In the first place, I must confess I’ve read more about Murakami than I’ve actually read Murakami. Since my knowledge of his work is secondhand, one step removed (akin, in effect, to indirect translation), my myopia of the moment behooves me to opine cautiously, if at all. But such caveats in place, the title of DK’s book (a direct allusion to Raymond Caver and an indirect one to Nathan Englander) seems to encapsulate another kind of indirectness, the zone of ambiguity which persists at the center of Murakami’s literary existence for those who read him in translation. While I can’t recall the exact figures or the title in question, last semester, Alissa cited the extent to which a Murakami novel was abridged prior to publication in English, the m.o. being that the publisher was willing to finance only so many pages and the task for the translator—over and above his usual chores—was to make it fit. In a similar vein, our Alejandro, who read Murakami in English, tells the story of discussing—trying to discuss—Murakami with a friend in Argentina, only reach the impasse that the two translations had engendered two texts, each barely recognizable in light of the other.
DK’s book reads like a mixture of textual scholarship and detective work. While he at times succeeds in pinpointing in English galleys the specific instances where modifications occurred, his best efforts defer rather than resolve the ambiguity. Which vested party made the changes and why? When the translator says one thing, the fiction editor at the New Yorker another, and the editor at Murakami’s publisher a third, it seems as though we’re talking less about Murakami’s work and more about the burgeoning lore which surrounds it. The biographical information, the factual details, and any attempt at an historical reconstruction seem to take on (perhaps inevitably) the speculative hue of fiction. Why would Murakami, an accomplished translator and thus able to foresee the pratfalls, insist a translation of his work into German proceed from one into English? Was there or was there not a promotional event at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in 1989 to celebrate the English release of A Wild Sheep Chase? As one interviewee remarks to DK, there is a person who would’ve known for sure, but that person is, unfortunately, deceased.
Rather than talking about reading Murakami, should we speak of reading Murakamis, a different and even distorted reflection of the original in every translation, as if the text passed through a hall of mirrors? Or could we instead, to apply the theory of Tim Parks, suppose that there’s a schism in Murakami’s oeuvre the moment he begins writing with the idea of being translated in the background (if not the foreground) of his creative process? To judge from the casual ease, the near indifference with which Murakami accepts textual changes made for the sake of translation—despite the literary stature that would have positioned him, a la Kundera, to insist—, we can at minimum say that the person of Murakami is amenable to translation and that the author is willing to permit departures from the letter of the source text in order to reach a wider audience. On the one hand, Murakami’s trajectory illustrates the exponential growth of an author via translation, an international transcendence impossible without translators’ contributions and which we—the next generation of professionals—must applaud. On the other, we must heed the prescience of a Tim Parks writing some 12 years ago: the earnestness to reach an international space may scuttle the techniques and dilute the content of literary fiction, leading writers to exercise a kind of homogenizing self-censorship and to enshrine voluntarily the 21st-century equivalent of having a cleric peering over your shoulder, insisting you write in Latin.
-Josh
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