TRANSLATING MURAKAMI

The following is an email roundtable conducted from Dec. 18, 2000 to January 18, 2001.

The participants were:

Philip Gabriel, Murakami translator and professor of Japanese literature at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Jay Rubin, Murakami translator and pprofessor of Japanese literature at Harvard University.

Gary Fisketjon, editor at Alfred A. Knopf.

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From: Philip Gabriel
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2000 5:28 PM
To: Gary Fisketjon; Jay Rubin
Subject: Re: A email roundtable: Translating Murakami

This is Philip Gabriel. I'm an associate professor of Japanese literature at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I've done my academic work on postwar literature, particularly that of the writer Toshio Shimao, about whom I wrote a book entitled Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Toshio Shimao and the Margins of Japanese Literature. I've also co-edited an anthology of writings on contemporary Japanese literature entitled Oe and Beyond. As far as translation is concerned, I've done one novel by Masahiko Shimada, one by Senji Kuroi (forthcoming), two by Haruki Murakami(plus half of his non-fiction work UNDERGROUND), and four short stories by Murakami--counting just the ones that have been published. Right now I'm submitting another Murakami short story for possible publication, and am working on a translation of Kenzaburo Oe's latest novel. [My whereabouts this week--I'll be here in Tucson, but will be leaving for Japan on Dec. 27.]

I first learned about Murakami's fiction in 1986, as I prepared to go back to graduate school. I was living in Nagasaki and was actively involved in a translation study group made up mostly of Japanese literature professors (of both English and Japanese literature.) Just before I left to return to the U.S., one of the professors and I went to a book store together. I'd asked him to recommend four or five writers he thought worth studying. This proved to be a memorable day for me, since three of the four he recommended were writers I ended up either studying or translating: Shimao, Kuroi, and Murakami. I read all of Murakami's short stories (they were in two collections) as soon as I could, and was really bowled over by them. I loved his light touch, his humor, his often quirky take on life, as well as the touch of nostalgia for the past that often appeared in these early works. In graduate school (at Cornell) I wrote a paper on one of these stories, and translated it as an appendix. I'd done some translation before, and enjoyed the challenge, and went on to translate three or four more of Murakami's stories for my own enjoyment. The editor of ZYZZYVA, a literary journal published in Berkeley, California, somehow heard I'd done some of Murakami's stories, and asked me to submit one. This was "Kangaroo Communique," which was published in the fall 1988 issue, making it, I believe, the first Murakami story published in the U.S.-- Murakami's agent in Tokyo was contacted at this time, and all the translations I had done eventually found their way into her hands, and into the author's.

In 1989 I went to Tokyo on a Fulbright to work on my dissertation. There I was able to meet Murakami; I had hoped to do a collection of his short stories, but he told me this was already in the works by someone else. I got involved in translating a novel by Masahiko Shimada, and in trying to find a permanent teaching position back in the U.S., and did not do much more in the way of translating Murakami until The New Yorker contacted me in 1992 asking to include my translation of "Barn Burning." After that two more of my translations appeared in The New Yorker (the latest one the Dec. 4, 2000 issue), and I was fortunate enough to be allowed to translate the novels SOUTH OF THE BORDER, WEST OF THE SUN and SPUTNIK SWEETHEART as well as the non-fiction work "The Place that was Promised," which became Part Two of the English book UNDERGROUND.

Before settling down in Tucson, by the way, I was briefly a junior colleague of Jay Rubin's at the University of Washington. I remember at least one discussion in his office about our shared interest in Murakami, and I'm looking forward to this email conversation as a way to continue our conversation after a hiatus of many years.

The happiest moment translating Murakami's work, of course, is when you finish and can look back over what it's taken many months to accomplish. When I'm working on a novel, I try to translate four pages a day; my not very original analogy for it is that it's like climbing a mountain--if you look up, you may get dizzy and give up, but if you struggle on, step by step, one day you'll find yourself standing at the summit. (Exhausted and out of breath. But exhilarated.) Then comes the process of wending your way back down the slopes, which in translation is the process of reworking the finished draft--retracing your earlier steps. I always recall Raymond Carver's comment about his favorite part of writing being the slow, careful re-writing process after he was finished a decent draft of a story. The polishing and repolishing part. I really enjoy this part of the process, too, and spend a great deal of time going over the translation as an English text--before going back to re-check it against the original.

