The Music of Words, Part Two

Some of the most interesting parts of Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words come when Jay Rubin briefly touches on issues of translation.

Murakami readers are no doubt aware that the author works almost exclusively in the first-person, using a series of non-descript, detached (almost at times formless, passionless) young men Rubin dubs--individually and collectively--"Boku" after the casual, "pronoun-like" word HM uses for "I."  As Rubin notes, the more formal alternative is "watakushi" or "watashi."*  Rubin goes on:

The first-person Boku was an instinctive decision to eschew all hint of authority in his narrative.  Boku may encounter strange stories, but he speaks to the reader in a voice that feels just as familiar and spoken--and, in a way, distanced from the events in the tale--as if a friend were telling us of his own personal experiences.  Murakami's consistent use of the friendly, approachable Boku remained central to his narrative strategy for the better part of 20 years.

Again, this probably comes as no shock to a person familiar with Murakami's work, but it is interesting that HM's "friendly, approachable" style--a style that indeed helps the reader to suspend disbelief when it is most necessary--is just as striking in the original Japanese text.

And speaking of the original text, here's Murakami on process and how it affected his early style:

At first, I tried writing realistically, but it was unreadable.  So then I tried redoing the opening in English.  I translated that into Japanese and worked on it a little more.  Writing in English, my vocabulary was limited, and I couldn't write long sentences.  So that way a kind of rhythm took hold, with relatively few words and short sentences.

Rubin aptly draws a comparison here with Beckett, who of course experienced a serious (and similar) shift in the manner of his prose when he began composing in French.

Later, in Appendix A(2), Rubin explores some other issues with translating Japanese in general and Murakami in particular.  Attentive readers realize, at least in the abstract, the difficulty in translating an author's work from one language to another--my personal revelation came in college, reading The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca in English with the Spanish original en face, in the comforting New Directions edition--but it's striking to see an explicit demonstration of just how knotty translation can be.  Brian Boyd's chapter on Eugene Onegin in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years is a nice, extended example, but Rubin provides a more brief, modest look in ...Music of Words.

He begins with a translation an "unremarkable paragraph" from "The 1963/1982 Girl from Ipanema," one of Murakami's early fictions:

When I think of my high school’s corridor, I think of combination salads: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, asparagus, onion rings, and pink Thousand Island dressing.  Not that there was a salad shop at the end of the corridor.  No, there was just a door, and beyond the door a drab 25-metre pool.

Then, he follows with this version of the same paragraph:

When one says high school corridor, I recall combination salads.  Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, asparagus, onion rings, and pink Thousand Island dressing.  Of course, it is not to say that at the end of the high school corridor there is a salad specialty shop.  At the end of the high school corridor, there is a door, and outside the door there is only a 25-metre pool that is not very attractive.

Sez Rubin: "Those without experience in translating literature will probably assume the second version is more "literal" or "faithful" simply because it is more awkward.  In fact, the second one is no closer to the Japanese than the first; it is just closer to the usage found in language-learning textbooks, which gives it an illusion of literalness.

To drive this point home, Rubin then drops a version he claims to be "literal translation" (with English "loan words" in italics):

High school’s corridor say-if, I combination salad think-up.  Lettuce and tomato and cucumber and green pepper and asparagus, ring-cut bulb onion, and pink colour’s Thousand Island dressing.  No argument high school corridor’s hit-end in salad specialty shop exists meaning is-not.  High school corridor’s hit-end in, door existing, door’s outside in, too-much flash-do-not 25-metre pool exists only is.**

Rubin notes that this version strikes a reader of English as bizarre for several reasons.  First, there are no definite or indefinite articles in Japanese and "no simple distinctions between singular and plural."  Subordinate clauses preceed nouns; there are no relative pronouns: English's the man who arrived yesterday becomes yesterday arrived man.  Also, with verbs at the end of sentences (along with "negative endings" and "tense markers") a sentence such as I didn't see Monty Python last night becomes Last night Monty Python see-not-did.

Taking all of this into account, it's clear that Murakami's translators--Rubin, Alfred Birnbaum, and Philip Gabriel--are doing some serious heavy lifting, and, it follows, at the same time bringing their own particular interpretation of Boku's "voice" to their translations.  Thus, it makes sense that some readers hold a distinct preference for one translator over the other (see this article, for example).

Rubin, for his part, credits Alfred Birnbaum's "jazzy" translation of A Wild Sheep Chase with catching the attention of English-speaking readers, thereby helping HM towards worldwide popularity (though he also accuses Birnbaum and Gabriel of overdoing it a bit--"introducing exaggerated hipness of expression" into their versions--perhaps as a way of perserving some of the unique character of Murakami's prose in Japanese.  See note "**" below).

Next: Murakami as translator.

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(*Apparently, female narrators get the gender-neutral "watashi.")

(**And Rubin here notes that this passage owes whatever small resemblance it has to English to the fact that Murakami is even closer in his Japanese to English than most, likely in part because he was influenced by novels from Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, etc.  In fact, Rubin sez, because HM's work is relatively close to English, it can be hard to translate 'back'--"the single most important quality that makes his style fresh and enjoyable in Japanese is what is lost in translation.")

Comments

[Dan wickett]

Thanks again RP - another interesting read.

Enjoy,

[Jenny D]

Yes, that translation stuff is FASCINATING. I definitely will get this book, that's more interesting I think than the personal stuff which I vaguely know about already. I do wish I knew some Japanese...

[panasianbiz]

I stumbled across your blog while I was doing some online research. I found this an absolutely fascinating discussion. I'm so fortunate that I lived in Japan and can appreciate the original language.