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A review by spacestationtrustfund
Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words by Jay Rubin
2.0
I cannot say I am myself a "fan" of Murakami Haruki's writing, nor particularly of the man himself. I've read a handful of his books, mostly in French or in English, and selected passages from the original Japanese, mostly for the purposes of translation comparison. But I don't particularly care for his writing style, his characters, his when-in-translation idiolect—a certain amount of this can be traced back to the fact that I've met more than the acceptable amount* of Westerners who have read one or two Murakami books in translation and are apparently under the impression that Murakami's writing is emblematic of the entirety of Japanese literature. (I find this particularly ironic because Murakami's popularity in the core anglosphere is far greater than his popularity in Japan.) But also I just don't think he's an exceptional writer, despite occasionally beautiful prose or compelling ideas. So it should come as no surprise that I didn't really spend much time on the hagiographical parts of this book. Sorry, did I say "hagiographical"? I meant "biographical." No I didn't.
The most interesting part of this book for me was the appendices regarding translation. Jay Rubin is himself a longtime translator of Murakami, among other Japanese authors, into English. Regarding The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Rubin writes:
This whole mess raises the question of what, precisely, is the role of the translator. Is it a translator's job to edit the work, correcting errors and tightening confusing areas? I would argue that it is not: a flawed work in one language should not be "upscaled" or "retrofitted" in another language, even if it would make the work arguably "better." Rubin claims that the "amount of 'adapting' [he] did was small in the overall context," but I would argue that the minor changes add up: in his translation of Norwegian Wood, for example, Rubin omits a "no smoking" sign** on an aeroplane, invents a new line of dialogue, halves certain sentences' word count, and changes "BGM" (background music) into "soft music." These changes all take place within the first six paragraphs. None of these details are unique to Rubin, however: Japanese novels are frequently published as multiple volumes, something atypical to Western fiction markets, usually resulting in abridgement by either the translator or the publisher; publishers responsible for publishing translations of foreign works almost always encourage substantial changes to the original text in order to make the translated product more palatable to an Western audience. Of Murakami's œuvre this is probably most obvious in regards to 1Q84 which, in its English translation, is around 920 pages—and doesn't even come close to the length of the original three volumes, which are 550, 400, and 470 pages, respectively. Around 500 pages are lost.
I also don't care for Rubin's (and, by extension, Murakami's) view on "re-translation," which is the process of using a "pivot language" to translate not from language A to language C but rather from language B to language C. For example, the first and most popular German translation of one of Murakami's novels used the prior English translation as a pivot, translating not from Japanese → German but from [Japanese →] English → German. Think of this practice as a game of telephone: the more times a text is "processed" through different languages, the less it will resemble the original. If you've ever fed song lyrics into Google Translate, forced them through various languages, and gleefully read the near-incomprehensible result, you know exactly what I mean. Any mistakes present in the Japanese-English translation will then be replicated in the English-German translation, which will then inevitably make its own errors of varying size (because translation is an inexact science and human translators are faillible). The "re-translation" phenomenon (personally I refer to these works as "palimpsests") is fascinating from an outsider's perspective, because all transformative art is fascinating, but endlessly frustrating from the perspective of a translator who is keenly aware of the slippery slope this trend is skiing. When I'm reading a work that was originally in a language I don't know, I want to read something that's as close to the original as possible. But that's just me.
*The acceptable amount, i.e., none.
**To his credit Rubin does address this: "No one reads a book as closely as a translator, which is why the bracketed part of the following sentence was removed from the first page of the translation of Murakami’s bestseller: 'Once the plane was on the ground, [the no smoking sign went out, and] soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of The Beatles’ "Norwegian Wood."' This may help prove Murakami’s point that the details are less important than the story." Well, I'm a translator.