One moment that stood out to me most recently was when I was working on SPUTNIK SWEETHEART: In chapter five there was a short quote from Pushkin's poem Eugene Onegin. In cases like this--quotes in Japanese from other languages--of course you need to find the original language, and with languages other than English, I try to locate a reputable, existing translation. I hadn't realized Eugene Onegin was a book-length poem, and visualized myself sitting there for hours trying to locate these lines in the English version. Fortunately, the lines came early in the poem. What was interesting was that I located four different versions of the poem, from which I copied out these translations of the lines:

(1) He had no itch to dig for glories/ Deep in the dust that time has laid.
(2) He lacked the slightest predilection/for raking up historic dust.
(3) He lacked the yen to go out poking/Into the dusty lives of yore--
(4) He had no urge to rummage/in the chronological dust.

I copied all these down in my notebook, and ended up choosing (final answer?) number one to include in the translation of SPUTNIK SWEETHEART. Seeing all four versions side by side was a mini-revelation to me. When I got home I pinned these all to my bulletin board--where they still remain--as a reminder of a simple truth, namely that there are so many possible translations of even one line. So very much depends on the voice you hear in your head as you read a piece of fiction. That's the voice you're trying most to reproduce when translating something like a Murakami piece. People ask me what's the most challenging part about translating Murakami, and I guess that's the answer: finding, and staying true to, the voice you hear as you read the original.

Here's a question to the other panelists: Do you detect a change, over time, in Murakami's style, voice, and vocabulary? In terms of his "themes" I sense a more serious approach these days, and I wonder if you see this reflected in the way he writes. And another question: Why do you think Murakami become the one "breakthrough" Japanese writer in the West (apart from Banana Yoshimoto)?

Thanks.
Phil

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From: Jay Rubin
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 5:23 AM
To: Gary Fisketjon; Philip Gabriel
Subject: Re: An email roundtable: Translating Murakami

This week I'm writing from Kyoto, Japan, where I have been since June, running a joint research project on Noh, a dramatic form that has survived in Japan since the middle ages. Usually I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I teach Japanese literature at Harvard.

Noh has been a sideline of mine since I was in graduate school in the sixties, but this year I'm going at it full time. Most of my work has been on writers who flourished in the early twentieth century, and I had little interest in contemporary Japanese writing. Somehow, whenever I sampled any, it seemed thin and immature in comparison with the great Meiji-Taisho giant Soseki Natsume.

Then, in 1989, I read Haruki Murakami. I had only been vaguely aware of his existence--as some kind of pop writer, mounds of whose stuff were to be seen filling up the front counters in the bookstores, but I hadn't deigned to read what was sure to be silly fluff about teenagers getting drunk and hopping into bed. Some months before A WILD SHEEPCHASE came out in English, an American publisher asked me to read a Murakami novel to see if it was worth translating; they had been evaluating a translation but wanted an opinion on the original. The book turned out to be what was later translated as HARDBOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD, and it absolutely blew me away--so much so that I have hardly worked on anything besides Murakami for the past decade.

I told the publisher that they should by all means publish a translation and that, if they were not satisfied with the translation they were considering, they should let ME do it. Well, they ignored my advice on both counts, and Alfred Birnbaum's translation came out a few years later from Kodansha.

After years of concentrating on muted gray Japanese realism, I could hardly believe a Japanese writer could be so bold and wildly imaginative as I found Murakami to be. I can still see the colors of the dreams escaping into the atmosphere from the unicorn skulls near the end of the book when I think back to that first reading of HARDBOILED WONDERLAND, and I remember how much I regretted closing the last page and realizing that I couldn't live in Murakami's world anymore. I hadn't reacted to a writer so strongly since I had been obsessed with Dostoevsky as an undergraduate. I got everything of his I could put my hands on and started reading him to the exclusion of anyone else.

I especially loved the stories. I found Murakami's address in the library and told him I had half a dozen stories I wanted to translate. His agent at the time got back to me saying I could go ahead. I sent her one of my favorites, "The Second Bakery Attack," and the next thing I knew Murakami himself was on the phone, asking me if I minded publishing it in Playboy. Used to publishing my academic stuff for audiences of twelve, I leaped at the chance, whatever scruples I might have had regarding the Playboy "philosophy." What a kick it was to publish something with the Swedish Bikini Team on the front cover! The illustration for that first story was a masterpiece, too, an ukiyoe-style depiction of the robbery scene in McDonald's. The New Yorker took "The Elephant Vanishes" around that time.

Murakami surprised me one day soon after by saying that he was calling from Princeton. I was probably the only professor of modern Japanese literature in the country who didn't know he was there at the time. In fact, he was going to be coming to run in the 1991 Boston Marathon that April, and we met in Cambridge the day afterward when he attended a class of Howard Hibbett's that was discussing my still-unpublished translation of "Bakery Attack." We were later neighbors in Cambridge and saw a lot of each other. I drove him crazy a few times asking him to explain some dense passages and finding inconsistencies that his Japanese editors had missed.

