4/4 reflections

 

Guest Speaker–David Karashima: 

I am very thankful for Professor Karashima’s talk for us despite the time difference. I learned a lot about the tweakings and editings and deletings that needs to be done by the publisher and the translator to make a book written in another language blow up in the english reader population. One thing I have been noticing about Asian literature in translation is that Murakami is such a phenomenon that no other Asian author has achieved. The Korean novel, Kim Ji Young born in 1982, was famous for a while but no East Asian author is as perpetually prolific as Murakami in the translation, and among western readers, I think. David Karashima has revealed a lot of behind the scenes mechanisms for Murakami’s book, but I think there is something more fundamental that makes Murakami sell especially well that sets him apart from any other author–his western elements, which is of courses amplified by the marketing teams at the publishing company. Murakami’s use of Jazz, emphasis on the globalized side of Japan (such as frequent mentioning of foreign chain restaurants such as Denny’s in After Dark), and the topics that he writes about–all of which I think are lesser found in a work by, say, a Korean or Chinese author. Thus, aside from the whimsical and mysterious and eerie storyline that Murakami is so good at building and his translators so good at appealing to the western audience, I think there is something more special that sets Murakami, or the many modern japanese authors apart from East Asian authors from other cultures. 

Readings: 

Julia Nemirovskaya’s poems in Boris Dralyuk’s translation were just absolutely enthralling to read. The use of rhymes is definitely a highlight of her translation, and I want to hear from our Russian language representative in class today whether she like sthe rhymes or not, whether it rhymes the same way in Russian, and if yes, whether she thinks the rhymes are well reserved/captured in English or not–because the poems’ rhyme in the English language works extremely well. What is amazing about her rhymes is that, there are a lot of usages of masculine rhymes, actually, and yet it doesn’t sound like a nursery rhyme! Why is that? How can that be achieved? Another question I have for our Russian rep is that, are Rhymes in Russian mostly masculine or feminine or some other kind of rhyme? And do you count syllables in Russian poetry line by line? Like you would do for Haiku or Tanka? 

My favorite poem out of the five is absolutely “inside”. It is so short, so terse, so to-the-point, so effective, so concise, that I can’t can’t help wondering what it must sound like in the original if this is the precision and concision in a translation. 

 

Jiayi