9/15 Reading Comments

I gained a lot of insight on the intricacies and difficulties of translation in these four articles that I previously had trouble putting into words to convey.

In Wendy Lesser's article, I first found her section on the dichotomy of translators in being "brilliant shadows" while still being invariably inserting their own writing characteristics into their work. She brings forward the bias one may have for certain writing styles, or for familiarity in the case of preferring the translation you found first. Lesser's section on Murakami was also great to see, as the translations of Birnbaum being compared to Rubin really brought home the point of matching a writer's style and tendencies cross-linguistically. Murakami's knowledge and interest in the West shows in his work, and Birnbaum's ability to show that by leaving La Gazza Ladra untranslated, or referring to the "musical climax" as a "crescendo" further suggests to me that the writer favors inserting the exact words that come to mind rather than translating or simplifying their language.

While I prefer Birnbaum's translation in the excerpt provided in Lesser's article, I believe Jay Rubin's insight in his interview, "Found in translation," shows an extremely interesting perspective on translation and reading translated works. What stood out to me in particular was his hesitance to agree with the premise of the question about how he is able to align with the author to be able to communicate even the subtlest aspects of their work. He approached it in a manner that allows the reader to not put absolute faith in the translator as the absolute authority of conveying every meaning that comes from an original work, but instead as a writer relaying the feeling and emotion of the original the best they can.

I was not aware how much Murakami and his translators interacted with one another. Considering Murakami is fluent in English, it was really interesting seeing Philip Gabriel discussing a translation with Jay Rubin and Murakami. For a language Murakami doesn't interact with, like Chinese in the case of Shi Xiaowei, it seems like an even more difficult task to provide a faithful translation to the original, so it does not surprise me that there was only one established Chinese Murakami translator before him.