Since Alfred seemed to be the exclusive translator of Murakami's novels (the lively job he did on SHEEP CHASE was largely responsible for the interest in Murakami in the U.S.), I got Murakami's OK to do stories that Alfred hadn't shown any interest in. To me, they were the best stories, and Alfred was missing the boat. The ones that he liked I usually didn't like. We almost never asked for the same stories. It was downright strange. When Gary Fisketjon at Knopf took on the job of compiling a volume of stories, he chose from the backlog that Alfred and I had sent in separately, and put them together entirely according to his own taste. Then, stranger still, reviewers of the book would almost invariably cite only stories that I had translated or stories that Alfred had translated, almost never both. There was some weird intuitive thing at work in Gary's compilation that combined Alfred's taste and mine, and then spoke to readers who were drawn to one or the other.

Having translated virtually all the novels, Alfred got tired just as Murakami was beginning to serialize THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE and Murakami asked me to do it. I actually got started on it while Book 1 was still appearing in the magazine--something of a gamble for a professor used to choosing canonical works by long-dead authors in large part for their historical importance. I still think the clairvoyant Kano sisters detract from the book, but the war-related chapters, especially, are some of Murakami's best writing, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to translate what is, so far, his most serious novel.

This maybe leads into an answer to Phil. Sure, there's a jazzy, jumpy quality to the early writing that is just about gone by HARDBOILED WONDERLAND. I think I would not have liked Murakami's writing much if I had first read anything else, including NORWEGIAN WOOD (which I would have understood only on the most superficial level). I've been able to enjoy almost everything of Murakami's, knowing that he was the creator of that incredible mind trip, HARDBOILED WONDERLAND, echoes of which are to be found in everything. I've just finished translating his collection of short stories related to the Kobe earthquake, ALL GOD'S CHILDREN CAN DANCE, which are probably the most nearly conventional pieces he has ever written, with a third-person narration in a muted style. They are wonderfully subtle pieces, touching on the earthquake as a distant rumble in the lives of people of the mid-nineties, as fragile as deja vu (one of his most consistent themes). (Not all the stories can be called "conventional"--especially my favorite, "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.")

A final question? How about it, Gary? Can you give us some insight into your compilation of THE ELEPHANT VANISHES?

Phil, I have absolutely no idea why Murakami became such a "breakthrough" writer in the West. From the beginning, I felt he was writing for ME, and I always assume I have quirky tastes not shared by many others (Dave Barry surprised me that way, too, by winning the Pulitzer Prize). I did not choose to work on him after a judicious review of all the current Japanese writers that convinced me he was the best: I just knew that I was not likely to find another writer anywhere in the world who spoke to me so directly and personally, so I jumped into his world without the least hesitation. How can so many other readers be feeling that way? Murakami gets inside your brain and does weird things to it. I remember one Murakami moment I had after translating the passage in THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE where little Nutmeg climbs into her veterinarian father's lap and smells all the animal smells he brings home on his body from the zoo. All of a sudden, I was singing "Oh, My Papa, To Me He Was So Wonderful."

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From: Philip Gabriel
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 12:17 PM
To: Jay Rubin; Gary Fisketjon
Subject: Re: An email roundtable: Translating Murakami

Phil here. Some questions for Jay: One of my graduate students wrote a thesis on WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE, and though I don't recall the specifics, I believe she mentioned some Japanese chapters that, in the translation, were either substantially altered or not translated at all. Does she have this right, and if so, what were the decisions behind this? Also, I remember reading somewhere that when Alfred did his translation of HARDBOILED WONDERLAND, Murakami approached him with some revisions/additions he wanted incorporated into the English version; I wondered whether similar things happened with WIND-UP BIRD.

This last point may be related to one of the problems I've encountered translating modern Japanese literature: a different notion of editing in Japan. What I mean is, at times I notice inconsistencies, repetitions, and illogical parts in original Japanese texts that I am pretty sure an American editor would have weeded out. When I translated an early novel (not by Murakami)I felt at times that I was both translating AND editing. (They wouldn't let me get paid for both, unfortunately.) My editor said something that had stayed with me, namely that works by popular Japanese writers are rushed into print with minimum editing (by our standards) and that editors in Japan play a less active role in suggesting changes to texts. Thus when it comes time for people like us to translate them, we--and our editors--have to massage the original to make it fit OUR notions of a tight, logical text. (And possibly writers such as Murakami realize this and have second thoughts about certain sections of their books once they are going to be translated?) I haven't felt this was a problem too much with Murakami's works, except for some occasional repetitious sentences--the same idea rephrased in two contiguous sentences; I found this to be the case in SOUTH OF THE BORDER, for instance, where I tightened up the text slightly by omitting a few sentences I felt needlessly repeated ideas.

