time, voice, cyntetokerus, curaniokerus

This past week, I have spent a lot of time thinking about voice in terms of my own translation project, and so I was comforted by Michael Emmerich (Karen Emmerich’s brother!) saying in David Karashima’s article “Inside the Intricate Translation Process for a Murakami Novel” that “for him, getting the first ten percent of a book right seems to take just as long as translating the rest of the book.” Later in the article, Karashima repeats this same notion again: “Both Emmerich and Smith emphasize the time it takes to get the ‘voice’ or ‘tone’ right.” I have found that voice can be challenging in some of the very same ways that dialect can be challenging—voice too can be regionally specific, deeply connected to local, cultural norms that are difficult to replicate or find parallels with in the target language. I was also comforted by Karashima’s emphasis on time in this article; not only does voice creation or development take a lot of time, but thoughtful translation does more generally. (Although I did wonder where Birnbaum and Luke got the funding to spend so many hours per week on translating this one novel…)

 

Birnbaum and Luke’s mistaken rendering of “Synthetoceras” and “Cranioceras” as “cyntetokerus” and “curaniokerus” in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World reminded me of our discussion of Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian. I think the internet has drastically changed how we think about mistake-making in translation and perhaps this is not purely a good thing. For example, I found this cyntetokerus “mistake” by Birnbaum and Luke charming and actually quite beautiful, especially given their statement afterwards that this translation was done before the age of the internet. Now, in the age of the internet, however, mistakes often suggest that a translator has not done their due diligence and research. Birnbaum and Luke’s mistake highlights to me how mistakes truly can bring invention, play, and even a little bit of silliness into translation; has the internet taken that away? 

-sharon