Just what you want, a transgressive first novel

Thanks to my interest in all things Japanese, I picked up a copy of Hillary Raphael's 2004 novel I [Love] Lord Buddha at a book sale recently. According to a Wikipedia entry last edited in October 2018, "Raphael (born April 12, 1976) is an American novelist, fashion and children's book writer. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City." At Hunter she won the MFA Thesis Prize for the novel, which was published by now defunct Creation Books.

"Although Raphael wrote cult transgressive fiction under her own name, she has made a complete pivot," says Wikipedia. Since 2014 she writes and illustrates children's books under the name Shoshana Banana. Her debut title Family Ties was named one of the Best Jewish Children's Books of 2015 by Tablet Magazine. Her second children's book, Picture a Chinchilla, incorporates vintage textiles. [Her third}  Levi & Aya was published in 2016."

In a 2005 interview to promote I [Love] Lord Buddha, Raphael said, "I have been, professionally: a model, dancer, hostess, journalist, grant writer, bartender, diplomat, waitress, dance critic, CEO’s personnel assistant, backpacker, fashion trend scouter, kept woman, and editor, over the years. I’m originally from New York, but have been resident in Tokyo, Phnom Penh, Rome and Mexico City for long stretches and have travelled throughout the world, from the Sahara to the Himalaya, the Negev to the Alps." She was, at the time, 29 years old.

Asked whether she thought the Japanese male’s motivation for attending a hostess bar—the world of I [Love] Lord Buddha—is the same as a foreign man's, she said, "Lingerie and hostess bars have always been an accepted part of Japanese culture, however I think their current incarnation is more standardized and business-like than it has been in the past—you could say the industry has standardized—and therefore reveals itself in a fresh way even to the Japanese. As for Nihonjin vs. Gaijin clients: the difference boils down to expectation paradigms. Japanese go to hostess bars because they want the service provided there. Foreigners go because they are fence-sitting vis-à-vis the idea of seeing a whore, and would like some risk-averse, easy-ingress prostitution. They are confused. A high-end hostess does not waste her time with foreigners unless they are obviously special."

I [Love] Lord Buddha is, to quote the back jacket, "set in the late-90s Tokyo; it recounts the history of the Neo-Geisha Organization, a sex-and-death cult with an anti-consumerist, pro-hedonist, sub-Buddhist ideology." I quote the back jacket because Raphael does not make it easy for the reader. The 187-page paperback consists of 92 chapters. She does not use capitals to start sentences or for most proper nouns (tokyo, japanese) but uses all caps for the main character HIYOKO. Chapters may be in the first or third person, narrative or haiku, apparent non-fiction or transcribed interviews.

Raphael writes the book from the inside; i.e., with the knowledge that an American woman would gain by working in Tokyo's water trade—promoting drinks and entertaining men in hostess bars. (For another view of that life, read People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Perry.) Hiyoko (or HIYOKO) (formerly Heather Peterson) is a charismatic hostess who recruits other foreign bar hostesses into a cult-like organization and (I believe) initiates a mass suicide to make a point. Not every woman follows Hiyoko. Here is Angelique, an older hostess who think Hiyako is a fraud,  at work:

angelique crosses her legs in a practiced fashion, and looking over yamada's head, makes eye contact with herself in the beige-tinted mirror of the club. she likes to judge herself objectively in moments like these, when she's fully dressed and made-up for work, natural, busy, and taking a light drag on her lite cigarette, and holding the smoke in her lungs, she carefully considered her face. "i'm well preserved," she concludes, "for my age". yamada gently shoves an ashtray toward her, she starts slightly, trying to delicately ash her cigarette, which is burning down to the filter. "anjyariku-chyan, are you dreaming?" "indeed, about you!"

I [Love] Lord Buddha is not an easy read but it does have its pleasures, although I'm not sure I agree with the back jacket that the novel "paves the way for a new literature of undiluted aesthetics and ecstasy." I'm not even sure what that means. I was happy to see that Raphael did use capitals in her 2008 novel Ximena. 

The translation reader's dllemma

"Around 1916, I decided to devote myself to the study of the Oriental literatures," writes Jorge Luis Borges in a fat collection of Selected Non-fictions edited by Eliot Weinberger. "Working with enthusiasm and credulity through the English version of a certain Chinese philosopher, I came across this memorable passage:

"'A man condemned to death doesn't care that he is standing at the edge of a precipice, for he has already renounced life.'

"Here the translator attached an asterisk, and his note informed me that this interpretation was preferable to that of a rival Sinologist, who had translated the passage thus:

"'The servants destroy the works of art, so that they will not have to judge their beauties and defects.'

"Then, like Paolo and Francesca, I read no more. A mysterious skepticism had slipped into my mind."

Mysterious? Skepticism? How about outright disbelief?

The translator's dilemma, Part VI

In the story I'm currently translating, Yusuke, a 36-year-old salesman, becomes unemployed when his company goes bankrupt. His wife goes back to work and Yusuke becomes a house-husband, cooking, cleaning, and caring for their four-year-old son. Shortly after the bankruptcy, Yusuke's former boss, Yamashina phones the house to tell Yusuke about a new company at which there may be a job. Yusuke is not sure he's interested and the conversation ends with the boss saying something and hanging up. Yusuke then thinks briefly about what the boss said. My first, very literal, version was this:

—Yamashina said, bursting with confidence, "There is aoyama any place there are people," and hung up the phone.
    Yusuke, section chief, it was a different way to read it. First of all it was "seizan" not "aoyama" . . . he was about to say but was prudent. A thing of more than twenty years that he'd read differently, it was better to leave alone.

