Murakami Articles/Interviews

I thought it was interesting that Lesser’s article describes translation as a “disappearing act” done by “selfless workers” (55); these descriptions sowed suspicion that her opinion would be skewed towards defining the ‘authenticity’ or ‘integrity’ of translating the original authors’ voices and intentions. Instead, the piece turned out to be quite charitable to different approaches to translation and embraced the role of the reader in translated literature. I quite enjoyed reading it overall, but found some irony in her discovery and loss of Arthur Birnbaum’s Murakami translations. With the transition to Gabriel and Rubin, Lesser phrased it as “[losing] an author through a change in translators” (60). Though she recognizes that the strong connection between a reader and a translation is personal to that reader, she still states it as a feeling of the loss of Murakami’s voice as she knew it, distilling the translator’s responsibilities to both the author and reader into a single statement; a loss suffered individually by Lesser and without a perpetrator. 

Michael Emmerich expresses a similar idea, that readers are in something like the “parallel universes that appear and disappear in the author’s works” (Templado par 4). As a translator, I imagine that the looming, infinitely-tined fork of reader interpretations ahead could either weigh you down or set you free. It follows, then, that those who seem the most ‘free’ and take the most artistic/stylistic liberties narrow the field of possible interpretations more than those who take pains to make few choices beyond what is ‘strictly necessary’ to communicate what they see as the core of the source text to a new audience. What the latter task entails is highly subjective, of course, so I do understand Lesser’s introduction which gives all literary translators some common goals and principles in generalized terms. I also don’t necessarily see the latter group as ‘sufferers of illusion’ as Emmerich does in relation to Birnbaum who tries to “‘create English sentences that will live on their own in a way similar to the way that Japanese sentences live’” (par 12). 

In the Gabriel/Rubin interview by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Rubin states that there’s never a promise of communicating the “unalloyed original” to readers of the translated work (par 7). Referring to translations as ‘alloys’ was personally amusing to me as an engineering student. Alloys can be created in many different ways just as there is no singular ‘translation process’ and to different final compositions, properties, and that do well in different applications. In translation, however, there is no static beginning or end. Source texts can feel like definite things (and so they may be by necessity if their authors are dead or have otherwise abandoned them), but for living authors like Murakami, translation turns the soil of these works and offers opportunities for revision. To borrow Emmerich’s idea of living sentences, the core of each work is as unknowable and dynamic as a person’s. The author may be the parent but sends it off for editing, publishing, reading, critique, the cycle repeats with translation, and all the while the author is changing as well. 

Sydnee