|
|
Winner of Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature
JAT Bulletin 186, September 2000. Publications Committee
Every year the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at
Columbia University awards two Japan-U.S. Friendship
Commission Prizes* for the Translation of Japanese
Literature, each worth $2,500. The award is open to all
nationalities, and entries are judged on the literary merit
of the translation and the accuracy with which it reflects
the spirit of the Japanese original. Eligible works include
book-length unpublished manuscripts, works in press, or books
published during the two years prior to the prize year.
This year the prize for the best translation of a modern
work of literature was awarded to Meredith McKinney for her
translation Ravine and Other Stories by
award-winning novelist Furui Yoshikichi 古井由吉**
(published by Stone Bridge Press). The stories in this
anthology are 谷 (Ravine, 1973), 哀原 (Grief Field, 1976),
先導獣の話 (Bellwether, 1968), and 中山坂 (On Nakayama Hill;
1986). After living in Kyoto for many years, Meredith is now
a freelance translator and part-time lecturer in Japanese and
Asian Literature at the Australian National University in
Canberra. Her other published literary translations include
アオギリの詩 (The Flame Tree) and Cooloola no
Tasogare (クルーラの黄昏)—translations of the
poetry of Judith Wright that were both co-translated with
Sakai Nobuo 酒井信雄 — and The Tale of
Saigyo (translation with introduction and notes;
Michigan Papers in Japanese Studies, No. 25).
Meredith is currently completing a Doctorate in Asian Studies
(topic: A Study of The Tale of Saigyo) at the
Australian National University.
JAT
Congratulations on your award. It is an outstanding
achievement that enhances the status and profile of all
translators of Japanese literature. To give JAT members a
taste of your wonderful prose, let me quote from the second
paragraph of 'Ravine':
"It came back to me now, as a chill autumn rain came racing
suddenly in from the mountain, beating at the branches of the
forest, and shrouded the ravine where I lay in a sound that
merged with the sound of the stream's rushing, till it was as
if the rain was pouring upward, out of the earth. And it
seemed to me then that, from beneath the almost paralyzed
quietness that lay wrapped at the heart of the water's roar,
the rich and lustrous weight of a chanting voice reverberated
with an astonishing clarity." ***
Why did you decide to translate Furui Yoshikichi? Were you
asked to do so by the publisher, or were you attracted by the
psychological aspects of Furui's works, or by his style and
stretching of the limits of the Japanese language, or by
other factors?
McKinney
When I first read Furui, some twenty years ago now, I was
quite simply enthralled by him. I've always been very
attracted by any work of literature that somehow manages to
create the intensity and strangeness of dream for the reader,
and Furui's world does just that for me. It was partly
because I couldn't work out how he did it that I decided to
try translating a couple of his stories, just for fun really,
as a way of trying to come to grips with his writing. At that
stage, the task of making a good translation from him was
beyond me—both because his Japanese was so
difficult, and because my understanding of how to translate
was so naive and blundering, I suppose. After a lot of sweat,
a lot of pleasure and even more despair, I had two fairly
abominable translations of two of the stories in this
collection ("Bell Wether" and "Grief Field"). I put them
away, though I kept reading Furui. It was only many years
later, when I saw an advertisement asking for submissions of
short story translations for a possible collection (which in
fact never got made) that I decided to pull them out and try
again. His writing worked its old magic on me all over again
as I redid the translations, but this time I felt at last I
could somehow begin to match his writing with something that
worked in English. I went on to translate two more stories,
and the result is this book.
So, to answer the second half of your question, it was
probably the psychological aspects of his writing that first
attracted me, and his style and extraordinary Japanese that
defeated me. It was only when my own sense of Japanese had
matured a lot more that I finally came to feel how the style,
the language and the dream-like effects were all intimately
connected, and this I suppose gave me the power to see how I
might transform his writing into successful English.
JAT
Why did you select these particular short stories for this
anthology?
