|
|
JAT Bulletin 177, December 1999
The following is an interview with J. Philip Gabriel, who is
a translator of Japanese literature and an Associate
Professor in East Asian Studies at the University of
Arizona.
Professor Gabriel is the author of the recently published
Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao
Toshio (島尾敏雄) and the Margins of Japanese
Literature (University of Hawaii, 1999), and co-editor
of Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary
Japan (University of Hawaii, 1999). He has translated
Murakami Haruki's （村上春樹） novel South of the
Border, West of the Sun (Knopf,
1999：国境の南、太陽の西) and the non-fiction work The
Place that was Promised (Yakusoku sareta basho
de：約束された場所で) (forthcoming), and is presently working
on Murakami's latest novel, Sputnik no
Koibito（スプートニクの恋人）. Professor Gabriel has
also published translations of three of Murakami's short
stories and is currently working on another short story by
Murakami.
His other translations include a short story by Shimao
Toshio, Shimada Masahiko's（島田雅彦） novel Dream
Messenger (Yumetsukai：夢使い), and Kuroi Senji's
（黒井千次）Life in the Cul-de-Sac (Gunsei,
forthcoming： 群棲).
Q. Thank you very much for agreeing to
answer some questions from JAT members about your
translations of Murakami Haruki's works. To start the ball
rolling, could you tell us a little about what led you to
become a translator of Japanese literature?
A. First of all, I'd like to thank you for
the opportunity to speak with you through this email
interview format. Thinking about the questions has been a
good opportunity for me to sit back and consider some
important questions about translation and what some of my
goals are.
My interest in translating Japanese literature goes back to
my first graduate school days, when I first began seriously
studying Japanese literature. When I moved back to Japan in
1981, I joined a small reading circle where I lived (in
Nagasaki 長崎), a group that consisted of Japanese
professors of literature--both English and Japanese
literature--and we met once a week for about two years. What
we basically did was read, side by side, modern Japanese
works and English translations of them.
We spent almost one year, for instance, carefully going over
Mishima's Kinkakuji （三島由紀夫の「金閣寺」） and
Morris's translation of it. This was one of the most
enjoyable experiences I've had working with texts, and gave
me a great desire to try my own hand at original translation
someday. While living in Nagasaki I did a few translations
that skirted the area of literary translation (one was an
essay by a well-known poet who was going to be lecturing in
the U.S.), but it was not until I entered the first
translation contest sponsored by The English Journal
（イングリッシュ・ジャーナルの翻訳コンテスト）that I began to
seriously consider working on literary translation. I entered
both the nonfiction and fiction categories of the contest
(Japanese into English section), won the nonfiction award,
and was told that I'd come very close in the fiction category
as well. This was certainly a confidence builder.
Q. When did you first read Murakami, and
which work was it? Did you immediately think that it was
'translatable' and thought about doing it yourself?
A. I first read Murakami's work in
1986--the two short story collections
Hotaru/Naya o yaku （蛍/納屋を焼く） and
Chugoku yuki no
suroboto （中国行きのスロウ・ボート）. I loved these
stories, and had a dream of putting together a translated
collection of some of them. At the time I was back in the
U.S., just beginning my doctoral program, and somehow along
with doing my other work I managed to translate four or five
of these stories. You asked if I immediately thought the
stories were translatable, and I'd have to say that they
struck me as much more so than, for instance, the work of
Shimao Toshio, the writer I was doing my dissertation on. I
guess my first reaction was to think that I'd run across a
kind of Japanese Kurt Vonnegut--one of my favorite writers in
college--a writer who writes about deep ideas in a highly
entertaining, approachable manner. I had no idea if anyone
else was working on translating Murakami, and just went ahead
for the sheer enjoyment of it.
Q. In an on-line article called Tokyo
Prose, Jean-Christophe Castelli has commented that
"Murakami ... is so translatable that he is, paradoxically,
the most un-translatable of Japanese writers; Everything in
his fiction can be conveyed to an American reader except the
shock of prose that reads so, well, American. His writing
injects the rock 'n' roll of everyday language into exquisite
silences of Japanese literary prose." Do you agree with
this?
A. I haven't read Castelli's article. It's
very tricky for a non-Japanese to comment on how a work or a
writer appears to Japanese readers. My impressions on this
subject are based, of course, on my own reading, on what I've
read by Japanese critics and scholars, as well as the
comments of quite a few Japanese grad students I've worked
with in the U.S. Castelli's notion that Murakami works with
the "rock and roll of everyday language" catches a certain
truth about Murakami's writing. Since his style works with
"everyday language", I don't think this was a "shock" to
ordinary Japanese readers, except perhaps to more
conservative members of the literary establishment who had
their preconceptions about what constituted the "literary."
Something along similar lines comes to mind regarding my
translation of Shimada Masahiko's Dream Messenger.
The original novel contained fairly hefty chunks of writing
in English, mixed in with the rest of the Japanese prose.
