Thoughts on Murakami

I've read a few Murakami novels (including A Wild Sheep Chase), so I really enjoyed reading about how his books found an audience in English. One thing I find a little off-putting though—and this isn't Murakami's fault but rather that of his reviewers/promoters—is the way his writing is lauded as sounding "American," as if that designation is somehow a marker of superior quality. Why should all writers aspire to sound American? To me, criticism like that encourages a really insular taste in literature, where anything perceived as "different" is considered worse. 

The first time I heard about "indirect" translation was from a friend in Spain who's a translator. She told me that this happens a lot with literature translated into Spanish (specifically with English translations from other languages being used as the source text) and I was shocked to hear that this sort of "translation telephone," if you will, is standard practice. I think I assumed it had something to do with a shortage of translators or editors with knowledge of the source language, but knowing that Murakami encouraged this practice when his books were translated into German complicates that hypothesis. This is purely speculation on my part, but I wonder if indirect translation contributes in some way to the "dull global novel" phenomenon. By that I mean: if all the translated literature in the global market from a wealth of languages is always being filtered through English, won't all these authors start to sound the same? Won't their styles, by dint of being "Englished" not only on the linguistic level but on the level of culture and custom, become homogenized? It's also especially concerning when the source text has been heavily edited—I think Professor Elliott mentioned that the English translation of Kafka on the Shore cut about one hundred pages. Then, one English editor's decision about what to keep dictates what readers in many other languages get to read, too. 

Maggie