This raises, of course, the whole idea of "naturalizing" foreign texts--neutralizing differences, etc. How far should we go in eliminating or toning down differences in order to make a book palatable to a western audience? Maybe this doesn't really apply much to the two breakthrough writers of the 90s--Murakami and Yoshimoto--and maybe this is part of the reason for their appeal. In other words, are these two writers are somehow less distinctively "Japanese" than other writers and thus more easily digested abroad? I remember the editor at The New Yorker for my first story for them, "Barn Burning," adding a phrase "here in Tokyo" to one of the first sentences of the story (which reads, with the addition, as I recall, "I met her at a party here in Tokyo.") The logic behind this addition was, according to the editor, the fact that readers of Murakami's seemed to not realize the stories were Japanese, and we should give them a clue up front.

Another question to Jay: What did you think of SPUTNIK SWEETHEART as a novel?

For Gary: My students who are into Murakami ask me often about why the publication of NORWEIGIAN WOOD was delayed for so many years, and I have no idea how to respond. What accounted for the unusual timing of the American edition? Another question: how do you decide on the covers for the American editions of Murakami's work? The cover of SPUTNIK for instance--is the mirror imaging supposed to depict the "split" nature of Miu and/or Sumire? As the translator, I know people will ask me what it "means"...

Phil

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From: Jay Rubin
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 8:43 PM
To: Gary Fisketjon; Philip Gabriel
Subject: Re: An email roundtable: Translating Murakami

The cutting done on WIND-UP is a complex matter. The more you look into it and into the question of revision, the more you realize there is no single authoritative version of ANY Murakami work: he tinkers with everything long after it first finds its way into print. I once heard that Willem de Kooning would occasionally follow a painting of his to the gallery and revise it on the wall, and Murakami's willingness to fix his stuff reminds me of that.

I did virtually all the cutting on WIND-UP, but I would have done none at all if Knopf hadn't told Haruki that the book was too long and would have to be cut by some number of words (I think it was around 25,000 words). Afraid that they would hire some freelancer who could wreak havoc on the novel, and filled with a megalomaniac certainty that I knew every word in the book--maybe better than the author himself--after having translated all three hefty volumes, I decided to forestall the horror by submitting my manuscript in two versions: complete, and cut. Knopf took my cut version pretty much as is (which no doubt saved them a lot of work and expense; like Phil, I was not recognized as an editor in anything other than the notice in the front of the book).

Having recently completed Book 3, Haruki felt incapable of cutting that, but he had enough distance from Books 1 and 2 to mark many passages for elimination--many SHORT passages that didn't add up to much in terms of word count. I included most--BUT NOT ALL--of his cuts as part of my cut version (in some, I thought he had taken out important passages), and of course sent the entire cut version to him. Later, when the paperback version of the Japanese text appeared, I found that Haruki had incorporated into that many--BUT NOT ALL-- of the cuts he had suggested for the translation, so the hard cover and paperback versions in Japanese are different from each other.

(For example, there is no reference to the illustrator Tony Takitani, a character from an earlier Murakami story, in either the translation or the Japanese paperback. Obviously, Haruki had enjoyed throwing the name in as an in-joke, then thought better of it during the process of revising for the cut translation, which he then carried over into the paperback.) Haruki did NOT, however, adopt the large cuts made for the translation into the Japanese paperback, though I have not done a systematic comparison of the two. Another different text is the British version from Harvill, which has British spellings and expressions. An energetic graduate student could have a field day tracking down all these differences, though it would probably be a waste of time. I do think, though, that if THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE outlives its time and becomes part of the canon fifty years from now, a re-translation will be needed, and scholars can have a fine time screaming about how Jay Rubin utterly butchered the text.

As for Japanese editors, you're right, Phil, they don't edit-not the way Knopf and The New Yorker do.

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From: Jay Rubin
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 10:21 PM
Cc: Gary Fisketjon; Philip Gabriel
Subject: Re: An email roundtable: Translating Murakami

P.S. Sorry I had to rush off the computer during the last message, realized I hadn't quite answered everything.