This certainly constituted something of a shock to Japanese
readers, I'm sure (there have been books like it since
Shimada's work, but I know of none before his), and along the
lines of what Castelli said, it proved an unwieldy, and
ultimately impossible task to convey a similar sense of
surprise or shock to the readers of the English translation.
In other words, Shimada's original English sentences just
became part of the whole flow of English in the
translation.
Q. Did the fact that Murakami is himself a
well-known translator inhibit you in any way?
A. No, this doesn't inhibit me at all. In
fact, it encourages me, knowing that Murakami himself is so
familiar with the struggles translators go through. Also, his
abilities in English are such that I can approach him with
questions about my translations.
Q. Were you able to communicate directly
with Murakami, either in English or Japanese? When you have
questions do you ask him or send them to the
agency/publisher? Could you give us some examples of
questions related to Murakami novels (e.g., ambiguous
sentences, or simple things like place names)?
A. I've met Murakami once (in Tokyo), and
have spoken with him several times on the phone, and keep in
close touch by fax and letters. Now he has an office in Tokyo
with a staff that is very helpful in tracking down
information. This was especially useful to me when I worked
on the nonfiction book of interviews, The Place that was
Promised （約束された場所で）. The book, interviews
with eight former Aum members, contained many religious
terms, place names, and of course people's names, that had to
be correctly put into English. As I translated, I kept a
running list of these problem terms, and faxed them to
Murakami's office. The staff there, at least once, had to go
back to the editor of the original Japanese book to ascertain
some of the correct readings--and even so, we're still
working on some of them. (The old question of how to convert
katakana words into correct English spelling.)
Some of the more interesting questions that have arisen for
me as I've done translations of Murakami's works have come up
when I've worked on short stories for The New Yorker. The
editors there, as you can imagine, go over everything quite
carefully. One question that came up in the translation of
the story Barn Burning concerned the term
"doji sonzai. （同時存在）" The idea
itself is quite important in many of Murakami's works. The
editor and I played around with the idea of "synchronicity,"
but the editor nixed that because it dated the story--through
association with the Police album, I suppose. The idea of
vocabulary dating a piece I understood, of course, but our
conversations really got me thinking about this point as I
worked on later translations. (We settled on "parallel
existence," by the way.)
One other interesting thing that happened with the most
recent story I did for them, New York Mining
Disaster（ニューヨーク炭鉱の悲劇）, was the editor's
decision to move the final paragraph of the story to the
opening. I preferred to keep it where it was, but deferred to
the wisdom of the editor. I'm not really sure why the editor
decided to move the paragraph from the end to the beginning.
In that case I didn't have a lot of direct contact with the
editor. In principle, I'm not against such changes, since I
moved a whole paragraph in Shimada's novel to a place several
pages later than where it was in the original. These kinds of
decisions have to be made on a case-by-case basis, of
course.
Q. What are the major difficulties in
translating Murakami novels compared with a) novels by other
contemporary writers (e.g., Shimada and Kuroi) and b) those
by writers of older generation (e.g., Shimao who died
sometime ago)? For example, Murakami doesn't use much
onomatopoeia (perhaps because he established his style
through doing
translation himself). But he uses adverbs such as きちんと
[kichinto],, しっかりと [shikkarito] and ちょっと [chotto],
which could be interpreted in several ways.
A. As I mentioned, I find Murakami easier
to translate, overall, than someone such as Shimao Toshio,
for the simple reason that his language is more accessible.
Shimao, whose work I love, too, tends to write in long, long
sentences that twist around a number of perspectives. You see
these perspectives developing in a certain order in the
Japanese--touching imagistic and psychological markers along
the way to a goal--but, because of the differences in
sentence structure between the two languages, it is often
very difficult to maintain the same developing perspective in
English translation and keep your prose readable. Though I
sense certain changes and transformations in Murakami's style
over the years, in general his prose doesn't present the same
difficulty. What is probably the greatest challenge for me in
working with Murakami's fiction is catching the overall tone
of the work.
The voice you hear when you read the original, in other
words. (Uh oh! Am I the only one who hears voices?) As with
all good writers, this tone can change from work to
work.
Linguistically, I guess one of the main challenges is to
convey the freshness and quirkiness of some of Murakami's
images. Some of these are fairly universal (the recurring
idea in Sputnik no koibito スプートニクの恋人 of
the early Sputnik capsule with a dog inside wandering the
solar system as an effective image of individual alienation
and isolation), but others are not. Even with a writer as
"Westernized" as Murakami there are many culturally-specific
images that give the translator pause. There's an image near
the beginning of Sputnik no koibito, for instance,
that describes a person's will as being as strong as the
"Cliffs of Chitose."(I believe that's the
reference; I don't have the book in front of me right now.)
At any rate, something has to be done here. "Cliffs of Dover"
sounds hackneyed. I haven't settled on a solution to the
"Cliffs of Chitose" image. What's important is finding out
whether this is a "normal" or "common" image, or, as is the
case often in fiction, an image the author has come up with.
It's dangerous to make guesses, so I will be asking around,
and if I don't get a good reply, I'll ask the author
directly. It's the imagery, more than things like adverbs or
individual words, that keeps me on my toes.
