|
Mirsky: What
brought you to languages, more specifically to Japanese,
and to translation?
Gabriel: My interest in foreign languages
stems from the influence of my stepfather, who was a professor
of Russian, German, and Chinese. As a teenager I studied
Chinese with him, and later majored in Chinese in college.
I was always interested in modern and contemporary fiction,
but the Chinese fiction I encountered during college was
not very stimulating, so on the advice of a classmate, I
began reading modern Japanese literature in translation,
everything from Soseki Natsume to Kawabata to Oe. I was
intrigued by what I read, and wanted to read more—in
the original.
Later I had the opportunity
to live and work in Japan. In Nagasaki, I was a member of
a weekly reading circle with some local Japanese professors
during which we read and compared Japanese short stories
and novels and the English translations. I found this whole
process quite stimulating and fun, and in the course of
our conversations found myself re-translating certain sections.
This piqued my interest in possibly doing my own translations
someday.
In 1985 a magazine in
Japan called The English Journal held a contest for
translators that I entered and won. So the seeds were definitely
sown by the time I entered Cornell in 1986. There, as part
of a paper I was writing, I started translating some of
Murakami’s short stories. Eventually one of these was
published in a small literary magazine—the first Murakami
story to appear in the U.S., and the four or five other
stories I’d done found their way to the author. We
met in Tokyo while I was doing my dissertation research,
and I ended up translating as my first novel the work of
another writer I’d met—Shimada Masahiko. Later
The New Yorker published one of the translations
I had begun in graduate school, and I became one of Murakami’s
regular translators.
Mirsky: The
craft of translation is an unusual one, and one that’s
not well understood. What are your thoughts on translation
as a skill, and on the abilities a translator needs to do
a good job?
Gabriel: I remember once being told by someone
in academia that translations—mine or anyone’s—shouldn’t
count for much because basically anyone who knows the two
languages can do a good translation. Naturally I don’t
agree, and have seen enough poor translations to know that
not just anyone can do a decent job. I recall the words
of a senior translator in my field, namely that one must
have three abilities to be a good translator. The ideas
are obvious, but the concepts and the order have stayed
with me. First, you need to have a good command of your
own language (the assumption being that you translate into
your own language)—a skill honed by reading good literature,
including good translations. Second, you need a solid knowledge
of culture, particularly the cultural context of the writer
and the original work. And third, you need a good command
of the original language. The order here is interesting,
because most people would assume that number three is the
top priority.
In other words, you
must be a decent, and hopefully better-than-decent, writer
yourself in order to do justice to the original work—hardly
a new thought, but one worth keeping in mind. The reader
of a translation, after all, is not going to read a single
word by the original writer, and as translator your own
prose must do the original justice. And being a good writer,
as every writing program tells us, depends on being a good
reader.
I think it’s a
necessity to live in the country whose language you’re
translating. I don’t think it’s a good idea to
live there permanently, but at least a few years of experience
is critical. My first encounter with Japanese was on the
streets, so Japanese has, from the start, been an entirely
living language to me. This allows me, when I read and translate,
to hear the language and picture the situations and
characters.
Mirsky: How
do you approach a translation? What are your steps?
Gabriel: My banal comparison is to climbing
a mountain—if you look up at the summit you’ll
get dizzy and want to give up, so especially with long books
it’s best to keep your eyes focused on the path in
front of you and take one step at a time. In my case, when
I translate, I get myself in the right frame of mind by
reading fiction in English that’s similar to the work
I’m translating. The day before I translate a section
I go over the text carefully with my dictionaries and try
to get it all firmly in my mind. There is a danger, however,
in over-preparing, because you then lose a sense of freshness
and enthusiasm over the section you’re working on.
After preparing a section,
the next day I just sit at the computer and directly type
in the translation, marking spots I need to come back to.
I’m always trying to work in translation around my
main job—teaching and doing research—so I try
to get up early in the morning, before the rest of the family
is up, and do my self-assigned section for the day, a rough
draft of four to five pages. This usually takes about three
hours. Though I usually work early in the morning, I paradoxically
find I sometimes do my best translation when I’m very
tired. The other day I stayed up all night in order to go
to the airport for a 5 a.m. flight, and to stay awake I
did some translating. Somehow I was coming up with amazing
language, the words just flowing out, making me think that
the unconscious—or something hovering on the edge of
the unconscious—was at play.
After I’ve finished
the entire book (my last one, a novel by Oe, was 900 pages),
I go back to the hundreds of spots I marked to try to solve
the problems. Getting the correct readings for place names
and people’s names in Japanese, for example, is difficult—even
native speakers are often not sure, because the Chinese
characters all have multiple readings. In one novel I translated
a minor character’s name one way, only to find that
the author preferred an alternate reading of the name. (Thank
goodness for the search-and-replace function on the computer!)
After I’ve straightened
out most of the problems, I read through the whole translation
in a few sittings to see how it reads as English. This editing
is actually the part I enjoy most (running down the mountain
after reaching the top). Finally, I compare, line by line,
the original and the translation to catch any mistakes or
omissions. This is very time consuming—and usually
ends with me having to get a pair of stronger glasses—but
with some authors (Murakami, for instance, who is himself
a noted translator), I get a lot of feedback that helps
me revise and catch potential problems.
Mirsky: Is it
a challenge to work with the kind of authors you do, living
and famous? Is it a strain?
