/lit/ - Literature

>>23303522
Japanese literature is pretty bad overall, yeah.

How in the world did this help Kawabata win the Nobel prize? This is hands down the worst translation I've ever read. It reads like a machine translation. Actually, it reads worse than one at points. I'm just so confused at how this ever got so much praise, and why it still does to this day. Seidensticker is a fucking retard. At first I thought he must've just been an overconfident ESL, but no. And what's even wilder is that Kawabata apparently signed off on it. Let's take a look at this shit. It almost makes Kawabata read like a trashy, wanna-be Hemingway:
>He knew that if he spoke he would only make himself seem the more wanting in seriousness. Overpowered by the woman, he walked along wrapped in a soft happiness. Abruptly, at the foot of the stairs, he shoved his left fist before her eyes, with only the forefinger extended. “This remembered you best of all.” “Oh?” The woman took the finger in her hand and clung to it as though to lead him upstairs.
>... All this Komako told him with no hesitation, but she said nothing about the girl who had brought the man home, and nothing about why she herself was in this house. Shimamura felt most uncomfortable at what she did say, however. Suspended there in the void, she seemed to be broadcasting to the four directions. As he stepped from the hallway, he saw something faintly white through the corner of his eye. It was a samisen box, and it struck him as larger and longer than it should be. He found it hard to imagine her carrying so unwieldy an object to parties. The darkened door inside the hallway slid open.
>The sick man he had watched in that evening mirror, then, was the son of the music teacher in whose house the woman Shimamura had come to see was living. He felt a current pass through him, and yet the coincidence did not seem especially remarkable. Indeed he was surprised at himself for being so little surprised.
>He wondered whether the flowing landscape was not perhaps symbolic of the passage of time.
>“You’re here.” Clinging to him, she sank to the floor. She leaned against him as she spoke. “I’m not drunk. Who says I’m drunk? Ah, it hurts, it hurts. It’s just that it hurts. I know exactly what I’m doing. Give me water, I want water. I mixed my drinks, that was my mistake. That’s what goes to your head. It hurts. They had a bottle of cheap whisky. How was I to know it was cheap?” She rubbed her forehead with her fists.
What the fuck? Is this the best one of the "greatest translators of classic and modern Japanese literature into English" can do? His Tale of Genji translation is just as bad, too. I feel like I'm going insane with how everyone seems to love this and call it "beautifully economical". This? This is what made people say that "Kawabata's novels are among the most affecting and original works of our time"? It's not just the critics either, because I went around searching for other people's opinions, and apparently everyone loves this trash but me. Come the fuck on.