About SPUTNIK. I think we're back to the divergent tastes issue. Without going into a lot of detail, it just didn't appeal to me past the wonderful opening passage. I found too much of it too predictable. Murakami himself recognizes that not everybody likes everything of his.

About the student's finding whole chapters missing from the translation of WIND-UP BIRD. It's true. I felt that Book 3, which came out a year after Books 1 and 2, rendered much of the ending of Book 2 irrelevant, thought that, as long as major cutting was being required by the American publisher, that part of the book was the best candidate for cutting. 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, and I'd probably have trouble myself now trying to reconstruct the steps I went through.

Phil's question to Gary about covers reminds me of the case of WIND-UP BIRD. Knopf did an absolutely knock-out job on that book, with a beautifully colorful mechanical wind-up bird on the dust jacket, a transparent raised plastic spring mechanism laminated over it, the same mechanism printed on the cover itself, circular mechanical motifs throughout the book, including page numbers that rotate around the edge of the page, etc. etc. I think it won some kind of prize (though I was never told so directly). I pointed out to them early in the process that, much as I liked what they were doing, there is a passage in the book that says specifically the wind-up bird is NOT a mechanical wind-up toy, but there was no turning back. (Finding out what the wind-up bird is is a large part of the experience of reading the book, so I would prefer not to blurt out what I think it is.) I might point out, however, that, far from being a mechanical toy, it is not a physical entity of any kind, or at least it is not visible: it exists only as a cry.

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From: Jay Rubin
Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2001 8:22 PM
To: Gary Fisketjon; Philip Gabriel
Subject: Re: An email roundtable: Translating Murakami

Some additional thoughts on translating from Japanese to English -- in general, the Japanese have a far more sensitive and sophisticated awareness regarding food than most Americans. The number of food-preparation shows on TV--PRIME TIME--is amazing. So when a Murakami character makes himself an egg salad sandwich, Japanese readers are going to feel something a little different from what American readers are going to feel about it. There is no way to convey the cultural context regarding that sandwich in a translation, except perhaps through scholarly footnotes, which would only succeed in destroying anyone's enjoyment of the text. So you just have to have the character make his sandwich in English and figure it's not going to be THAT different. The fact that the word "sandwich" is written in a phonetic script reserved for recording foreign terms, that the Japanese reader's eye travels vertically down the page to take in that word and the other words of the sentence, that the Japanese word for "cut" has a tiny picture of a sword in it: all these facts about the Japanese writing system are fascinating but are of interest only to foreign students of the language and are no more exciting to a Japanese reader than the snake-like shape of the "s" in the word "sentence." As I pointed out in my book Making Sense of Japanese (Kodansha International), the Japanese language is not processed in either hemisphere of the brain but in the left elbow, which makes for a certain calcification of style in literary works, but no translator has yet figured out how to convey this in a foreign language. The Japanese language is SO different from English--even when used by a writer as Americanized as Murakami is--that true literal translation is impossible, and the translator's subjective processing is inevitably going to play a large part. That processing is a GOOD THING; it involves a continual critical questioning of the meaning of the text. The LAST thing you want is a translator who believes he is a totally passive medium for transferring one set of grammatical structures into another: then you're going to get mindless garbage, not literature.

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From: Philip Gabriel
Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2001 8:22 PM
To: Gary Fisketjon; Jay Rubin
Subject: Re: An email roundtable: Translating Murakami

Phil here. I thought Jay's comments on food were interesting. I remember seeing a translation (Jay's?) in The New Yorker a few years back that opened with the characters preparing Japanese food. As I recall, none of the dishes were translated, just romanized (e.g. miso shiru, etc.). When dealing with culturally bound vocabulary there are three choices for the translator: leave them as they are, add some simple explanation, or find a rough English equivalent. (As an example of the last case, in translating one of Osamu Dazai's novels Donald Keene translated shochu--a Japanese type of liquor--as "gin." Which wouldn't have been my choice, by the way!) To give you an example from SPUNICK SWEETHEART, one of the characters, Sumire, is at one point eating a "Mont Blanc" in a cafe in Tokyo. I originally just left this as "Mont Blanc," but Murakami was worried that people in the west would think she was eating an expensive fountain pen, instead of a type of cake, so we decided to make it a generic "cake" instead. This isn't an ideal solution, since it eliminates some specificity that existed in the original, but it does avoid the possible misunderstanding.(Sumire is a writer, a bit neurotic, so who knows, maybe she DOES chew on her fountain pen. Just kidding...)Another recent example is from "Man-Eating Cats," the story in The New Yorker I did recently. There, two characters are eating breakfast at a "Royal Host" in Tokyo. Again, I left it as is, but Murakami thought Americans aren't familiar with this restaurant chain, and asked that it be changed to "Denny's." And that's what we went with. Royal Host, though, is a pretty nice chain of restaurants, often found in the major airports as well as elsewhere, and a step above Denny's, I think. So this is an example of "rough equivalent."

