"Hearing Voices" Reading - Sloane

     I was interested by Copeland's inner conflict between Seidensticker's principle that "the temptation to reshape... should be resisted," and the goal of the publisher she was working for, which was to re-craft a Japanese story (Gurotesuku) into an American format. Although she agreed with Seidensticker to an extent, Copeland made a good counterpoint -- in this situation, from an English-speaker's perspective, there is no true original to be faithful to because, as of yet, this audience has had no contact with the story. Once again, the issue has come up in one of our readings where, if a translator attempts to recreate the Japanese text in English so that it follows the same stylistic choices, makes the same decisions concerning how to execute the plot, etc., you end up with an echo of the original, yes... but this is still not necessarily readable for the English-speaking audience. If a Japanese writer's style reads as conventional in Japanese, then shouldn't it feel conventional in English as well? However, to get this effect, some doctoring of the work must be involved. It seems oxymoronic but sometimes in order to make the text feel the same in both languages, it can't be left as is. At the same time, Copeland still leaves room for more "faithful" interpretations (by Seidensticker's definition) in the realm of academia, where readers might crave more of a taste of the Japanese writing style than the average person who wanders into a bookstore. I think both strategies have a time and place.