Updated 1999-10-01
Interview with Margaret Mitsutani
Publications Committee
JAT Bulletin 174, September 1999
Margaret Mitsutani is a translator and a teacher of modern
literature and women's studies at Kyoritsu Women's University
（共立女子大学） in Tokyo. Her best-known translations
include An Echo of Heaven, which is a translation of the
novel Jinsei no shinseki （人生の親戚） by the 1994 Nobel
Prize laureate Oe Kenzaburo （大江健三郎）, and The
Bridegroom was a Dog（犬婿入り）, a collection of three
strange tales of fantasy by Akutagawa Award-winner Tawada
Yoko （多和田葉子）, which was published under the Japan
Foundation's Publication Assistance Program and Translation
Assistance Program. Women are the protagonists in all of
these works, and Margaret has a particular interest in the
problems of gender and translation. She kindly agreed to this
interview for the JAT Bulletin.
1. How did you come to translate Oe Kenzaburo's Jinsei
no Shinseki?
About ten years ago I got to know an editor at Kodansha
International. In 1990, my translation of
"Stations," a short story by Hayashi
Kyoko（林京子）, was published in the magazine Manoa. He saw
it, and asked me if I'd like to do a book for KI. At first I
wanted to do a book of Hayashi's short stories. The editor was
also keen on the idea, but Kodansha, the parent company,
decided it wouldn't be commercially profitable, and turned the
project down. Then I was shown a list of books recommended by a
committee of literary editors at Kodansha, and Jinsei no
shinseki, which I had read when it came out in 1989, was on it.
(Perhaps I should make it clear that the literary editors who
recommend titles for translation to KI are not the same people
who ultimately decide if those translations will be published.
I understand that at a meeting held shortly after Oe won the
Nobel Prize, while I was still working on the translation,
several people in the accounting section wanted to reject the
project, apparently because John Bester's translation of The
Silent Cry (Man-nen gan-nen no
futtoboru万延元年のフットボール), which KI had published in the
1970s, had not sold well.) I liked Jinsei no shinseki a lot
when I read it for the first time, partly because it clicked in
interesting ways with some things I was reading and thinking
about around that time. It had been quite a while since I'd
read anything by Oe, and this novel was a pleasant surprise.
But I'm sure it never would have occurred to me to translate
it, or anything else by Oe, if this series of coincidences
hadn't led me to it.
2. What particular challenges and pleasures were
involved it translating this novel?
Translating Jinsei no shinseki was without a doubt the most
difficult thing I have ever done. Following the method of
Geraldine Harcourt, a translator I very much admire, I tried to
do as close to a word-for-word translation as possible, and
then after letting it lie dormant for a while, went back and
tried to work it into readable English without consulting the
original. But I found that, in the reworking process, I had to
consult the original quite often because in places my
"word-for-word translation" was almost
incomprehensible.
A lot has been said about Oe's "translation
style," and many Japanese seem to think that
translating Oe is simply a matter of putting his Japanese back
into whatever foreign language it came from. While this might
be true on the level of individual words or phrases (that is,
some of the words and phrases he uses are clearly translations
from French, English, or sometimes Latin), it certainly doesn't
apply to his style as a whole. This leads into the next
question, but I think that going to his house and observing him
at first hand helped me to realize something about his style.
If I had to describe Oe's style in one word, I think it would
be clumsy. (I should add that clumsiness, at least to me, is
not necessarily a negative quality.) He does everything very
quickly, but whereas we usually associate agility with speed,
there's a basic kind of clumsiness about the way he moves. His
speech also has a very odd rhythm. I think that clumsiness
comes out in his style, and that's one thing that makes it hard
to translate. Also, although he apparently has a deep
appreciation of music, as far as dialogue goes, he has a tin
ear. I spent an awful lot of time trying to get the dialogue to
sound right in English.
As far as pleasure goes, there're a couple of long letters
from the protagonist, Marie Kuraki, to the narrator, the
novelist K, and those were the parts I enjoyed translating the
most. There's one particularly beautiful scene in Chapter 10
where Marie sees a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a
church in Mexico City. She's about to burst into tears and fall
down on her knees before the Virgin, but finally decides not to
go that route, and walks out of the church into the evening
air. This is my favorite scene in the whole book, and I enjoyed
translating it. Also, after the whole thing was over, I was
very happy to know that Oe was pleased with the
translation.
3. Did you have any direct contact with the author
during the translation process?
