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."

What happens if you're possessed by a fox spirit?

In Spirit of the Fox by Matthew O'Connell, a brief Prologue shows a family is being driving out of their remote, rural Japanese village in 1945. The unnamed point-of-view character is a young girl who has a younger brother. She has no idea where they are going, but any place would be better than where she's been.

Jump to present-day Tokyo. Meiko Wright has just finished her undergraduate degree in psychology at UC Santa Barbara, is taking a year off before deciding what she wants to study in graduate school, and has come to Japan with her father David to spend a year teaching English. David is a professor of anthropology with a special interest in folklore, who will be teaching in a Japanese university for a year. Meiko's  mother, Chieko, is Japanese and a successful Tokyo psychologist. Chieko divorced David nine years earlier and returned to Japan, abandoning Meiko, at least in Meiko's eyes.

The story really gets going when Meiko goes to Kyoto for a weekend on her own. She visits the Fushimi Inari Shrine, a real place famous for its tunnel of red torii gates. Inari is the god of rice, fertility, sake, tea, and prosperity. The god's messenger or avatar is the fox and every one of the more than three thousand Inari shrines in Japan has one or more statues of a fox. The Fushimi Inari Shrine parent shrine of all Japanese Inari shrines.

Walking alone in the woods near the shrine, Meiko sees a fox, falls, and hits her head. When she wakes up, she has no memory of who or where she is (although she can still speak Japanese and English). She has no purse, no cell phone, no wallet, nothing to identify her. A priest from the shrine assists her, gives her his card, a prepaid cell phone, ¥50,000 so that she can eat and find a place to stay, a good luck charm to wear, and a special tea blend she should drink regularly to calm herself. The priest gives her a name, Hana, and sends her off to a nearby soba restaurant for a meal.

In short order, Hana, who radiates pure sexual desirability and erotic opportunity, has seduced the married restaurant owner and persuaded him to buy her sexy lingerie; expensive, brand-name clothing; and put her up in a hotel.

Back in Tokyo, David grows concerned when Meiko does not return to their apartment and does not answer her cell phone. Because he is not fluent in Japanese, he has to join forces with his ex-wife, who is after all a native. They contact the Kyoto police, who are not particularly concerned about a young foreign woman who may be shacking up with an attractive man and is not answering her phone.

The police however are interested in a soba restaurant owner who kills himself by jumping off a building. A handwritten note in his pocket says, " . . .My life is ruined. If I had never met you, Hana, would my life be better? . . . Now that I can't be with you, what's the point of living? . . ." We readers know that Meiko/Hana has moved on to another target. Could it be that Meiko has been taken over by a fox spirit? Would that explain the fox tattoo on the dead man's ankle? What has happened to Meiko? She herself does not know.

David, the anthropologist, wants to keep an open mind about the possibility of spirit possession. Her mother, the psychologist, has no sympathy for spirits, shamans, or fox possession. Chieko's mother, Aiko, has her own ideas. And the Kyoto detectives are on the trail of a seductive young woman who is leaving a trail of death and destruction and Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Chanel boxes behind her.

Spirit of the Fox is an interesting story that incorporates Japanese folklore and culture in a mystery for which I was willing to suspend my instinctive disbelief. I do have some quibbles. O'Connell devotes an entire chapter to a class David gives at the international division of Waseda University in Tokyo. While the material is interesting for itself, it has little relevance to the main thrust of the book and slows things down.

On the other hand, a Shinto priest says, "People have a need to believe in something beyond themselves. I would say that it is fundamental to our being. I believe this small omamori [good-luck charm, amulet] is more than an attractive piece of silk and wood. I believe that it helps protect me and guide me along a purer path. Can I prove that? Is there scientific evidence to confirm it? No, of course not. But does that make it any less powerful to me? Again, the answer is no." Here the priest's words do help to move the story along.

By putting every chapter into the point of view of the central character—David, Chieko, Aiko, Meiko, Hana, Detective Nomura—the action for the most part does move along briskly. I found Spirit of the Fox a diverting mystery that held my interest.

