there was still breathable air up around my nose, and as long as I didn't lift my feet off the floor (if you do you can never put them down again without landing on someone else's toes...), it was not that difficult. Now, though, it only takes about ten minutes to get to work, and by the time I get my book out and recall what I was reading last time, it's time to get off again. Maybe three or four pages a day, which is simply not enough.

Sure, I could read at home, except that when I'm at home my dogs (two King Charles cavalier spaniels) insist that it is time to play with them, not sit and read. And if I'm foolish enough to try to ignore them and read anyway, they try to lick me to death. It's hard to turn the pages when your hands are that gooey.

Sunday night I do have a little time, and could probably get some reading done, but I have to write this blog instead...

]]> tag:www.kurodahan.com,2008:/mt/e//3.452 2008-09-15T02:43:39Z 2008-10-10T06:35:58Z

Buy this book... Crystal Silence By FUJISAKI Shingo (藤崎慎吾) Translated by Kathleen TAJI It is 2071, and Mars is being slowly terraformed by many nations often cooperating in an uneasy truce that reflects tensions back on Earth. The water...

Kurodahan Press

Buy this book...

Crystal Silence

By FUJISAKI Shingo (藤崎慎吾)

Translated by Kathleen TAJI

It is 2071, and Mars is being slowly terraformed by many nations often cooperating in an uneasy truce that reflects tensions back on Earth. The water of the polar ice cap, the most important resource for all the Mars colonies, is jointly controlled by the US, China, Japan and Russia, and doled out to the second-tier colonizing groups (Europe, Canada, Australia, India) only grudgingly. A military build-up is under way as different groups jockey for control of this all-important resource, and then the bodies of what appear to be intellligent aliens are found under the Martian ice.

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Saya Askai is dispatched from Earth in realtime, separating herself from the virtual reality network that encompasses civilization, to investigate... and finds herself in a battleground of cyborgs, virtual reality plagues, and Schwartzchild traps that she may only be able to navigate through safely with the help of people who probably don't exist...

Originally published in 1999, Crystal Silence (クリスタルサイレンス) was promptly voted the best Japanese SF novel of the year in the annual poll run by Hayakawa SF Magazine. The book remains popular, both for its own qualities and more recent science fiction masterpieces by the author, and a revised edition was recently released as a two-volume paperback.

The author has published multiple novels and short stories and is rapidly being recognized as a leading writer of hard SF in Japan.

The Hayakawa bunko edition that we are using for the translation, a two-volume set, has cover art by Seto Hakata and WONDER WORKZ.

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Details:

• xx pages
• Trade paperback
• ISBN 4-902075-05-9
• Kurodahan Press Book No. FG-J0004-L13
• List Price: Pending
• Cover: Pending
• Publication date: Scheduled for fall 2010

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Buy this book:

• Amazon (free shipping in the U.S.)
• Amazon Japan
• BookDepository (free shipping worldwide, including Japan)
• Bookstores and university buyers (contact us directly)
  

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About the translator

A third-generation Japanese American, Kathleen Taji hails from Los Angeles, California. After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles with a major in East Asian Studies, she went to Japan to further her education, got married, and ended up living there for well over two decades. Although she is a technical translator, translating fiction is rapidly becoming a passion as well as a compulsion, especially in the science fiction, horror, and mystery genres. She currently resides in the suburbs of Los Angeles with her zebra finch and her beloved desert tortoise, Miz Pamie.

]]> tag:www.kurodahan.com,2008:/mt/e//3.453 2008-09-14T14:06:22Z 2008-09-16T06:18:33Z

Last week I flew up to Tokyo to meet with Fujisaki Shingo, to sign the contract for Crystal Silence. I read the book quite some time ago, as it was published in 1999 and was chosen as Best SF Novel...