Yes. I went to his house once with my editor just to say
hello, and then once again by myself to ask him some specific
questions about the text. He was extremely helpful and
cooperative, and very interesting to talk to. He also has a
good sense of humor, which helps a lot. But I couldn't help
thinking what an exhausting person he would be to live with,
and soon developed a tremendous admiration for Mrs. Oe, who by
all accounts is a truly remarkable person.
4. I would imagine that translating Tawada Yoko's
short stories would have been quite a different challenge. What
particular problems were involved here?
I translated three of Tawada's stories (I suppose you might
call them novellas): Inumuko-iri ("The Bridegroom Was
a Dog"), Kakato o nakushite ("Loosing
Heels" 踵をなくして), and Gottharuto tetsudo
("The Gotthard Railway" ゴットハルト鉄道).
In the first two, she uses extremely long sentences, some of
which go on for a page or two. The biggest challenge in
translating these stories was to keep those long sentences
intact. It seemed to me that she was using them to draw the
reader into a fantasy world, much as Marquez did in A Hundred
Years of Solitude, so breaking them up would have ruined the
effect. Actually, I had a lot of fun spinning them out----there
was a lot more pleasure involved in translating Tawada than
there had been with Oe. But she uses a completely different
style in the third story, "The Gotthard
Railway," which she originally wrote in German and
then translated into Japanese. It was as though she'd taken a
pair of scissors and cut those long sentences into fragments,
and that really threw me for a loop. I'd gotten so used to
spinning the words out line after line without a break that,
when confronted by all these fragments, I was literally at a
loss for words. I felt as though I was having an attack of
aphasia; for some time, I simply couldn't get anything to come
out at all. I don't think I'd ever experienced the physical
effect of a literary style that way before.
5. Do you think Tawada's works are easy for Western
readers to accept? Did you try to make them easily 'digestible'
for Westerners, or was it your policy to draw the reader into
Tawada's world?
Although the book I did was the first translation of Tawada's
work into English, she has already made quite a name for
herself in Europe. She does much of her writing in German, and
has received three German literary prizes, including the
Adlebert von Chamisso Prize, which is awarded to foreign
writers who have made a significant contribution to German
culture. In addition, (I'm quoting from the blurb of The
Bridegroom Was a Dog now) "[h]er ficiton and poetry
have been featured in journals and anthologies in France,
Holland, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic," so
I think it's safe to say that her work has indeed proved easy
for Western readers to accept, at least in Europe. Bridegroom
has received favorable notices in places like The New Yorker,
The New York Times Book Review, and the Village Voice. Many
reviewers have seen a Kafka-like quality in her work (though to
my knowledge, no one has labeled her "the Kafka of
Japan," as was done ad nauseum to Abe
Kobo 阿部公房). Other readers have told me they find the lack
of exoticism in her work refreshing. Ironically, the only
unfavorable review I've seen so far was in the Japan Times. The
reviewer, who I believe was an American, obviously didn't know
how to read fantasy, but I think that probably had more to do
with the kind of reader she was than with her
nationality.
Of the three stories I translated, the title story,
"The Bridegroom Was a Dog," was definitely
the most "Japanese." The story about a
little princess and her black dog that the protagonist, Mitsuko
Kitamura, tells to her pupils, is a Japanese folk tale that
interested readers can find out more about in books like
Miyashita Noboru's Hime no minzoku-gaku. And there are several
references to another character's smelling like fried bean curd
(abura-age 油揚げ), obviously intended to connect her to the
fox, the trickster of Japanese folklore who is said to be very
fond of this food. Since this would not be obvious to a reader
who knew nothing of Japanese folklore, I did at one point slip
in a comment that wasn't in the original, but that I hoped
would help draw the connection. (No, I won't tell you where.)
But this is the only instance in which I did anything to make
Tawada more "digestible" for Western
readers.
The other two stories are set in Europe. "Loosing
Heels" is about a young woman from a developing
country who goes to a recognizable but very strange European
country as a mail-order bride. "The Gotthard
Railway" is a sort of fantasy travelogue about a
train ride through the Gotthard Tunnel, which the narrator
thinks of as a journey through the body of a man named
Gotthard. Readers who know something about danchi life in
Japan, and are familiar with some of the places names mentioned
in "Bridegroom" will be able to feel the
reality---the sense of place, if you like---in which the
fantasy is grounded more strongly than those who know nothing
about Japan today. The same applies to readers of
"The Gotthard Railway" who have actually
been through the tunnel. But whether a reader is able to
appreciate Tawada's work will ultimately depend on his or her
own imagination. Like all good fantasy writers, Tawada has her
own devices, such as the long sentences I mentioned earlier,
for drawing readers into her world. My job as a translator was
to make them come alive for English readers.