Something we can't do in English

In a Japanese short story my conversation partner and I are currently translating, I came across something I don't think we can do.

A young father is taking his four-year-old son to nursery school and the boy asks why his mother isn't taking him and has gone off to work. Because, the father says, "Papa's company has gone bankrupt." I.e,:

「パパの会社は倒産しました。」　("Papa no kaisha wa tousan shimasita.")

The kid responds by asking, "Bankrupt?" I.e,:

「トウサンって？」　("Tousan tte?")

Why, I asked, did the author write "tousan"—bankrupt—in kanji when the father spoke and in katakana when the child responded?

It's because a four-year-old would not know the kanji for the word. By four years old he might know the two syllabaries, katakana and hiragana, but would not know the kanji. By writing the kid's dialogue in katakana, the author indicates visually that it's a child speaking.

I don't know how you'd accomplish the same effect in English.

Polite Lies: How Japan is different from America

Kyoko Mori has interesting qualifications to compare and contrast Japanese culture and society with American. She is a Japanese woman who grew up in Kobe, moved to America to attend Rockford College in Illinois and the University of Wisconsin. She published her first novel, Shizuko's Daughter, a New York Times Notable Book, in 1993 and published Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures in 1997 when she was teaching creative writing at St. Norbert's College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

She says that when she wrote Polite Lies her life was split neatly half: twenty years in Japan, twenty years in the American midwest. The book consists of a dozen essays titled Language, Family, Secrets, Rituals, A Woman's Place, Bodies, Symbols, School, Tears, Lies, Safety, and Home. And by page 5 she's pointed out bilingual announcements on a plane take twice as long in Japanese as in English because "every Japanese announcement begins with a lengthy apology," It's an observation one can make (a) only if you speak Japanese and (b) are sensitive to the implications. Because while the polite apologies fall like spring rain, the "politeness is a steel net hauling us into the country where nothing means what it says."

I thought I knew something about Japan and its culture, but in every chapter Mori told me something new or articulated something I knew but had never put into words or both. For example: "In Japan, there is no such thing as a purely personal choice. Everything you do (or decide not to do) is a symbolic message directed at the world, a manifesto of a philosophical cause you support. Even your rebellion, then, will be interpreted as a sign of your belonging to another group. . . ."

In her essay on Tears she writes that no one in Japan "expects a cab driver to show—or even experience—any emotions in the presence of his customers. That is part of the paradox about emotions in Japan. We are caught to refrain from expressing our feelings in public because to do so is rude, intrusive, and selfish, and yet it is all right for six hundred people to cry together at a funeral, or for an important company official to break down in public in the middle of delivering a eulogy. . . ."

That leads naturally to an essay about Lies, which are "fascinating because there are so many possibilities for invention and embellishment. In a liar's mouth, facts are no longer boring and predictable, but interesting and surprising . . .  My Japanese friends and I were not brought up to lie on all occasions. What we received was a very mixed message: lying is all right under some circumstances, and yet honesty is also very important . . . "

I have been interested to talk to businessmen and America tourists returning from Japan who report that "Tokyo is just like New York" or that "The Japanese are so polite." Polite Lies conveys a much more complex, much richer, much more interesting reality, one that Mori describes as both an insider and outsider. She is also an individual with a unique history and perspective. So while I do not question her generalities, I also suspect there may be individual variations.

More seriously, I wonder how many of her twenty-year-old observations hold up. What effect, if any, do the recession and general economic malaise, the rise of China next door, the spread of the internet and cell phones, the Fukushima disaster, the aging population, the less-than-replacement birth rate, climate change and more have on the culture? I suspect not much, but it would be nice to know. In the meantime, Polite Lies is a fascinating introduction to Japanese culture and society.

Why can't you just say what you mean?

Recently my Japanese conversation partner and I were talking about Japanese culture as reflected in the language itself. In the story I'm currently translating, I had come across anmoku no ryokai (暗黙の了解) which means "a tacit or a silent understanding." 

That led her to teach me the word inginburei (慇懃無礼) which according to my electronic dictionary means:

—insolent under one's civility

—rude under a veneer/mask of politeness

—rude under the surface

—politely insolent

—rude while preserving the outward forms

—studied insolence.