The most interesting part of this book for me was the appendices regarding translation. Jay Rubin is himself a longtime translator of Murakami, among other Japanese authors, into English. Regarding The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Rubin writes:
With regard to abridging the translation, I [...] would never have considered cutting it if the US publisher, Knopf, had not stipulated in Murakami’s contract that the book should not exceed a certain length. Concerned at what an editor might do to the text, I took the initiative to make cuts based on my knowledge of the novel, leaving in more than the specified number of words. Knopf accepted my edited version without a whimper (which suggested to me that I probably could have left more in). [...] The cuts occur primarily at the end of Book Two and the beginning of Book Three. Books One and Two were published in Japanese as a single unit and were accepted as complete by many Japanese readers. Much of the end of Book Two, however, involving Tôru’s indecisiveness about whether or not to go to Crete with Creta Kanô, was rendered almost irrelevant by Book Three, so I did not feel too bad about leaving that out. I still think the translation is tighter and cleaner than the original, but I suppose that very tightness can be viewed as a distortion of the original, an Americanization of a Japanese work of art. I had a great time doing it, though it turned out to be a much more complex process than I had imagined.As Rubin mentions, what was published as a singular novel in English was released in Japan as several volumes, a common practice not only in Japan but in many other countries. In this respect the US/UK market is the outlier. Rubin goes on to explain that he rearranged certain scenes in order to remedy "several chronological inconsistencies which were not deliberately placed there by the author," noting that Murakami himself "contributed many minor cuts that have since been incorporated into the Japanese paperback edition of the novel."
This whole mess raises the question of what, precisely, is the role of the translator. Is it a translator's job to edit the work, correcting errors and tightening confusing areas? I would argue that it is not: a flawed work in one language should not be "upscaled" or "retrofitted" in another language, even if it would make the work arguably "better." Rubin claims that the "amount of 'adapting' [he] did was small in the overall context," but I would argue that the minor changes add up: in his translation of Norwegian Wood, for example, Rubin omits a "no smoking" sign** on an aeroplane, invents a new line of dialogue, halves certain sentences' word count, and changes "BGM" (background music) into "soft music." These changes all take place within the first six paragraphs. None of these details are unique to Rubin, however: Japanese novels are frequently published as multiple volumes, something atypical to Western fiction markets, usually resulting in abridgement by either the translator or the publisher; publishers responsible for publishing translations of foreign works almost always encourage substantial changes to the original text in order to make the translated product more palatable to an Western audience. Of Murakami's œuvre this is probably most obvious in regards to 1Q84 which, in its English translation, is around 920 pages—and doesn't even come close to the length of the original three volumes, which are 550, 400, and 470 pages, respectively. Around 500 pages are lost.
I also don't care for Rubin's (and, by extension, Murakami's) view on "re-translation," which is the process of using a "pivot language" to translate not from language A to language C but rather from language B to language C. For example, the first and most popular German translation of one of Murakami's novels used the prior English translation as a pivot, translating not from Japanese → German but from [Japanese →] English → German. Think of this practice as a game of telephone: the more times a text is "processed" through different languages, the less it will resemble the original. If you've ever fed song lyrics into Google Translate, forced them through various languages, and gleefully read the near-incomprehensible result, you know exactly what I mean. Any mistakes present in the Japanese-English translation will then be replicated in the English-German translation, which will then inevitably make its own errors of varying size (because translation is an inexact science and human translators are faillible). The "re-translation" phenomenon (personally I refer to these works as "palimpsests") is fascinating from an outsider's perspective, because all transformative art is fascinating, but endlessly frustrating from the perspective of a translator who is keenly aware of the slippery slope this trend is skiing. When I'm reading a work that was originally in a language I don't know, I want to read something that's as close to the original as possible. But that's just me.
*The acceptable amount, i.e., none.
**To his credit Rubin does address this: "No one reads a book as closely as a translator, which is why the bracketed part of the following sentence was removed from the first page of the translation of Murakami’s bestseller: 'Once the plane was on the ground, [the no smoking sign went out, and] soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of The Beatles’ "Norwegian Wood."' This may help prove Murakami’s point that the details are less important than the story." Well, I'm a translator.