McKinney
The two stories I first chose for translation were both ones
that particularly engaged me when I read them—
"Bell Wether" for its brilliant evocation of the
strange world of rush-hour city Japan, and "Grief Field" for
its peculiar intensity, its strange compelling circling in on
some intimate and ungraspable "other world" at the borders of
our everyday sense of things. Later, when I was looking for
two more stories to translate, "Ravine" was an obvious choice
for me. I love Furui's mountain writing (his book of essays,
山に行く心, is a wonderful book), and "Ravine" is a great
example of it, Furui at his best I think. "On Nakayama Hill"
took more finding. I wanted something more recent, but
reading his recent short stories reminded me of why I'd
stopped reading him—for me his writing has become
just too oppressive and death-obsessed in recent years, and
repetitive (a problem so many writers in Japan face and so
few overcome). I wanted something a bit different, a bit
lighter, but still having that old Furui dream-like quality
to it, and I finally found it in "On Nakayama Hill". I liked
it the least while translating it, but now I'm very fond of
it.
JAT
What particular challenges were involved in translating
Furui for Western readers, and did you have direct contact
with him while you translated?
McKinney
Well there isn't a great deal in Furui that's
culture-specific, since he deals essentially with a world
that's not only beyond cultural norms but often beyond any
normal social world whatsoever. "On Nakayama Hill" presented
the most difficulties on that level, since it is set in a
more typical Japanese reality, and it was hard to recreate
for an English-speaking audience the little wayside eatery
where much of the action takes place. Though frankly I had
more trouble with the race track scenes, since I know nothing
of racing terminology! But my real problems in these
translations centred around the weird discontinuities that
Furui creates, which Japanese is a lot more tolerant of than
English—our acute sensitivity to verb tense makes
it peculiarly difficult to achieve the kind of blurred sense
of time that he's so masterful at, for instance.
When I first translated "Grief Field" I was foolish enough
to send a copy to Furui. He never responded, and I don't
blame him. More recently, when the book was being made, I
contacted him again to ask his permission, and this time
received a kindly but rather curt response, directing me to
his agent for future negotiations. I got the distinct
impression he wasn't interested in being pally with his
translators, so I left it at that! He's a reclusive person, I
know, and I well understand the need writers have to keep
extraneous human contacts to a minimum, so that's fine by
me.
JAT
Did you attempt to bring Furui into the Western readers'
world, domesticating his works so that they would be more
readable and familiar, or did you attempt to preserve his
Japaneseness and transport Western readers into Furui's
world? Or do you think he has a universal appeal, rather than
being a 'Japanese writer'?
McKinney
Yes I think I'd agree with the last statement. As I said,
there's not much that's specifically "Japanese" about Furui,
at least as we normally understand that word. More
fundamentally, though, I do think his sensibility is very
"Japanese", or at any rate is deeply rooted in the folk world
of Japan, the world of shamanism and the kind of awed and
intimate response to the natural world and the world of death
in which folk Shinto has its roots. There's no way I could
"domesticate" this, but on the other hand there's absolutely
no need to, since this is a world which many westerners
(including myself) respond to deeply when we first meet it, I
think.
JAT
In his works Furui uses unusual kanji with his own
nuances (e.g., hashagu はしゃぐ, which cannot be produced
here), and a critic once referred to his style as 心理の微分
(an attempt go beyond the limits of ordinary language). How
did you go about conveying these nuances and subtleties in
your translations?
McKinney
In such cases, there's really very little you can do to
reproduce the specific effect. All you can do is be sensitive
to these things as they occur, acknowledge and pay them due
respect, rather than simply going for the easy "what he means
is"translation —and if possible reach
for a word or expression that in some similar way stretches
the language or at least momentarily unnerves the reader a
little. Furui's vocabulary is very rich, which is a pleasant
challenge, but he also stretches certain expressions to
encompass far more than their dictionary meaning. I did my
best to convey this where I could, to find a word whose
slight oddness shifted the reader's linguistic consciousness
in the same disconcerting way. In many cases I didn't
succeed. My only hope is that, knowing the sort of effect he
generally aims at, I occasionally managed to reproduce it in
other ways.
