I really liked the Q&A section at the end of the speech and seeing how Hibbett deals with the intricacies between Japanese and English. I especially liked the question on Edo fiction and how Hibbett would translate Edo humor into English. Hibbett says that "in Edo I think there is a strong temptation just to explain it in all those footnotes...", which is something I quite understand. Edo humor is something I feel even Japanese people may find difficult to find "funny", which makes it hard to even find a starting point to translate. "How would you translate something that might not even be funny?"
I say this because last semester in Japan I took a class called "Japanese Traditional Art of Humor", where we looked extensively at Edo "humor": Ukiyo-e, comics such as The Monster Takes a Bride , and stories such as Through Bearing an Umbrella, He Was Rained Upon (Saikaku). As the professor discussed these works with us in class, he constantly had to explain why a particular aspect of a work was "funny" to the Edo people. For example, apparently themes of homosexuality (as in the theme in the Saikaku story) was "laughing material" to the Edo people -- this was something even the Japanese students didn't know, and certainly something that did not age well. This suggests to a translator that in addition to the intricacies between the Japanese and English language, there also exists a "time" dimension when translating these Edo works -- a dimension that isn't quite passed on to modern Japan, let alone countries on the other side of the world, 300 years later.
Perhaps it is true that in these situations, all a translator could do is explain and recreate the original, and ask the reader to convince themselves that this is "funny" "humor" -- just as we had to do in that class.
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