Karashima and Nemirovskaya/Dralyuk

I’m very grateful to David Karashima for braving the 13-hour time difference to speak to us on Friday! I was really interested to hear how the influence of the Akutagawa prize (I think this was the prize he spoke about?) encourages authors to write a lot of short story and novella–length works. And because the works that are eventually translated into English tend to be works that have received prizes and significant literary attention in Japan, those novellas are the works that get carried over into English. After the talk, I thought about the contemporary books I’ve read from Japanese and realized they have all been novellas, except for Haruki Murakami’s novels. 

 

Karashima only briefly mentioned English publishers’ tendency to put kawaii imagery on covers of Japanese books, as well as use blurbs with words like “weird” or “quirky.” I would have liked to hear him say a bit more about this—specifically, how foreign publishers might play into certain cultural stereotypes or pigeonhole literature from a certain country. I’m curious to know if anyone else in the class has noticed a similar phenomenon in the way books from their source languages are marketed. 

 

Boris Dralyuk’s translations of Julia Nemirovskaya are a delight to read. I’m really interested in Dralyuk’s method for finding a “way in” to the poem—namely, finding a poet with a similar style in the target language (Elizabeth Bishop in the case of “Neighbor”) and modeling the translation after one of their poems. I also enjoyed reading about how he compensated for lost word play in “Time” by adding a third “O” as an apostrophe—a really lovely solution. Merely in terms of the English (since I can’t speak to the Russian), I think Dralyuk is most successful in his translations of Nemirovskaya’s most compact and rhythmic poems, like “Neighbor” and “Inside the bakery.” I found the lines of freer poems like “Ostankino Park” a little unwieldy, and had trouble locating their rhythm as I read. My favorite poem, though, so short and incisive, is “Inside.”

It's also fascinating to see Dralyuk’s influence not only in the translation but as the subject of the poem “For Boris.” There’s something wonderfully meta about translating a poem about yourself, the translator. I wonder what the experience of translating that poem was like for him. 

Maggie