Seidensticker "On Nagai Kafu and Kawabata Yasunari" - Sloane

 I was a bit amused by the criticisms made about the first sentences of Seidensticker's Snow Country translation. The blowback seemed a bit overdramatic to me, but after thinking it over I can understand a bit why the Japanese general public might have reacted the way they did, even though I still think they're somewhat wrong. 

For reference, his translation was: "The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky." 

One major issue Japanese critics had with this translation was the direct specification that it was a train that came out of the tunnel, when in the original Japanese exactly what came out of the tunnel is not specified. The anger at this seemed ridiculous to me because, in Seidensticker's words, "what else would be coming out of a long railroad tunnel" than a train...? I might understand the public's insistence on omitting the sentence subject if it served any true literary purpose and was not just purely a quirk of the Japanese language. For example, in The Silence of the Lambs the reason Buffalo Bill's "it rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again" line is so creepy (or at least one reason why) is the unconventional use of third person narration. In a case like that, I think it would be understandable for native English speakers to be frustrated if that same effect wasn't transmitted through a translation to another language. But here, I don't think this is the case at all! In my opinion, Seidensticker's filling in of the blank here doesn't truly add any more information to the story than is provided, but rather completes an inference the reader would be sure to make anyway. 

Secondly (and this is the part I have more sympathy towards the Japanese critics about), many people took issue with how Seidensticker changed the second sentence away from its original meaning "the bottom of the night turned white." Seidensticker said he did so because he wanted to avoid the rhyme of night and white, which sounds sing-songy and distracting, which I agree with. However, I think there was probably a better way to avoid that pitfall without abandoning the concept of the sky changing color entirely. If the rhyme was an issue, couldn't he have found a synonym for white (ivory, alabaster?) or night (evening, dusk, midnight?). I know that there's the potential issue of specifying a specific time of night if you were to say dusk, midnight, etc. so I personally would have opted for changing "white" to a specific shade of white. I see how that could be seen as inserting language into the writing that is more descriptive, or potentially flowery, than what was originally intended. But I personally share Seidensticker's strong aversion to rhyme without purpose, so I think it could be acceptable in this case. Seidensticker seems like a great translator, but I don't really know why he addressed this issue the way he did. The way his translation reads, it makes me visualize the ground, trees, etc. turning white, but if the "bottom of the night" turns white, that sounds to me moreso like the base of the sky itself? I'm not quite sure. Either way, I think I have to side with the Japanese on this one.