All the culturally bound items in a text are a challenge to the translator; part of the reason that Western readers read Japanese literature is to learn something about a different culture, yet flagging these culturally bound items and loading on an explanation makes the reading experience far different for the western reader; in other words, the western reader would dwell on things the Japanese reader would skim right over. Another example of this is vocabulary related to the interior/exterior of Japanese houses. I remember having a heck of a time translating the word engawa in a story by Yoko Ogawa; the word roughly means a kind of verandah, but in the story the character was dangling her legs down to the ground from the engawa, something difficult from your usual porch or verandah, at least in the part of the world I grew up in. In the novel by Senji Kuroi I just translated, entitled "Life in the Cul-de-Sac," there is a lot of detail about the interior of homes that make it very difficult for the translator. At times I felt like just including a couple of photos or drawings of a Japanese house and saying: here! study these and then let's move on! The idea of a "cul-de-sac," too, is very different between the two cultures. The cul-de-sac in the neighborhood described in Kuroi's novel is a narrow, cramped little space, yet in the U.S. often a house on a cul-de-sac is a very desirable location. Fortunately, I was given a translator's preface in which to address some of these issues. The use of extra space between sections of each chapter in SPUTNIK SWEETHEART is unusual at times, with breaks between sections that, to the western reader, should not be there. The editors often suggested eliminating the spaces where two sections most "logically" belonged together. I generally resisted this change; there might be some vague analogy between these spaces and the ways a director such as Ozu lingers over certain "empty" moments. This may be a false analogy, but at the very least these spaces give the reader are meant to give the reader pause, and a moment to reflect. Eliminating them was, to me, an example of overly "naturalizing" or domesticating a foreign text. In other words, the spaces were put there for a reason, so let's ponder the reason first instead of just reacting in light of the models we're used to. In an interesting article on translation several years ago, Edward Fowler made the point that, in translating from a language such as Japanese into English, rather than always fitting Japanese into what English can do, we should consider how this process could enrich the possibilities of English.

Regarding the use of a mixed writing system in Japanese and its effects on the reader, I agree with Jay that it's basically a non-issue. The one thing I would bring up, though, is the basic word order difference between Japanese and English. One writer I've worked on is Toshio Shimao, who tends to write long sentences that twist around a number of perspectives before arriving at a settled conclusion. In translating these, I find the English tends to reverse things, giving away the punch line that, in Japanese, is delayed. I am struggling with the same thing in my present translation of Kenzaburo Oe's novel.

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From: Fisketjon, Gary
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2001 2:14 PM
To: Philip Gabriel; Jay Rubin
Subject: Re: An email roundtable: Translating Murakami

I'm Gary Fisketjon, Haruki's editor at Knopf (starting with THE ELEPHANT VANISHES, published in the spring of 1993) and, for years before that, his avid reader in so far as he was available in English (including tiny little books translated for Japanese students studying English). I can't recall whether I'd discovered him on my own or because of his relationship with Ray Carver, a dear friend of mine whom Haruki was translating into Japanese, but we're more or less in the mid-late 80s. Before long, I think just prior to the publication of A WILD SHEEP CHASE, we had occasion to meet; we talked a lot about Ray's work, and I confessed my deep admiration of his own novels and my anticipation of the one forthcoming, and Haruki responded that he didn't think it was very good, nor the one to come after, but maybe the next one...

Anyway, my interest in his work derived from an intense though amateurish fascination with Japanese literature and culture for a couple years at Williams College, where I had a professor, Peter Frost, who proved an irresistible guide to such matters. I plowed my way through the so-called Big Three (Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima) and naturally became utterly entranced by Mishima, who became the subject of a very, very long paper I must've spent six months on. So the groundwork was laid in the mid 70s, and when I first encountered Murakami I felt strongly -- as I still do -- that he properly belongs next in that hugely distinguished line of writers.

Then, skipping ahead, while by 1986 I was running the Atlantic Monthly Press and certainly would've been keen to publish Haruki, he had his relationship with Kodansha (and I don't poach writers) and so I was a friend in court, as it were, content to spread the word however I could that a great novelist was among us. I moved to Knopf in 1990 and before long so did Haruki, and given my convictions I was the most plausible editor for him. And that's about that.