6. Did you identify strongly with either of these
authors or their protagonists?
No, I can't really say that I did. I liked both books a
lot---otherwise I wouldn't have agreed to translate them. But
liking is different from identification. For me, one of the
attractions of translation is that it gives me a chance to get
out of myself; to assume a different identity, if only
temporarily.
7. Some feminist translators believe that only women
should translate works by women writers, so as to truly
represent the female voice. Do you agree or disagree with
this?
If this were true, then it would follow naturally that women
translators are also incapable of truly representing the male
voice, and as the woman translator of a novel by Oe Kenzaburo,
I'd be sticking my neck out in subscribing to it. As a matter
of fact, after reading my translation of Jinsei no shinseki, Oe
told my editor that he'd felt that one of his previous
translators (a man) had used a style that was too feminine, but
that he was particularly pleased with the "strong,
masculine style" of my translation.
One of the interesting things about the relationship between
gender and language (or performance) is that it sometimes gives
us a chance to see the extent to which gender is an artificial
construct. For instance, the Meiji woman writer Higuchi Ichiyo
(樋口一葉：1872-1896), who wrote in a style that harks back to
the women diarists of the Heian period, is generally thought of
as the "feminine" stylist of modern
Japanese literature. But she didn't start out that way. Her
first attempts at fiction were sketches of two
sisters---modeled on herself and her younger sister
Kuniko---discussing ways to make money for their ailing father.
When Ichiyo showed these fragments to her mentor Nakarai
Tosui（半井桃水）, who was serializing novels in the Asahi
newspaper at the time, he told her that the lively
conversational style was too rough and crude for a woman
writer. Women, he went on, are mistaken in thinking that if
they write in a style that seems natural to them it will
automatically be "feminine," simply because
they are women. In order to learn a truly feminine style, he
recommended that she go to the theater and study the language
of the onna-gata (女形)---male actors who play women's roles.
And there you have it---the epitome of femininity, created by a
man impersonating a woman.
It's sometimes hard to say exactly what makes us experience
literary style as masculine or feminine, but whatever it is,
it's clearly not determined solely by the biological sex of the
writer (or performer). For whatever reason, the style of Oe's
male translator seems not to have quite measured up to Oe's
standard of masculinity, just as Ichiyo's style in those first
fragments was not feminine enough to suit her mentor. And while
I don't know exactly what it was that made Oe praise my style
as masculine, I wonder if I might not have subconsciously been
trying harder to create a male voice, precisely because I'm a
woman. (Consciously, I was devoting all my energy to getting
this very difficult text into English; whatever voices I ended
up creating grew naturally out of the "nuts and
bolts" process of polishing and tinkering, getting
everything to sound right.) As I said earlier, I enjoyed
translating Marie's letters. I now think this may have been
partly because the subconscious tension of having to create
male voices suddenly disappeared.
Although there may be some people who are 100% masculine or
feminine, I suspect that most of us are combinations of both in
varying degrees. A good translator---like any good writer---has
to be able to produce many different kinds of voices, some of
which are very foreign to her or his own. In this sense,
translation is a lot like acting. Surely there are men who
shouldn't translate women writers, because they are simply
incapable of assuming a female identity, even temporarily. I
object to Robert Lyons Danly's award winning (!) translations
of Higuchi Ichiyo on these grounds. There's a certain kind of
man who, without even realizing it, assumes a condescending
attitude the moment he starts talking to a woman, and judging
from his translations of Ichiyo, I strongly suspect that Prof.
Danly was that sort of man. But Edward Seidensticker, who is
also a man, did a very fine translation of Ichiyo's story
Takekurabe （たけくらべ）. Although Danly's was done much
later, it was definitely a step backward.
We should also remember that women translators are just as
capable of translating women writers badly as men are. I
recently read a paper which compared early translations of Jane
Eyre, showing that Cristoph Friedrich Grieb, who translated the
novel into German in 1854, captured the immediacy of Jane's
voice far more effectively than Mme Lesbazeilles-Souvestre, who
published her French translation in the same year. This may
have something to do with the general tendency of French
translators to "domesticate" or
"normalize" foreign texts, and of their
German counterparts to "foreignize." But it
also shows that women are not necessarily the best translators
of women's texts.
I really have no desire to set down rules about who should
translate whom. That's something individual translators have to
decide for themselves, after honestly assessing their own
inclinations and abilities. What interests me more is what
translation can teach us about gender, and about how it is
revealed in literary style.
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