/lit/ - Literature

Try Mishima: Confessions of a Mask or The Sailor Who Fell With Grace By the Sea

>>14364824
Mishima, Murakami (male and female), and the Jap who wrote the tale of Genji.

That's where my knowledge of Japanese literature begins and ends.

>>14364824
The Japanese don't have any real self-consciousness. It's just all about saving face and a cartoonish sense of honor.

>>14364867
this.
flee this artistic wasteland while you can, there is nothing here for those who seek higher meaning

>>14364824

I really like Murakami books although people criticize him for using similar themes across books. Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow trilogy and the sailor who fell from grace with the sea are must reads.

>>14364824
Why are you posting Kwhoreans?

>>14364960
>the sailor who fell from grace with the sea
I heard that was kinda vulgar and gross, it's worth checking out?

>>14364864
>Murakami
Where do I start with Murakami?

>>14364864
>female murakami
???

>>14365010

Not vulgar and gross at all if I remember correctly, depends on what you're used to honestly.

I'd start with Kafka on the Shore for Murakami.

Yo man, you gotta read Kusamakura. It was recommended to me on /lit/ once as a comfy book and it sure is. Great ideas about art and being, it has become one of my favorite novellas.

>>14364824
The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe.

>>14364824
>Kawabata:
Snow Country
Thousand Cranes
The House of the sleeping beauties.

>Dazai:
The Setting Sun
No Longer Human

>Mishima
Golden Pavilion
Confessions of a Mask
The Sea of Fertility

>Also:
Genji Monogatari
Ugetsu Monogatari
The Life of an Amorous Man +The Life of an Amorous Woman

>>14364960
It's not a trilogy, it's 5 books

>>14364824
fuck off you thot posting reetard, faggot, nigger, kike and stop shitting this board up with images of ugly, disgusting gooks making irritating poses, as if they weren't abominable.

>>14364824
cute

>>14365483


My bad, isn't it four though?

>>14365343
The romantic description of the kittens corpse is a pleb filter

>>14365571
Fuck me you're right, idk why i was counting The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the sea as well with the rest of them

>>14365617

I liked The Temple of Dawn a lot less than the other three, that's probably why I thought it was a trilogy! I read them right after the Sailor as well so I get (y)our confusion.

>>14364824
gonna dump some charts

>>14365772

>>14365776

>>14365789

>>14365792

>>14365796

>>14365802
last one

>>14365351
This, Kusamakura is my rec as well. Comfy as shit prose, probably my favorite piece of prose.
Feels good to have read something and be the one reccing it compared to the usual other way around.

>>14365772
>>14365776
>>14365789
Thank you for all these charts

>>14364960
im so mad that there are only a few german translations available of this mishima fag (confession, golden pavilion).

just bought norwegian wood as a present to my sister, did i fuck up

I read Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki and Silence by Shusaku Endo pretty recent. Both are really good and I don't see them referenced as much on here as Mishima or Murakami.

>>14367437
It’s okay, anon. You can admit that you want to fuck your sister.

I'm a Japanese -> English translator with 14 books published, AMA

>>14367500
Dear god why?

>>14364894
higher meaning is a meme. op read dazai and mishima

>>14367505
The pay is pretty solid. Sitting back and translating for a few hours a day is pretty comfy work conditions too. Not to mention being more fulfilling than most retail or desk jobs.

There's also the fact that you can kind of attach yourself to a successful work and ride the existing popularity. I know some writers in real life who published / self-published to practically zero sales. With translating you're guaranteed some degree of attention, since you'll be translating popular/famous stuff to begin with.

>>14367500
what’s your name?

>>14367553
I ain't posting on 4chan because I want to share my name, buddy. Not that it's a big deal.

>>14367500
What are the hardests parts of translating from Japanese to English? Some grammer issue? Voice? Words not having an adequate equal?

>>14367487
is it really that sexual? fuck i need to get a new book present

>>14367585
This depends on the skill of the translator. Some people start too early after beginning to learn Japanese, and the hardest part is understanding the Japanese on a fundamental level. Other people, in fact the majority of J->E translators I'm familiar with, are inexperienced with English writing and the hardest part is just fundamentally producing English text that is fluid and makes sense. Many publishers who deal in translation have an "editor" role that is literally just someone going through the translation and trying to turn it from half-Engrish into readable English.