Kurodahan Press Last week I flew up to Tokyo to meet with Fujisaki Shingo, to sign the contract for Crystal Silence. I read the book quite some time ago, as it was published in 1999 and was chosen as Best SF Novel of 1999 in the annual Hayakawa SF Magazine poll, but didn't have a chance to actually start talking to the author about possible publication until earlier this year.

]]> When I did finally get in touch with him, I was quite surprised to discover he already knew me... and, in fact, I already knew him, although under a different name! Turns out we had talked about SF and possibly asking him to write some stories for a particular project maybe fifteen or twenty years ago, back when he was still a freshly-hatched author published only in Shibano Takumi's "Uchujin" fanzine. Nothing ever came of that talk, but it did lay the groundwork for a very nice meeting last week in Jimbocho, the used-book district of Tokyo.

Fujisaki got his MS in the United States, and in fact at the University of Maryland, which is my own alma mater. That makes him a member of a select group of Japanese SF authors: people who write about other cultures and actually have some experience in other cultures to draw upon. The same problem applies to English-language authors, of course, and I imagine applies to almost every nation in the world: people spend most of their time in one culture. Sort of unavoidable, unfortunately.

Like many authors, Fujisaki uses names that are not immediately identifiable by nationality or language. In the United States, justly called the "melting pot of humanity" (although certainly not the onlyi one!), it is not too unusual to find surnames from, say, Viet Nam, Poland, Ireland and Spain living next to each other in an apartment building. Regardless of how they're spelled or where they came from, they are all perfectly good "American" names. My own last name, Lipsett, was apparently created on-the-fly at Ellis Island from some Eastern European surname, perhaps Lipschitz, because somebody thought it sounded more "American" than what it was to start with. That could have marked the creation of a new surname, but in any case today it is as American as Smith or Weingarten or Singh.

The main character is his novel is named Saya ASKAI. From the Japanese アスカイ (yes, he writes her name, ane most other proper names, in katakana, probably for the reasons I touched on earlier), it should be Romanized as Saya ASUKAI, but in fact the Japanese would probably pronounce it without a noticeable "U" between the "S" and the "K."

"Saya" (written initially as 沙耶) is a real Japanese name... I can't claim to have ever heard of a woman with this first name, but a quick Internet check shows that it is not all that rare. "Askai," which he introduces initially as 飛鳥井, is rare, but again a real Japanese name.

So why did the author choose to represent them in katakana throughout the book? The vast majority of Japanese-language books consistently use the correct kanji for character names, except for some very special cases. Does it make the character seem somehow less "human?" Perhaps half a century ago it would have... writing things in katakana was the equivalent of the robot from "Lost in Space" speaking in flat buzzing tones. A book I am reading now, in fact, deliberately uses this trick in a conversation between an AI and a human being... the software speaks in katakana, and the person in normal hiragana. Perhaps this would be the equivalent of writing robot speech in a different font in an English work.

Today, however, Japanese is trending away from heavy kanji usage, and sentences are likely to use a much higher percentage of hiragana to kanji... and, with the flood of words imported from English and other languages, the percentage of katakana is also soaring. Katakana no longer means clunky robots; instead, it provides a modern, multi-cultural flavor to the text. The story makes it clear that Saya is Japanese, but her name simultaneously makes it clear that this is not a Japanese of today... this is the future.

English-language authors do the same thing, eliminating clear references to real cultures and languages to make the work more clearly a part of another reality. When you read Skylark or Lensman, for example, the names are all part of the setting, and make it very clear that this is all an American view of the future. Jack Vance strikes me as perhaps one of the best in the trade at creating names with no clear cultural origin, although relative newcomer Iain Banks is right up there with him when it comes to filing the serial numbers off of main characters. There are countless others, of course.

The names used in the book are a crucial key to the setting, and define much of the atmosphere of the novel. For a Japanese reader, having the main character named (for example) Tazaki, is perfectly normal; for an American reader the name alone carries an unfamiliar ring. A surname like Askai is equally exotic to people in both languages, and I think hints at the superlative approach the author has taken in this novel, avoiding setting a novel of the future too firmly in a present-day culture. Askai is Japanese, living in Japan, but both are firmly products of a well-imagined future and not merely renditions of real life wearing masks.