JAT
Are there any other stories by Furui that you would like to
translate? What about his long and very challenging stories
Kari oujou denshibun 仮往生伝試文 or his 'wet'
Asagao 槿? Or some of his recent works, which are
said to be becoming more difficult to read?
McKinney
As I said, it's really his earlier work that most attracts
me, and I think I share this with many of his readers. I love
the novella Youko (杳子) that won the Akutagawa
Prize, and wish I'd been the one to translate it. Among his
novels, Hijiri 聖: ひじり is one I'd still like to
translate. I'm sure later ones would turn out to be
fascinating to do, but they don't compel me as the earlier
ones do I'm afraid.
JAT
You have already published several translations, including
an annotated translation of Saigyou monogatari
西行物語, and you are currently working on a doctoral thesis
on the 12th century poet Saigyo. Where did you receive your
training in classical Japanese literature, and what are some
of the particular challenges involved in translating such
works?
McKinney
I taught myself classical Japanese, with Japanese high
school text books that I found in the bookshops. Not the best
way to do it—they have a horrifyingly rigid
approach to language learning and to
literature—but they certainly do a thorough job of
teaching the basics, and in the process you get a wonderful
understanding of how Japanese readers read their own
literature, which is immensely useful. I did it because I'd
begun to read Basho's "Narrow Road" with a local reading
group (読書会) in my neighbourhood in Kyoto, and was
frustrated at how little I could really understand. Then,
through Basho, I fell in love with his great forebear Saigyo
(even more difficult!), and became determined to learn how to
read him.
That's how I came to translate Saigyou Monogatari,
as a stumbling attempt to come to grips with his poetry in
the context of his life. I seem to launch into all my
translation projects from a position of absolute ignorance
and desire to learn, come to think of it! In the process of
learning the language, I inevitably became familiar with many
of the works of classical literature, following my nose more
or less, reading what attracted me. There are thus great gaps
in my knowledge —which I'm still happily filling
in.
As for the difficulties of translating classical Japanese
literature, well they're just immense. But, on the principle
that any translation is better than nothing and everything's
worth a try, I'll keep plugging away at it
nevertheless.
JAT
You have also published translations of two anthologies of
the poetry of Judith Wright, who until her recent death was
one of the most significant and best loved of Australian
twentieth century poets. What was it like translating her
poetry—a notoriously difficult genre to translate
in any case—into Japanese, which is not your
native language? How did you and your co-translator, Sakai
Nobuo, work together?
McKinney
These translations were done over quite a few years, in
rather desultory fashion really—Sakai-san and I
would meet for an afternoon once a week, and each week we'd
each bring our tentative translation of a chosen poem. We'd
exchange these, and proceed to go over the poem line by line,
referring to both our translations, nutting out what the
final version should be. Needless to say, Sakai-san's version
was generally infinitely preferable to mine, and he had the
final say in what the finished line was, but from time to
time I did get a line of my original translation
incorporated, which was always a nice moment. But the final
version really was a mutual product of our discussions, and
it was fascinating to be able to toss nuances around between
the two languages, each of us of course more sensitive to the
nuances of our native language. Sakai-san, though an academic
(he's head of the English Dept. at Tezukayama University), is
a very skilled and linguistically responsive reader and
translator of literature, and I learned an immense amount
from him in the process of this project. The final
translations have received warm praise from readers, and I'm
satisfied that they're largely successful, though of course
I'm constantly aware of all that's had to be sacrificed of
the original poem.
JAT
What challenges were involved in translating Australian
poems for a Japanese audience? Were the difficulties related
more to the content or to the form and language of the
poems?