Gabriel: With living writers there is both
extra pressure and extra satisfaction. The pressure, of
course, comes from knowing that their watchful eye hovers
over the project, but this leads to the satisfaction of
entering into a dialogue not only with the text, but with
the creator. Oe and I, for instance, sent quite a few faxes
back and forth as I tried to locate references to other
literary works within the novel. Translation is often a
lonely business, and this part of the process ameliorates
some of the loneliness and isolation.
Mirsky: What
encourages you to take on a job?
Gabriel: I guess what I find the most stimulating
is tackling a new writer and reaching the point where I
finally feel comfortable with his, and my own, voice—where
the voice I hear in my head as I read is the same voice
that coming out in translation.
I’m the type of
person who likes to meet deadlines, but it’s also comforting
to have at least some editors and publishers out there cheering
on the translator, who recognize that translating a work
of literature, no less than its original composition, is
a creative act.
Mirsky: How
do you handle the cultural issues inherent in translating
a book originally designed for Japan and Japanese readers
into something comprehensible for an American or English
audience?
Gabriel: Most of the books and stories I translate
are quite contemporary, so the number of problems related
to cultural context and cultural differences are fewer than
if I were doing earlier literature. Even so, the western
and Japanese lifestyles are different enough to create all
sorts of minor difficulties. One difficulty I’ve encountered
in several works is the question of how to convey a verbal/visual
image of ordinary Japanese homes. When I worked on Kuroi’s
Life in the Cul-de-Sac, for instance, I found it
a challenge to convey a picture of the small Tokyo suburban
neighborhood depicted in the novel. The author, of course,
writing for a Japanese audience, could assume that most
of his readers could readily call up a mental picture of
the setting. In that novel the actual houses and the physical
neighborhood play a vital role in the story—the “ghost”
of an earlier house rises up, in an entirely placid way,
to haunt one of the inhabitants of the present house that
replaced it—and I still wonder how well English readers
can picture the interiors and exteriors of Japanese homes
when reading the translation. Fortunately, I was allowed
to write an afterword, but publishers generally eschew any
footnotes or explanatory essays.
Presently I am working
on an historical novel set in the bakumatsu period
(1850s-1860s). The author, quite naturally, assumes a certain
amount of knowledge on the part of his Japanese readers,
an assumption that doesn’t apply to my readers.
(It also means I have to do a considerable amount of research
and background reading.) Furthermore, the novel depicts
early encounters between Americans and Japanese. This creates
a lot of difficulties for the translator, as the author
explores the linguistic and cultural encounters. The novel
uses the Japanese script katakana when characters
converse in English or a mixture of English and Japanese,
but, unfortunately, the contrast between scripts gets flattened
out in translation. A similar problem arose in the first
novel I translated, Shimada’s Dream Messenger.
The novel contained chunks of text that were actually in
English in the original. On the printed page in the original
you had a striking contrast between the two languages that
disappeared in the English translation.
Every novel, no matter how imaginative, has its basis in
some aspects of a shared culture, which is why it’s
so vital to have a hands-on experience of the country. Much
recent Japanese fiction—Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto,
for instance—does seem very international and not too
“Japanese,” but there’s still a lot of Japanese
fiction which requires a working knowledge of how Japanese
people live, think, and interact, best obtained through
first-hand experience. Since Japan is a fast-changing place,
it’s important that I visit every year to recharge
my linguistic and cultural batteries.
Mirsky: As you
may be aware, Knopf published Sándor Marai’s
Embers in an English translation by Carol Brown Janeway
that was itself translated from a German edition translated
from Hungarian. How do you feel about this sort of thing?
Gabriel: I haven’t heard of the case,
but I know that sort of practice goes on far too much. The
German translation of Murakami’s South of the Border,
West of the Sun, for instance, was based on my translation
of a Murakami novel, not the original. A hundred years ago
this kind of second-generation translation was more common,
but nowadays, when there are many good translators out there,
I have trouble understanding the justification for the practice.
Mirsky: How
has being a translator informed your own writing? What are
you writing at the moment?
Gabriel: I think translating has opened my
eyes to the many possible ways of conveying a thought, or
constructing an argument. This actually makes it more difficult
for me now when I do my own writing (academic papers, for
example), for I can’t leave the phrasing alone and
am constantly tinkering with how I’m conveying
an idea.
Translation certainly
alters my perception of English. When you translate, the
strong points and weak points of your two languages come
into sharp focus, and I find myself sometimes getting frustrated
at the limitations inherent in any language.
The book I’m writing
on spirituality in Japanese literature explores the fiction
(and in one case non-fiction) of four modern Japanese writers,
including Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami. The book grew
out of my own personal religious beliefs and interests,
as well as translation projects I was involved in—the
translation of Murakami’s non-fiction book Underground
on the Aum affair, and his later novel, Sputnik Sweetheart,
and my most recent translation, of Oe’s novel Somersault,
a novel that also grew out of the Aum affair.
Mirsky: Is there
anything you think informed readers should know when they
sit down to read a translated work?
Gabriel: Readers should know that translations,
if they’re worth anything, are always labors of love.
Excuse the crass mention of money, but figured on an hourly
basis, translations pay about as well as working at McDonald’s.
Readers should read translations critically, but should
keep in mind that what they hold in their hands is the result
of months, and often years, of an intense intellectual struggle.
They should know that the translator loves the work, and
has tried his very best to guide the reader to share this
love. Murakami’s very first novel, Hear the Wind
Sing begins: “There is no such thing as perfect
writing. Just as there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”
Obviously there is also no such thing as a perfect translation,
either, but I do not despair … Quite the opposite.
I love what I’m doing. 
|