I think you'll enjoy this book when it's ready. Goodness knows I did!

]]> tag:www.kurodahan.com,2008:/mt/e//3.451 2008-09-12T04:48:41Z 2008-10-07T01:08:30Z

We have just signed an agreement with Fujisaki Shingo (藤崎慎吾) to translate his award-winning science fiction novel Crystal Silence (クリスタルサイレンス). Originally published in 1999, Crystal Silence was promptly voted the best Japanese SF novel of the year in the annual...

Kurodahan Press We have just signed an agreement with Fujisaki Shingo (藤崎慎吾) to translate his award-winning science fiction novel Crystal Silence (クリスタルサイレンス).

Originally published in 1999, Crystal Silence was promptly voted the best Japanese SF novel of the year in the annual poll run by Hayakawa SF Magazine. < More >

]]> tag:www.kurodahan.com,2008:/mt/e//3.450 2008-09-08T03:44:52Z 2008-09-06T08:57:51Z

Story evaluation and discussions are still under way for the second volume of our Speculative Japan series of science fiction in translation, but a number of things happened coincidentally and simultaneously to vastly accelerate our plans for a similar series...

Kurodahan Press Story evaluation and discussions are still under way for the second volume of our Speculative Japan series of science fiction in translation, but a number of things happened coincidentally and simultaneously to vastly accelerate our plans for a similar series of Chinese science fiction in English. It's still hard to tell, but it now looks quite possible that the first Chinese collection could come out before the second volume of Japanese stories!

]]> At World Science Fiction Convention 2007 in Yokohama last year I met with a number of people from the Chinese SF world, especially a few very nice editors from the leading Chinese SF magazine, SF World (and possibly the leading SF magazine in the world by subscription count).

They were quite interested in how we've been publishing Japanese works in English, and we spoke briefly. There were a lot of things going on, and it was not the place for prolonged discussions. Simply too many people that we absolutely had to meet, right then and there, and (as always happens at a conference) too many things scheduled for the same time. All I could do was give them some sample books to leaf through, and agree to get back in touch with each other.

Early this year, David Brin (the GOH at WorldCon 2007) contacted me with an e-mail he had received from a fan group in China, with two stories they had translated themselves into English. He asked if I could help, as they were seeking a publisher... I read the stories eagerly, and while the English needed editing, the stories were easily of a quality to match American or British authors, yet both retained a few elements that were clearly not Western. Chinese flavoring, if you will.

Turns out that the people in the fan group and the people at SF World know each other. When SF World discovered that they had been beaten to the punch in submitting selections, they immediately put together a stack of about half a dozen top-notch stories for me to look at. Unfortunately, they are all in Chinese... and my knowledge of Chinese is pretty close to nil. Oops.

What do to? I immediately posted want ads in a few places where Chinese-to-English translations hang out, seeking people who would be willing to give me story outlines and evaluations. A few very talented people showed up, and work in under way. Serendipitously, Japan's own Hayakawa SF Magazine published a special issue on Chinese SF! Two of the stories I had received from SF World for evaluation were there, translated into Japanese, which I can read just fine. Even better, the translator for one of the stories is someone I know quite well! All sorts of pieces are coming together.

Best of all, I have now read four stories translated from the Chinese and highly recommended... One of them, in my ever-so-humble opinion, is exquisite and the others very good. I'm waiting to see more information on the remaining stories so I can see just what they're about, and how they work in English, but right now everything looks very rosy. When I compare these to the selection of Chinese shorts in Science Fiction from China by Dingbo Wu and Patrick Murphy, and old and still solitairy book, they are much more about the "sense of wonder" and exploring new ideas, and are structurally much more modern. The stories in the Wu-Murphy book reflect a more tightly-controlled China, and while they are fascinating for how they reveal what China was a few decades ago, China has changed... and needless to say, her authors have changed as well.