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A footnote to Philip's mention that the editor of ZYZZYVA had approached him about Haruki: Ray Carver had a connection to that same magazine, so I wonder if this was strictly coincidental, which chicken preceded which egg -- but in all it seems a perfect instance of synchronicity, or, for that matter, the sort of weird happening that you come across in Haruki's fiction.

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As to Jay's discovery of Haruki, that shock of recognition is always, exactly and pretty much only what I'm looking for as a publisher who wades through countless submissions and manuscript: the realization that here, amazingly, is something to reckon with, and with a writer of Haruki's caliber of course this effect is magnified considerably. In a black-and-white world, here by god is something in color (or vice-versa, at any rate entirely new and different and naturally, therefore, unexpected).

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As to Jay's curiosity as to the selection of stories for THE ELEPHANT VANISHES, that's pretty simple: I studied what was available and picked -- to my own taste, of course, since I don't know anyone else's -- the best. I don't think I paid any attention to who translated whichever story or, for that matter, much else about my decision-making process. I still recall vividly, though, that I was seeing sides of Haruki's fiction that were altogether unfamiliar to me, based on what I'd read. For example, "Barn Burning" struck me at the time as very Carver-like in a strongly, surprisingly pleasant way. I also thought the collection we put together was pretty much drop-dead terrific, and in fact it enjoyed sales and reviews beyond most collections even by not-well-known American writers.

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As to Philip's comments on editing while translating, I don't see how any good translator could separate the two -- starting with this word as opposed to that one, this structure or implication. Therefore the trust that a publisher places in the translator -- especially out of ignorance of the original language -- is not only of paramount importance but indeed essential. (For example, I couldn't have chosen the stories for THE ELEPHANT VANISHES if I had to guess what a particular story was any good. I had to just assume I was reading a good, fair, representative translation; moreover, I also assume that an editorial function has also been fulfilled, so in effect I'm giving up some editorial control -- which is fine when not one but two excellent translators are on the case. I also put trust in Haruki's wisdom in selecting translators, whom I think consider to have his authority to do their job, and that would certainly include rejecting subsequent editorial idiocy such as "here in Tokyo" line that Phil mentioned, or for that matter any tendency to stress Japanese-ness for its own sake. Unless the author for some reason feels obliged to lend such emphasis, adding or enhancing it seems more properly the realm of travel guides than of literature.

My thinking on NORWEGIAN WOOD is, again, simple. I had been given to understand that Haruki wasn't particularly keen on seeing either the existing translation or a new one appearing in English, so I let it sit. I did, maybe four or five years ago, pass on word to his agents that his Norwegian publishers, who I could vouch for, were understandably keen to publish it, and that permission was granted. But, similarly to my translation observations above, I also trust Haruki's agents to fairly represent his thinking, and such was this case.

As to the SPUTNIK jacket and all others, I look for -- above all -- something somehow engaging, attractive in the literal sense and surprising, and do NOT look for anything itself literal or reductive. Evocative is the key term, I suppose, beyond which I leave it to the designers' analysts to ponder the deeper meaning. So, I trust the designers too, but only once they come up with the goods. Then it's dealer's choice.

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Ah, Jay, the cutting of WIND-UP BIRD. I'd meant to note above that national traditions vary with editing as with everything else. Though I had my suspicions about the thoroughness of the Japanese version, I can only assume what Philip says is true. (Certainly some countries, Italy being at the top of the list, can be counted on to do absolutely no editing or even, apparently, reading -- though the same is undoubtedly true of certain American publishers.) A related subject is national traditions in the manner of publication. In Denmark, for example, many friends there will tell me not to regard a particular novel as a novel at all, but as part of an ongoing novel-in-progress published bit by bit, as it were, so the author could qualify for government grants. In return, I say I'm not used to that tradition and have no reason to change my tune from judging a writer book by book. So the serial publication of WIND-UP BIRD would seem to fall somewhere in between. My reaction was that it couldn't be published successfully at such length, which indeed would do harm to Haruki's cause in this country; then I put my trust in Jay and determined, once I'd read his work, I was right to, and that this was the way to go. Haruki's cooperation dispelled any worries about ham-fisted, vulgar editorial (or commercial) interference on our part. And your work, Jay, did save me no end of time for which I'll always be thankful; of course I couldn't have tackled that job myself, not without the language, not without the much greater access to Haruki, and so forth. But no, we editors never get credit in the book for whatever it is we do, and that's true of the editorial end of the translator's job as well.