McKinney
Well rhyme and rhythm, both of which are immensely important
in her poetry, were of course the first things to
go—a huge loss. With problems of form, there's
very little one can do. So most of our struggles were
linguistic ones (which includes questions of tone as well as
meaning).
Specifically Australian content was of course also a
problem, and some poems we simply had to
bypass—"Bullocky" is an
example of a poem that would have required a mini-essay to
make sense of it to a Japanese reader. For some of the other
problems, we resorted to sleight of hand. An example is in
the title poem for the collection Aogiri no Uta:
this is a translation of "Flame Tree", a tree which of course
doesn't exist in Japan. But then, most Australian readers
would have little idea of what a flame tree was, and this
doesn't interfere with reading the poem, so Sakai-san chose a
tree whose name was euphonious in Japanese and which in fact
does appear in some dictionaries as a (mis)translation of
"flame tree", and we went with that. This is the kind of
compromise we decided had to be made, for the sake of the
poetry.
JAT
As Judith Wright's daughter, did you find that your personal
knowledge of our mother gave you deeper insights into her
poems, or did you feel that this complicated the task of
translation?
McKinney
That's a difficult one! I suppose I did have a very strong
"personal reading" of a lot of the poems—whether
that could be called an insight or not is another matter.
Some of the references which Sakai-san had difficulty with I
could elucidate from personal experience. Poems like "At
Cooloola", for example, involve places and family references
that I'm very familiar with, and my knowledge did guide our
translation to some extent. But, more than having any direct
influence on the translation process as the poet's daughter,
the point for me was really that my own reading of the poems
was incredibly enriched by the process of helping translate
them. I knew those poems like I knew my own hand, on an
intuitive level, but (perhaps for that reason) I found I
hadn't really READ them. Translation is undoubtedly a
wonderful way of really getting to grips with a poem. The
experience gave me a whole new understanding of my mother's
poetry.
JAT
Could you cite one short poem and the Japanese translation
to give our readers a feel for Judith Wright's poetry and how
it was translated?
McKinney
・・・・・・EGRETS
Once as I travelled through a quiet evening,
I saw a pool, jet-black and mirror-still.
Beyond, the slender paperbarks stood crowding;
each on its own white image looked its fill,
and nothing moved but thirty egrets wading -
thirty egrets in a quiet evening.
Once in a lifetime, lovely past believing,
your lucky eyes may light on such a pool.
As though for many years I had been waiting,
I watched in silence, till my heart was full
of clear dark water, and white trees unmoving,
and, whiter yet, those thirty egrets wading.
・・・・・・白鷺
かつて、静かな夕暮れを旅していたとき
真っ黒な、鏡のように静まりかえった水面の池をみた。
向こう岸には、白い姿を心ゆくまで水に映し
ほっそりとした白樺が群れ立っている。
動くものは、水を踏む三十羽の白鷺
静かな夕暮れどきの白鷺だけだった。
生涯に一度、信じがたいほど美しい
このような池に出会うことがあるのだ。
何年も待ちつづけたかのように私は
じっと眺めた ー 真っ黒な澄んだ水と
静止した白い樹の群れと、それにもまして白い
静かに水を踏む白鷺が胸に満ちるまで。
JAT
Do you have any advice for aspiring translators of Japanese
literature?
Read lots! In both languages. Very often, I think, it's a
translator's sense of English that creates poor translations,
as much as difficulties with Japanese.
McKinney
The only other advice is to treat dictionaries as guides
rather than bibles. Translations that are made from constant
reference to dictionaries are generally dead translations.
You have to feel your way into the writing, once you've
grasped the "what it says". That's why it's important, I
think, to choose works that you respond strongly to as
literature. (Ideally, you ought to want to have written the
work yourself in the first place, when you first come across
it, though that's a tall order I know.)
JAT
Do you do any non-literary translations?