The Japanese collection is also proceeding smoothly, albeit perhaps a bit slowly. We are gradually building up a stack of stories that are worth translating into English, but haven't done too much culling yet. Stories obviously unsuitable for reasons of length, obviousness, or simply lack of interest are being dropped, but we still have enough for several volumes already. There is so much more material to read, however, that it's difficult to say "Enough." I'm always thinking that there's another story even better waiting in the next book I pick up... And sometimes I'm right!

]]> tag:www.kurodahan.com,2008:/mt/e//3.448 2008-08-31T19:44:11Z 2008-09-15T01:42:23Z

September has come... this should be the middle of the typhoon season here, but the unusual weather worldwide seems to have come to Japan as well. It's unseasonally cool right now, and only a few scattered typhoons roaming around down...

Kurodahan Press September has come... this should be the middle of the typhoon season here, but the unusual weather worldwide seems to have come to Japan as well. It's unseasonally cool right now, and only a few scattered typhoons roaming around down south. The hotter seas down there will no doubt produce a whole series of whoppers for us later in the year. I can hardly wait.

]]> September is also the deadline for submissions to the Kurodahan PressTranslation Prize. We released notices to a lot of places, and I was gratified to see our announcement being copied to a wide range of websites. We've gotten a large number of inquiries, too, but so far nobody has really had any questions about the content of the contest. Which is good, because it implies we actually wrote the instructions well!

Reading a good story in English is always a treat, but perhaps what I look forward to even more than that is reading a lot of different interpretations of a weird story. Each translator will make his or her own decisions about what the author means, how to best express the author's intent and style, and then go right ahead and inject personal touches. The end result will certainly not be one "best" story and a bunch of runners-up.

Instead, it will be a handful of translations which obviously missed the boat, and a larger (I hope) set of translations which are all very good for one reason or another. Some may be perfect translations, some may be perfect English stories, some may best reflect what the author wanted the reader to feel. My suspicion is that no submission will do all of these things at once, and that will make the decision pretty tough.

It will also make reading them a heck of a lot of fun (except for the fact that the jurors have to read them all within a reasonable length of time...).

Different people seem to have different methods of translating. My own approach, after years of making mistakes, is to make a rough draft designed to get the meaning down solid. It is full of notes to myself to verify the meaning of a particular phrase, to check who actually said something in case I misinterpreted, or just reminders that a particular passage should show loneliness, or sadness, or whatever. Sometimes if I'm not happy with my base translation I'll pick a few English words that are close and leave the Japanese there, too. At this stage I don't worry about style, although if the "perfect" word occurs to me of course I use it.

The next stage is getting rid of all those questions. A lot of them I can work out myself by rereading the Japanese, and referencing a stack of books in both languages: English dictionary, Japanese dictionary, kanji dictionary, thesaurus (sometimes in Japanese, too), not to mention whatever specialized references the job at hand might require. I'm translating a story involving go now, and need to know how moves and handicaps are referred to in English. I understand what the Japanese says fine, but I don't play go in English, and therefore don't know what English-speaking players call these things.

If all goes well, I now have a solid base translation. It probably reads terribly, because the goal is accuracy, not readability or style. After that the process is much like any English writing job: refine and polish. Be succinct and select words that impart the proper atmosphere, whatever it may be. Listen to my own words objectively and see where I stumble. Fix it again.

Eventually the story becomes readable. Sometimes you can get trapped in this rewriting process, never finding the "ultimate" translation that is your goal. Chances are, it's already done and you're too close to it to see.

This is why I like to refine once or twice, and then put the story down for at least a week and let it ferment. Then reread it as objectively as possible and see where it sticks. Anything that shatters the "willing suspension of disbelief" has to be rooted out. And of course the English should sing, not merely be good English.

If I keep improving at the rate I have been, I expect to become a good literary translator in another, oh, 75 or 80 years...

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