Here's the original:

—山科は鼻息荒く「人間いたるところに青山ありだ」と言い、電話を切った。
　裕輔は、いや部長、それは読み方がちがいます。まず「アオヤマ」じゃなくて「セイザン」で．．．と言いそうになったが自重した。間違い続けて二十年以上物件は、そっとしておいたほうがいい。

My problem was the boss's finally words. The word 青山 can read either as "aoyama" or "seizan." My dictionary gives two definitions: "faraway mountains in a blue haze" for aoyama or "a burial place" for seizan. In the context of the story, neither makes a lot of sense. ("There is a burial place anywhere there are people" is at least English even if doesn't fit the context.)

My dictionary, in addition to defining the word, adds a proverb that uses the word, the proverb the boss quotes: "One's native village is not the only place where there is a green hill fit to be buried on." In other words: "You can make your fortune anywhere in the world." Those words are not even close to the original.

But it does make sense that Yusuke's former boss would tell him he could do well anywhere. But then what do I do about Yusuke's silently correcting the boss's confusing "seizan" with "aoyama"?

Change the proverb. Here's my revised version:

—Yamashina, bursting with confidence, quoted a proverb, "You can make your fortune anywhere but home," and hung up the phone.
    No boss, thought Yusuke, that's not how it goes. It's "You can make your fortune anywhere in the world," but he said nothing. He'd heard the proverb differently for more than twenty years, and it was better to leave it alone.

What if feels like to write in a foreign language

Jhumpa Lahiri wrote In Other Words (In altre parole) for me personally.

Or to put it another way, I can think of few books with which I identify so closely. Lahiri is in love with the Italian language; I'm carrying on an affair with it. Lahiri writes fiction; I write fiction. Lahiri has thought long and hard about translation (and has translated Domenico Starone's Ties (Lacci) among other works); I think long and hard about translation (and translate Japanese fiction).

In Other Words was  translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, and is the translator of, among other works, the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan quartet. It's a book for me because the left-hand pages are Lahiri's Italian, the facing pages are Goldstein's English. Readers with Italian can read the original; readers with only English can read Goldstein; readers like myself who have some Italian can read the Italian (although as I do so, my lips move and I subvocalize) and compare the English. Why didn't Lahiri translate it herself?

Because, she says, "When I write in Italian, I think in Italian; to translate into English, I have to wake up another part of my brain. I don't like the sensation at all. I feel alienated. As if I'd run into a boyfriend I'd tired of, someone I'd left years earlier. He no longer appeals to me." Moreover, "the translation doesn't sound good. It seems insipid, dull, incapable of expressing my new thoughts."

The book includes personal history, observations about language learning in general and Italian specifically, anecdotes about learning Italian, and original fiction. (Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies and has published three other works of fiction.) Most of the chapters are short, and because only half the 233 pages are in English, it's a quick read—unless, like me, you struggle with the Italian.

I love the book, which is why I gave it five stars on Amazon. I find myself agreeing with thoughts I've had but never expressed. ("I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, spike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren't aware of before. We want to transform ourselves . . . ."

I'm delighted Vintage Books published it and I plan to return to it periodically to read the Italian and immerse myself in Lahiri's sentences. What I wondered as I read however was: Who is the reader for this book? How many people care about a writer wrestling with a foreign language? How many can identify with a writer who is able to move with her husband and children to Rome to submerge herself in the language?

I rarely look at a book's reviews before I write about it. I don't want to be influenced even subtly. In Other Words is an exception. A number of the reviewers who gave the book one star complain that the book is boring and the Italian is not of a native speaker's, and they don't like Lahiri. One reviewer wrote: "The best thing this book does is give insight into a very self centered human being who feels like she is a 'victim' of her circumstances and the world. She is a perfectionist who can't fit into to the Italian language or culture because she doesn't fit. She gets upset that her husband seems to fit because of how he looks and his name, but really it's because he has the attitude of an Italian in him the ability to flow and not worry too much. He must be a saint to live with this woman actually! The amount of self-absorption is amazing to me—how does she even find time to be a wife and a mother? The book goes on and on about her inability to really get the Italian language and her fear of losing it and so on . . . ."

Another critic wrote: "Let's leave alone motivation and talk about her Italian, her prose, her style. Undoubtedly, she has an advanced knowledge of the language. Yet her short memoir gave me the goosebumps. She piles up awkward adjectives that in Italian don't work, one after the other, all synonyms of sad, frustrated, confused and so on and so forth. Adjectives used perhaps by Verga, or Petrarca, or whomever she read, but that make little sense now . . . "

To be fair, at this writing, 62 percent of the 185 Amazon reviewers gave the book four or five stars. Saying, once again I guess, that different people bring different backgrounds to a book and take different experiences from it. I'm going to go with the San Francisco Chronicle's observation blurbed on the back cover: "In Lahiri's hands, these essays and stories become an invaluable insight into the craft of writing not as storytelling but as speaking the self into existence."