Q. Were there any parts of Murakami's works
that you felt should be omitted or changed to make the
translation more "digestible" for English readers?
A. One of the things I did in translating
South of the Border was to tighten it up very very
slightly. As I read the book I kept noticing more
repetitiveness than would usually be tolerated in English
prose. Though Murakami may be aiming for a certain effect by
doing this, I felt certain U.S. editors would approve of my
choices. (They did.) When I translated Barn
Burning （納屋を焼いて）, too, the editor decided to
tighten up the ending by omitting a sentence that was, in the
editor's eyes, overly repetitive. I didn't like the idea at
the time, but looking back on it, I can see the point.
(Murakami and I discussed it over the phone. I recall that
initially he didn't like the idea of omitting the sentence at
the end of Barn Burning, ,but he told me that the
editor has the final say, so we should go along with whatever
she decided was best.)
One of the interesting things about Murakami, by the way, is
that he reworked many of his stories when his 1989 Collected
Stories volumes came out. There are, in other words, two
versions of many of his early stories--the original version
and his revised version. He prefers I work on the revised
versions, which was an interesting challenge since all the
early stories I had translated were based on the older
versions.
Q. Murakami has also been translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin. What did you do to be No. 3 (e.g., contacted the publisher or Murakami himself)? Do you think that your approach to translating Murakami differs from theirs in any significant respect?
A. When I was in grad school, as I
mentioned, I had done four or five short story translations.
One day I was contacted by ZYZZYVA, a San Francisco literary
journal that had heard about Murakami and was interested in
publishing a short story. I believe in the midst of
contacting Murakami for permission, the editor passed along
copies of my translations to Murakami's agent. At any rate,
my translation of Kangaroo
Communique (カンガルー通信) was published in 1988 in
ZYZZYVA (the first Murakami short story published in the
U.S., I believe), and when I was in Tokyo, Murakami's agent
contacted me and set up a meeting with the author. I still
had the idea of doing a short story collection, but Murakami
told me someone else was working on this. He was kind enough
to set up a meeting for me with people at Kodansha
International, where I went on to translate the Shimada
novel. Two years later, out of the blue, I got a call from
The New Yorker; they had heard about my work, and wanted to
publish Barn Burning. After that, I read South
of the Border, asked for permission to translate it, and
did it. For the two books after that-- The Place that was
Promised, and Sputnik no Koibito --I was asked
to translate them.
Alfred and Jay are outstanding translators, and I've learned
much from studying their work. In Alfred's translations
there's an amazing sense of language, a very fluid, extremely
witty and entertaining style. Murakami has been fortunate to
have such a skilled translator from the beginning. I hear a
slightly different Murakami in my mind--a writer who, at
times, is a bit distant, a bit "cool," with a decided sense
of ennui at times. (A writer who's often more "cool jazz"
than "rock and roll.") As I mentioned, though, this also
depends on which work we're dealing with.
Q. Do you feel that there is growing
interest in Japanese literature in the US and other
English-speaking countries (in spite of the diminishing
influence of literature that is often talked about in many
countries)? If so, is it because some Japanese novels
(probably Murakami ones too) have become more cosmopolitan in
nature and more acceptable to non-Japanese? Do you think that
Japanese animes (e.g., Pokemon's success in the US market)
would help sell your translations, or are they
unrelated?
A. There seems to be a growing interest in
certain authors who have established a following--Murakami,
of course, Yoshimoto Banana（吉本ばなな）, as well, but it's
very hard for a writer new to the West to break in. This came
home to me when I finished translating Kuroi's
Gunsei and was told that the major New York
publishers wouldn't be interested unless and until Kuroi had
made a name for himself--presumably by having a short story
or two published first. There are, as you know, so few
nationwide venues for publishing serious short fiction that
this becomes a difficult assignment. America's quota for
Sonys knows no bounds, but its quota for Japanese writers, in
each generation, seems limited to one or two. Despite these
difficulties, a small cadre of my dedicated colleagues have
been turning out some terrific translations and widening the
scope of what's available in English. I think they are
responding to a genuine interest, on college campuses and
elsewhere, that I hope will continue to grow.
Q. How is your translation work regarded by
your university? Do you get any "brownie points" for your
translation publications or are they not regarded as "proper"
academic work?
A. Universities here generally do not
recognize literary translation as a major form of academic
endeavour. To receive tenure, of course, you have to produce
scholarly work--papers, books, monographs, etc. Translation
is often just the "icing on the cake." One way around this
dilemma is to publish translations with "scholarly"
introductions or afterword, trying to have the best of both
worlds. But the publishers who have the widest distribution
don't usually want translations with any such scholarly
attachments. I continue to work in three areas--my scholarly
work, teaching, and translating. All three areas are
complementary--with books I translate becoming integral parts
of my scholarly research, and new translations being used to
widen the scope of the literature classes I teach.
Thanks again for the opportunity to speak with your members,
albeit in this disembodied way. I enjoyed the interview.