Regarding NORWEGIAN WOOD, I really had to wait for Haruki's interest to be made clear to me, with respect to this book or the order of publication (however out-of-sequence it might be). I can base my decisions only on what's available, when it's available, and then start factoring in my thoughts on building a career or controlling its rhythm; that is, don't publish two books every five minutes and then disappear for several years, but instead try to maximize the writer's presence in the bookstores by pacing publication and thinking about paperback editions as part of that process. Now, with NORWEGIAN WOOD, one consideration I had was that since a different translation was out there, doing the new one in hardback made relatively less sense, especially since no much dead time existed between SOUTH OF THE BORDER and SPUTNIK SWEETHEART, and I believe our decision to move straight into paperback has proved correct. Similarly, since the non-fiction book didn't seem likely to build on what we were accomplishing with the fiction, again Vintage seemed to best way to get the book in the hands of as many readers as possible -- which is a mantra all publishers ought to live by.

As to the BIRD jacket, see above, though I'll add that the entire package was as good as we can manage and really sort of an inspired -- and expensive -- lunacy, and that I'm convinced that the mechanical toy was the way to go.

I'll close with the question about how Haruki became THE breakthrough Japanese writer in the West: because he's the best, and the best since Mishima, and because he continues to grow and change and mystify, probably surprising himself as much as his readers en route.

And so, based on the sound principal that editors, like children, are best unheard if necessarily trotted out to make the occasional appearance, I'll shut up knowing fully well that I've probably missed the odd transmission or query, which I am happy to do in my haphazard fashion. And with many thanks for your patience and fascinating conversation.

Happy new year to one and all,

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From: Philip Gabriel
Sent: Jan. 18, 2001
To: Jay Rubin; Gary Fisketjon
Subject: Re: An email roundtable: Translating Murakami

This is for Gary, from Phil. I really enjoyed reading all your comments. It's interesting for me to see things through an editor's eyes. When I mentioned having to edit as well as translate (when translating Japanese novels) I was thinking of more than just the usual decisions a translator makes. To give you an example, when I was translating the Shimada novel, Dream Messenger, there was a long paragraph in one of the early pages that just did not belong there, as far as I saw it, and fairly screamed out to be moved a few pages later, where it could logically, and smoothly, introduce a new character. My editor at Kodansha agreed, and we made the move. I felt I needed to alert the reader to this, and other more minor changes, so I had a statement added after the title page to the effect that the book was "translated and adapted with the permission of the author." I know that after the changes done to WIND-UP BIRD this is very small potatoes, but I remember thinking long and hard about the role of the translator (this was my first novel, after all) before giving myself the dual role of editor and translator.

Are there any plans afoot to publish Murakami's first two novels, HEAR THE WIND SING and PINBALL, 1973? As you know, they've been available in Japan from the Kodansha International English Library -- those small books for Japanese high school students you mentioned). I always told interested people here to order them through the LA or NYC Kinokuniya, but after my last trip to Japan (two weeks ago) and many visits to bookstores there, I got the impression that they may not even be available from Kodansha. (They were nowhere to be found, in other words.) Sure they're not the blockbusters that his later novels are, but I think they're enjoyable, give a lot of insight into Murakami's approach to writing, and should be made available. (Each one is so short, though, that it may be good to combine them into one two-part novel in English.) Any plans to issue them, or retranslate them? (Hint hint!)

Best wishes,
Phil

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From: Gary Fisketjon
Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2001 5:50 PM
To: Philip Gabriel; Jay Rubin
Subject: RE: Translating Murakami

Dear Philip,

Translator has more in common with the editor, in precisely the instance you describe, than you might've thought. I just don't think about what it is, exactly, that I do; merely give notes and advice to the writer, who then owns, invented and has full authority for whatever he chooses to do with them.

I believe I read HEAR THE WIND SING in that little pocketbook edition back in the days of yore, but I haven't seen the thing in over a decade. And until I hear anything that suggest Haruki's all for having them out over here, I'm in no rush to complete the ouvre for its own sake and instead will keep concentrating on what's available and forthcoming. Flooding the market works just as well as flooding an engine, pretty much every time. My mind, such as it is, is open, however...

All for now, and thanks again,

Gary

 

From: Philip Gabriel Sent: Monday, December 18, 2000 5:28 PM

From: Jay Rubin Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 5:23 AM

From: Philip Gabriel Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 12:17 PM

From: Jay Rubin Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 8:43 PM

From: Jay Rubin Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 10:21 PM

From: Jay Rubin Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2001 8:22 PM

From: Philip Gabriel Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2001 8:22 PM

From: Fisketjon, Gary Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2001 2:14 PM

From: Philip Gabriel Sent: Jan. 18, 2001

From: Gary Fisketjon Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2001 5:50 PM