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.Novelist/translators are not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, ofcourse similar figures are common throughout the world, althoughmuch more rare in French and English literary cultures.Even so, how-ever, the number of modern Japanese novelists who have turned theirhand to translation (or vice versa, since many translators eventuallyturn to fiction) is striking, no case being more remarkable than HarukiMurakami.Murakami is an internationally successful novelist, withlegions of readers in places as far-flung as China, Russia, Europe, andSouth Korea.Yet in Japan he is equally celebrated as the translator ofAmerican writers such as Carver, Chandler, Fitzgerald, Capote, and Sa-linger.His translations are best-sellers too, since Japanese readers tendto select books based on their translators, something hard to imagine in aculture such as ours in which the name of the translator seldom registersin a reader s mind.A few years ago, for example, when Murakami s ver-sion of Carver s complete works was just out, I saw red banners flying infront of the Kinokuniya bookstore in Shinjuku promoting the series; notsurprisingly, perhaps, Murakami s name was placed above Carver s andprinted in larger characters.The Japanese profile of American authors whom Murakami translatesthus soars the moment his translation appears even the original Englishtexts are snapped up, though few can read them easily.That Murakami isaware that this affects the reputations, and the pocketbooks, of previoustranslators of the same work can be seen from his afterword, whichtakes pains to commend their efforts on the one hand while lamentingtheir inability to capture his Gatsby on the other.Indeed, beneath themodulated modesty (de rigueur in the Japanese afterword genre), Mu-rakami s announcement that all of American literature is fair game hurlsdown a literary gauntlet.In the process, he also raises the bar for hisPart II: The Translator at Work184 fellow translators by stressing the importance of being able to reenactthe creative process itself that is, how we would have written it, hadwe been the author. Tackling The Great Gatsby, and by implication anyother good novel, means occasionally stepping back from the surfacemeaning of words to try to capture the bigger picture in a style that sings.The problem facing his fellow translators is that no one sings quitelike Murakami, whose distinctive rhythms drawn from his lifelonglove of jazz characterize all that he writes, including his translations.As Jay Rubin puts it in Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, It is awonder that he did not become a musician himself though, in a way, hedid.Rhythm is perhaps the most important element of his prose. Fitzger-ald and Murakami are thus beautifully matched: just as Fitzgerald estab-lished a style for his times by giving his writing a jazz swing, so hasMurakami drawn from Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, and other jazz greatsfrom a later era as well as from American novels such as The GreatGatsby to fashion his literary voice.The influence of jazz and American literature on Murakami has ledsome Japanese critics to call his writing unnatural (read un-Japanese ),especially in the 1980s when he first became popular.Today, though, suchcriticisms seem rather moot having been read by so many for so long,the Murakami style now feels quite normal, especially for those raisedon it (I include myself in this group).Still, some continue to lament itseffects on today s readers, whose view of literature has been narrowed, sothe argument runs, by the likes and dislikes of people such as Murakamiand his occasional collaborator, Motoyuki Shibata, another star transla-tor of American fiction.Given America s postwar military occupationand the decades of American influence that followed, the impact of Ameri-can culture on Japan (and the rest of the globe) is bound to remain aheated issue, and Murakami s writing is placed squarely in the middleof it.Nevertheless, thanks to this deep and long-standing tie with America,Japanese readers come to a work such as The Great Gatsby with consider-able background knowledge.Although few can speak the language verywell, many are comfortable reading English at some level, and almosteveryone has a basic vocabulary.They are also likely to have a vagueimage formed primarily through films of what the Roaring Twentieslooked like.Murakami can count on this experience, which means thatHaruki Murakami and the Culture of Translation185 when he comes to a crucial yet untranslatable phrase such as old sport, he has the option which he takes of leaving it in English, and then dis-cussing it in the afterword.Far better, he insists, to stick with the originalthan replace it with a Japanese phrase whose associations are markedlydifferent.Translators of Murakami s books into Western languages face simi-lar problems, but have no recourse to a similar solution.The word kokoro(mind/heart), for example, which was the title of Soseki s masterpiece,also plays a central role in my favorite Murakami novel, The Hard-BoiledWonderland and the End of the World.There, the hero loses his kokoro whenhis shadow is forcibly detached from his body and spends the rest of thenarrative trying to reunite with it.In English, however, the hero is try-ing to save his mind, a word that subtly alters the emotional and spiritualaspects of his dilemma.Had translator Alfred Birnbaum been given theoption, you can bet he would have left kokoro in the original and thenexplained his choice in a translator s preface.It is hard to imagine a West-ern publisher going along with such an arrangement, however, since trans-lators here are kept tucked safely out of sight to perpetuate the illusionof seamlessness. For English readers, it appears, books need to bedubbed, not subtitled.Part II: The Translator at Work186 FIFTEENTranslating Jacopone da TodiArchaic Poetries and Modern AudiencesLAWRENCE VENUTII write here as a literary translator, prefacing my own work, but I do notintend to offer yet another belletristic commentary on translation.Myaim is also to challenge the prevailing tendency among contemporarytranslators to make fairly impressionistic remarks on their practice, onits literary and cultural values, on the equivalence they believe to haveestablished between their translations and the foreign texts.In adoptingthis approach, translators actually avoid addressing the conceptual prob-lems posed by translation and so inadvertently raise the question ofwhether any translation practice can ever take into account theseproblems without a sustained theoretical reflection.Such a reflection, Ibelieve, can enrich practice in ways that have yet to be fully explored.My starting point is a skepticism as to whether cross-cultural under-standing is possible in literary translation, particularly when the foreigntext to be translated was produced in a remote historical period.Main-taining a strict semantic correspondence to the foreign text, a correspon-dence based on dictionary definitions, cannot obviate the irreparable lossof the foreign context.Translation radically decontextualizes a foreigntext by uprooting it from the literary traditions and practices that notonly give rise to it, but make it meaningful to foreign readers who haveread widely in the foreign language and literature
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