Some of the articles we read this week were difficult for me to piece together because there were quite a few names and references I simply was not familiar with – and I have not read any Murakami outside of what has been assigned in this class – so it was really hard to try and speculate about the significance of the examples that were being given because I didn’t have a lot of context to place them in. I really liked the concept of getting this kind of window by which to read the initial text through getting to really know the voices which have shaped the text, but I without also having the text it was really to try and find a thread or a lens to read the text through instead of falling into the trap of trying to dissect it or identify like this particular change came here, or this attribute belongs to this person -- essentially, I think for me the articles we read this week played into a bad inclination (not necessarily by any fault of the author) to dissect instead of reading the published work as a whole, but unstable nonetheless, piece -- however, this could be just something mistaken on my end being generally unfamiliar with the Murakami, and I could see an opposite project for Karashima of trying to isolate some kind of arbitrary alterations that may obstruct a meaning in the original piece -- still, I think there could be a missed potential for that exploitation to create something even more interesting in the work, and I'm usually of the opinion that whatever ends up being the most interesting is the best thing to look at (again following the logic that the original was itself unstable/available to be changed). For example, I am a big fan of movies that came out during the Hays production code -- that creative limitation informed some of the most compelling pieces of dialogue/character dynamics of all time in film -- but since the primary piece of original-text to republished-text comparison we got was about sexual content, and that was precisely at the heart of the prohibitions of the Hays production code I am perhaps here also a bit biased. Basically my takeaway was that I should read some Murakami before the talk on Friday.
Also, something I'd just like to include here for the sole reason that there is something in almost every article we read about Globalization and the like that I think it answers to perfectly is the famous Ralph Wiley exchange where Saul Bellows asked "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" and Ralph Wiley comes up with the reply "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus" -- it just feels like in this class we're consistently grappling with this problem of what action denies or excludes a group of people from a universal human achievement (like asking "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus" or hypothetically on the other hand completely disregarding the universal human achievement of Zulu authors, for example). It seems like this issue of trying to find something multiple and particular versus trying to find something universal maps onto a lot of what we've been talking about with translation choices and discussion of the "global novel" about when to change something to be more "familiar" to an audience or when to keep something "foreign."
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