Meandering in Translation

Dick’s Toolbox cont.
.. Finnish or Urdu for a moment longer. Not only that, their TV, books, magazines
and newspapers are all in a foreign language. And whilst the canon of English
literature is vast and strewn with masterpieces, such as Peyton Place and
Harry Potter, we only really know the literature of other languages through
a few key books. Russian Literature is probably more than Dostoevsky and Pasternak,
French literature more alive that than Flaubert’s parrot and Proust
desperately recapturing times past. And the key fact is that, unless you are
truly, deeply multilingual, you are taking on trust that these books that
you read in English are in fact the same book as written in its original language.
Many, myself included, regard Haruki Murakami’s books highly, finding
his deadpan prose and surrealistic imagery innovative and engaging. The characters
live in a alienated world resembling an Edward Hopper painting, the protagonists
haplessly at odds with themselves, and where Japanese animist mythology intermittently
intrudes in the form of ghosts and giant frogs. Whilst related to Western
culture, we have a sense of alien familiarity and magic realism couched in
the icons of American consumerism.
Murakami has spent large parts of his life in Europe and America, teaching
for four years at Princeton, and has translated English writers into Japanese
– Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paul Theroux. Yet his books are
translated into English by others; of the two I have on my desk ‘Kafka
on the Shore’ is translated by Philip Gabriel, and ‘Dance, Dance,
Dance’ by Alfred Birnbaum. Curiously Birnbaum and Rubin have both translated
‘Norwegian Wood’. You can compare the different translating styles
as the first story in the book ‘The Elephant Vanishes’ becomes
the opening section of ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’. They are
subtly different.
Being fundamentally illiterate in Japanese I really have no idea how faithful
they are to the original, how well they capture author’s intent , but
I assume, in this case at least, that the translation is as close to the author’s
intention as possible. Not so other languages.
Murakami is quite liked in Japan, but the establishment frowns on him for
not being Japanese enough, as Western critics do as well. The same ‘non-acceptance
in the land of one’s birth’ occurred with the late Akira Kurosawa
who had the same approach to film, in that he drew inspiration from Western
sources – for the visual style and story-telling of John Ford to American
or European literature. We tend to think of him through Samurai epics that
were appropriated into the Hollywood lexicon; movies like the ‘Seven
Samurai’ that was reworked by John Sturges into “The Magnificent
Seven”, or ‘Yojimbo’ that was hijacked by Sergio Leone into
“A Fist Full of Dollars”. In fact, in many of his films he was
eclectically referencing Western literature, from Ed McBain to Gorky and Shakespeare.
Mind you, the Shakespeare is problematic, with ‘Throne of Blood’
(Macbeth) being a wonderful visual and plot parallel to a ‘Ran’
(Lear), which, apart from a number of breath-taking set pieces, is different,
if not bizarre.
It is not until his very last movie, ‘Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams’,
released in 1990 two years after his death, that we see a close parallel with
Murakami. It is a series of film novellas, the most striking of which is “Sunshine”,
where a young boy is told not to venture out in to the forest, as a period
of rain in the village has been followed by a period of sunshine. He is told
by his mother that it’s on days like this that foxes hold their weddings
– and they do not like being watched. Being curious and disobedient
he goes anyway, and observes the foxes dressed in traditional Japanese garb
moving down a forest path in a haunting, halting, rhythmic gait. He tells
his mother, who locks him out from his home until he apologises and pays the
price for spying on the foxes. Here ghosts, animals and people co-exist in
the same world.
But now things are migrating, being culturally appropriated across the Pacific
through anime and manga. With manga the relationship to Japanese ukiyo-e woodblocks
prints is obvious, the flat angularity and strong graphics style flowing in
almost a straight line from Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige. But it is the
saucer-eyed heroines which are the greatest reverse cross-pollination where
the lineage is from Alice in Wonderland through Tenniel’s and Walt Disney’s.
Now in a country where you can buy worn school girl’s knickers from
the equivalent of Coke Machines, the kiddie porn nature of these figures is
probably not a cause of wonder. Here we sometimes look askance.
Japan is one of the world’s safest countries, where straphangers in
trains read R-rated comics, but, even after 150 years of desperately absorbing
American and European culture, it is still a foreign place. I’m not
sure whether the Japanese are baffled by the phenomenon of Western appreciation,
but when I was in Tokyo ten years ago my hosts were acutely embarrassed when
I asked to buy some manga, and they asked of what kind. I stated that they
were famous for sex and violence, and they pointed to an anonymous shop resembling
an enlarged wardrobe near Shinjuku station. Now, if you have ever been faced
with a vertical wall of brown-paper wrapped comics with no possible means
of differentiation, you might realise the subtlety of their revenge.
A final digression: a form of translation which never works is opera singers
of either or any sex, singing popular music – with one notable exception,
which is ‘For The Stars’ where Anne Sofie von Otter meets Elvis
Costello. The project wasn’t commercially successful, which doesn’t
mean it isn’t good. I think it is a wonderful album of contemporary
art song where even Abba’s ‘Like an Angel Passing through My Room’
becomes transcendent. Anne Sofie von Otter uses a delicate nuanced voice to
give classic readings of the Beach Boys’ ‘You Still Believe in
Me’ and the Lennon McCartney’s ‘For No One”. But nothing,
not even this glorious album, will ever erase the true horror of John Denver
singing with Placido Domingo.