If you're someone who has a strong understanding of Japanese and can produce fluid English (like me!!!), only then do the problems become more subtle and pernicious. At that point I would say the hardest part is character voices. In Japanese it is extremely easy to give characters unique voices due to keigo and sentence enders. For example:

そうですわ
そうですね
そうですな
そうだな
そうだぞ

These are all the exact same sentence conveying the same grammatical idea (more or less), but merely by switching between polite language/casual language and replacing the sentence-ender you can have 5 immediately distinct character voices with little to no effort. It's just how the language is structured, and it's also partially why stuff like tsundere/ojousama/etc archetypes and the like are so popular in Japanese fiction - it's really easy to write dialogue that matches an archetype's image. But in English, we have no such luck. For pretty much every character in a work you'll need to think up a similar character voice in English, and then apply it every time the character speaks - at this point, it's more creative writing than translating, which is why it's hard. Especially since you can't stray too far from the original text without receiving complaints (perhaps justifiably so). Narrative text can be pretty brainless boilerplate stuff, but never dialogue.

This includes dialects, by the way, which are actually impossible to translate. I believe it was Jay Rubin who, when asked how he deals with dialects, responded that he prays they don't appear in what he's translating. No matter how good you get, you can never translate dialects, and you just have to bust your ass inventing characters voices that don't stray too far from the original. Did I mention that Japanese writing barely ever uses speaker tags, because it's so easy to distinguish characters by their voice alone? That's the level of distinct character voices you need to think up if you want to TL the characters properly.

Outside of character voices, there's the fact that Japanese is highly contextual. It leaves a lot of things unsaid, and often you have to guess what it means, which requires a high level of familiarity with the work in question, Japanese, and more. Sometimes the author doesn't even know what was being implied. Oh I just hit the character limit for /lit/, that's it from me.

>>14367707
Thank you!

>>14365010
Start with Norwegian (love novel kind) or Bird (supernatural kind)

>>14365010
If you want a lighter introduction to Murakami , read his short fiction. They're pretty nice and strange. Like The Bakery Attack

>>14364824
I feel like Ryu Murakami is quite underrated as the western world is obsessed with the other Murakami (Haruki). Not saying the latter's bad. But Ryu writes some serious strange entertaining shit

>>14367707
That's something I've wondered about--how Rubin and others go about dealing with Kansai-ben and the like.

I remember reading some ENG -> JPN translators debating about "I" pronouns, too. Whether a narrator is more of a watashi or a boku.

>>14368343
The answer is that you simply don't deal with kansai-ben. You just invent a new character voice, probably a comedic one, and use that instead. Or you just make them talk like a normal person, knowing that the reader will be none the wiser.

>Whether a narrator is more of a watashi or a boku.
Characters (and people) actually swap their pronouns around constantly based on social setting. Ore with friends, boku with coworkers, watashi when writing an email... and so on. Rarely is a character defined by their pronoun, it's really fast and lose. That said, the pronoun a character by default uses is undoubtedly telling of their character in ways English can literally never hope to compare to, especially in anime where people speak in unrealistic ways (you often see hotblooded guys in anime using "ore" to everyone, when in real life even a yakuza thug will probably switch to something more polite giving the social setting, especially when speaking to someone older than them due to deeply ingrained Confucius values. Most people don't want to come off as a rude idiot that doesn't understand social cues).

In J->E translation, of course, you completely ignore pronouns because they are literally impossible to translate. The most you can do is let them inform your character voice tone a bit. When the focus is drawn to pronouns, you weep and rewrite the scene. (Unless it's an extremely "Japanese work" and the scene is important.)

>>14368429
Sure, it's contextual. But isn't there usually a pronoun a narrator specifically defaults to--not in dialogue with other characters, which is where the code-shifting would happen--in their narrator voice?

Motoyuki Shibata has commented on this difficulty:
"But sometimes you don’t have a perfect answer. I was giving a talk with Haruki Murakami last week in Tokyo and we were talking about the first person pronoun in a Raymond Chandler novel in which the private detective Philip Marlowe is the first-person narrator. Haruki goes for “watashi,” which is rather formal, and I go for “ore,” which sounds more like an outsider. And we agreed that there has to be something in between. Watashi is a little bit too formal and ore smacks too much of an outsider. You think you have many alternatives, but there’s not necessarily a perfect solution."

>>14367500
Translate Teito Monogatari

>>14364864
Thats where japanese literature begins and ends.

>>14364867
>>14364894
Kinda this. There is a lot of flowery stuff, but not a whole bunch of substance. However, one could almost be envious of them. Like you would with a stupid happy dog. The quaintness of the scene prevents a lot of anguish, tumult, and discontent of the West.

Kawabata, Abe, Mishima, Akutagawa, Dazai.
Also, if you enjoyed Tanizaki, check out Quicksand , or In praise of shadows, which is specially beautiful if you're interested in the philosophy behind Japanese aesthetics and poetic systems.