McKinney
Yes, over the years I've done a number of other translation
jobs, a lot of them translations for exhibition catalogues,
or essays written by artists for various publications. On the
whole, they're quite fun, and certainly a lot easier than
"literary" translation.
JAT
Do you teach translation as part of your classes in Japanese
literature at the Australian National University?
McKinney
I did teach a translation course a few years ago, and would
enjoy teaching it again some time. But generally the course I
teach is open to non-Japanese speakers, so inevitably it's
based on translated works.
* This year the prize for the best classical
literary translation was awarded to Professor Roger K. Thomas
for his translation of Enchi Fumiko's Namamiko
Monogatari なまみこ物語 as A Tale of False
Fortunes. Although Enchi Fumiko is a twentieth-century
novelist, this particular work contains many passages in
Heian prose style, so Professor Thomas' translation was
regarded as eligible for the classical literature
award.
1937.11.19東京生まれ。
東大独文科卒業後、金沢大、立教大でドイツ語を教え、ブロッホ『誘惑者』(1968)、ムジール『愛の完成』など現代ドイツ文学の翻訳を手がけながら創作活動に入る。同人雑誌「白描」に処女作『木曜日に』(1968)発表後、「海燕」を皮切りに各文芸誌に短編を書き継ぎ、「円陣を組む女たち」(1970)、「男たちの円居」(1970)など作品集を次々と刊行する。1970年立教大を退職。同年の作『杳子』で芥川賞受賞。その後、長編『行隠れ』(1972)、『水』(1973)、『櫛の火』(1974)、『聖』(1976)、『女たちの家』(1977)、『栖』(1979、日本文学大賞)、『山躁賦』(1982)、『槿』(1983、谷崎潤一郎賞)、と旺盛な創作意欲を見せる。近年の作品集には「明けの赤馬」(1985)、「眉雨」(1986)、「夜はいま」(1987)、「魂の日」(1993)、「陽気な夜まわり」(1994)、「白髪の唄」(1996)、「夜あけの家」(1998)、長編に『仮往生伝試文』(1986)などがある。
マッキニーさんが翻訳した『谷』は短編集「水」(1973)に、『哀原』は「哀原」(1977)に、『先導獣の話』は「円陣を組む女たち」(1970)に、『中山坂』(川端康成賞受賞)は「眉雨」(1986)に所収のものだが、たとえば『中山坂』の初出が「海燕」1986年1月号であるように、いずれも初出は文芸誌である。現在は『哀原』を除いて、『谷』が講談社文芸文庫「水」(\951)、『先導獣の話』が講談社文芸文庫「木犀の日」(\981)、『中山坂』が福武文庫「眉雨」(\485：今のところ版元では品切れとのこと)で手に入る。
『中山坂』の老人が「むこうからわなわなと身を傾けてきて」といったイメージ喚起力の豊かな文体と、飛躍的なことばの連鎖が古井文学のすべてと言えるが、その翻訳の難点をマッキニーさんが、「英語では許されないが、日本語では許される魅惑の不連続性」と指摘しているのは興味深い。別なところで古井文学の本質として言及しているアニミズム、さらには死生観を媒介として作家と芭蕉、さらには西行にまで通底する隠遁の精神と無縁ではないからだ。芭蕉の七部集を繙くまでもなく、歌仙を少しでもかじれば、不連続の連続というイメージ連鎖の要諦は知れる。さらに、そのイメージはプルーストの絵画性とは異なり、どこまでも情緒的または心理的または精神的であり、その方向は避け難くタナトスへ、そしてエロスへと向かうはずである。
*** 原文は次の通り。
「・・・に思い出した。山のほうから時雨が樹の枝を叩きながら速足で寄せて来て谷の上におおいかぶさり、沢音とひとつに混りあい、逆に地の底から湧き立つように上げてきた時である。そのざわめきの奥につつまれた麻痺感に似た静けさの底から、重い艶のある読経の声がほとんど朗々と響き出てくる気配があった。」