In other words, someone may appear polite, but beneath they are seething. That's when you'll need some tacit understanding.

An all-fired cat lover and his cat's observations

Hiro Arikawa's The Traveling Cat Chronicles (旅猫リポート) is an delightful novel on a couple levels. First, it has an interesting structure. Second, Philip Gabriel has done an impressive job of rendering Arikawa's Japanese into English. (Gabriel has also translated Kenzaburo Oe's Somersault and four Haruki Murakami novels including Kafka on the Shore, so he's got some chops.) Third, as a small book—about 5.5" x 7.5"—it is a pleasure to hold.

The novel begins "I am a cat. As yet I have no name," which is the opening sentence of Natsume Soseki's 1906 novel I Am a Cat. Soseki's novel is a satire on Meiji upper-middle-class society. The Traveling Cat Chronicles is a very different animal. The cat who narrates much of the novel is a stray who is adopted by a young man, Satoru, after the cat is hit by a car. By the time of the accident, the cat and Satoru had established a relationship of sorts because Satoru allowed the cat to sleep on his van's hood and has been feeding him.

Once he adopts the cat, Satoru names him "Nana" because, from the top, his tail "looks like nana—the number seven." Because the character for nana is 七, I have trouble visualizing this, particularly because Satoru's earlier cat had two marks on its face that resembled the character eight—八—and was therefore named Hachi—8. Maybe the tail is the Arabic 7. In any case Nana it is.

Satoru's landlord does not allow pets, so "Satoru moved with me to a new place in the same town. Going to all that trouble to move just for the sake of one cat—well, maybe I shouldn't say this, being a cat myself, but that was one fired-up cat lover."

After five idyllic years, Satoru hits the road in the silver van to find one of his friends who will take Nana. It's not clear until late in the novel why Satoru wants to give Nana up. But after Nana narrates the first chapter describing how he and Satoru connected, Arikawa shifts to a third person point of view to tell the story of Kosuke Sawada, a school chum of Satoru's, who is trying to make it as a photographer and who is separated from his wife. Satoru and Nana visit, we learn about the boys' childhood adventures, about Satoru's devotion to Hachi, and, in first-person POV, Nana's take on the relationship and its history.  Kosuke cannot adopt Nana, so Satoru and Nana travel on to the farm of Daigo Yoshimine.

Similar structure. Third person POV to convey information Nana cannot know: "About three days after Yoshimine had arrived home, both his parents, surprisingly came home from work early. His mother cooked them dinner, a rare thing, and the three of them sat down together to eat." It's hardly a spoiler to reveal that his parents are getting divorced. This material is interspersed with Nana's first-person observations. And although a cat is a good animal to have on a farm, Satoru again takes off with Nana.

The third stop with a similar structure is with Shusuke Sugi and his wife Chikako who run a bed and breakfast that accepts pets. They too have a history with their high school friend Satoru and we learn more about him and the relationship between the three of them. (Satoru was sweet on Chikako.) They, however, already have an elderly cat and a young rambunctious dog. Here's Nana's first encounter with the dog: "Every single hair on my body was now standing on end. If you're going to pick a fight with Satoru, then I—a cat with a strong sense of pride—am not going to just sit here and take it! If you don't want that nose of yours cut to shreds, then apologize right this instant, you mangy mutt!" Satoru again cannot bear to part with Nana, however, and they end up in Hokkaido with Satoru's aunt and where the book comes to it's moving conclusion.

I mentioned Gabriel's translation, which manages to give Nana a recognizable cat-like attitude. For example, here's Satoru at the beginning greeting Nana who has been sleeping on his van:

"Do you always sleep there?" he asked
I suppose so. Do you have a problem with that?
"You're really cute, do you know that?"
So they tell me.
"Is it okay if I stroke you?"
No thanks. I batted one front paw at him in what I hoped to be a gently threatening way.

The Traveling Cat Chronicles will be catnip for readers who are interested in Japanese fiction, or who like cats, or who want to know more about contemporary Japanese society, or all three.