>>14367500
Have you read Japan: An atempt at Interpretation by that greek guy? I thought it was a great introspective read of the japanese, and the auther can really illistrate a foriegn concept well. it was released around 1900, so its a bit dated, but the time period actually really adds to the experience.

>>14364824
>>14364824
If you liked Naomi, you might also like The Key and Diary of a mad old man, both of which were also written by Tanizaki. I also recommend Ryunosuke Akutagawa, very good short story writer.

>>14368678
Yeah, though people swap inside their thoughts, too. I was just trying to elaborate on the subject since I imagine westerners might not realize how fluid pronoun use actually is.
>>14368711
Buddy, books like Teito Monogatari sell like shit. There's kind of like an invisible line of Japanese genre fiction where if you go back too far people just stop buying or caring. Good taste, though.
>>14368736
Why the fuck would I care about what a Greek guy thinks about Japan, especially 1904 Japan? That's the kind of thing foreigners read since they don't know Japanese. If I want to know more about Japan I'll just load up Futaba.

>>14368825
Do you know if anyone's translating more of Haruki's nonfiction and whether there's any plan for a Hideo Furukawa short fiction collection?

Tell me yes; it's Christmas.

>>14368843
No clue I'm afraid. I work for a smaller publisher, comparatively.

>>14368863
I suppose if you mentioned any writers whose stuff you've worked on, you'd be unmasked.

Who's someone whose stuff you'd like to work on?

>>14368878
When it comes to translating I tend to like genre fiction more than high literature, since it's more fun to work on a hack and slashy grand adventure than it is to go through a meticulously crafted, pondering work of art.

To that end I think it would be pretty cool to work on something by Shibamura Yuuri, Shoji Gatoh, Mizuhito Akiyama... Honestly, it'd be cool as shit to do Teito Monogatari, but like I said it would sell miserably (probably). I don''t know a publisher that would take it, anyway. I would actually love to TL Satou Kei's absolute classic series Tengoku ni Namida wa Iranai, but it falls into the same line of "would never sell" that Teito does.

Here's my question for translator anon: what would you say is most likely to have to be sacrificed in a translation, besides word play?

>>14364824
>japanese books
>posts a korean

>>14370054
The most pervasive thing that is sacrifice is doubtlessly keigo (polite language). As you may know, Japanese has a very rigid hierarchy of politeness built into the language itself on a fundamental level. Every single verb, for instance, will either be casual, polite, or very polite. You can never, ever be neutral. Every single sentence will be forced into politeness or not-politeness. To say that English is not equipped for this is an understatement. You can safely assume that every single translated JP work you ever read will be absolutely rife with sliced out nuance due to English lacking built-in politeness. Oh, sure, you can attempt to preserve it, but you'll end up with the most unnatural sounding dialogue ever created where every other line sounds like whoever wrote it had a huge stick up their ass. "Want to go out for drinks?" would become "Would you honor me by considering whether or not you would perhaps like to go out to consume beverages?", and even though that's like grade 101 basic stuff in Japanese, in English it sounds like the character speaking is an alien. Keep in mind that some characters (or people, even) speak purely in keigo (polite language), so you would need to translate every sentence they ever say in that manner. Of course, these efforts would ultimately fail to both convey the original intent and make an enjoyable reading experience, so it's not even worth trying.

But that's kind of broad, isn't it? That's not something that's relevant only every now and again like puns, it's something that's constantly relevant all the time. Not exactly an interesting exception. So, have some examples of things that are more uncommon and situational:

1) Japanese writing uses Chinese characters, 漢字, and all of these chinese characters have readings and can be written in kana. So 漢字 and かんじ are both read the same, they're just written differently - like KANJI and kanji, basically. But the way this is used in Japanese is outright untranslateable. A character will "speak" in kana to indicate they don't know a word. Children will "speak" in all kana to indicate that they're dumb kids. A word commonly written in kana (うるさい) might be written in kanji (五月蝿い) for one artistic reason or another. Sometimes the kanji used for a certain word will be swapped out with another kanji to add layers of meaning. And so on. You can bet that none of this shit is ever getting carried over in translation.

2) In Japanese it's pretty easy to have very feminine speech and very masculine speech, but it's much harder to convey gender so clearly in English. In translation a very manly dude will often end up sounding less manly, and a very feminine character will end up sounding less feminine. English isn't equipped to convey gender through speech the same way Japanese is. (In fact, learning Japanese can actually make English dialogue sound more "flat" gender-wise in retrospect). Oops char limit again.

>>14370270
年収は?

>>14368994
I'd love to read Teito Monogatari, it sounds neat as fuck.