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 

Ronkainen, Jonika -- Comments 4/4

    Karashima’s talk was really enjoyable to listen to – he’s a great storyteller, and he talks very similarly, I think, to how he writes (how he wrote in the articles and book excerpts we read last week) – but I did, at some points, have a hard time piecing together all of the details of what he was saying, so I’m looking forward to going back and watching the recorded version to see if I can get some of the parts/details I might have missed the first time around. I especially want to revisit with the recording what he was saying about Japanese publishing encouraging novella length works – it just seems so opposite to what seems like a larger movement towards shorter work, and a hopeful opposite at that. 

    Although I can’t read the original Russian he’s translating from, based off the level of visual similarity, and from the way he writes in the “The Little Books of Julia Nemirovskaya” article, I feel like you can just tell how much precision/tightness he holds himself accountable for – I absolutely love the way he writes in that article, and after having read it I definitely appreciated his translations of Nemirovskaya more.  I love the descriptions he gives of what he sees in Nemirovskaya’s poem – it’s hard for me to pick out precisely what makes it so compelling, and I think that’s definitely to his merit – the piece feels airtight, so to speak, like taking any one word out would be a genuine loss. Each and every descriptor he gives is so poignant and creative, it's such an impressive article. I am really looking forward to his talk on Friday, and I'm curious to see how his writing translates to his speech/presentation.

Reflections 04/04/22

 The title of Karashima's talk, "Reproducing Contemporary Japanese Literature for the Anglophone Market", gave an impression of modern authors as if being used to experiment with and explore the market. This commercialization moves literature, like a pearl, out of the shell of a purely aesthetic phenomenon - at the same time, what does it offer in return for what it replaces? Something that struck me in Karashima's talk was, firstly, the use of kawaii visuals on book covers to increase sales and secondly, the fact that publishers avoid certain authors because they "don't sell well", this becoming especially keen when it comes to foreign authors because "translated literature is a hard sell" to begin with. With kawaii visuals, an aesthetic that is gaining in popularity in the West is used to sell what's "a hard sell", i.e. translated literature. The work is not sold for its content, but for how lucky it is to be able to fit into an appealing cover. Similarly with both the avoidance of low-selling authors and acceptance of a "difficult sell" label for translated literature, I believe publishers forget that their job is to sell literature, not profit from what already sells. Instead of tackling and addressing the scheme of nonacceptance of foreign art, it's the easy way that they take, going for "outliers" that satisfy the current narrow trends. I think there is low awareness of why exactly certain books got pushed on the market and of why the public buys them - this is shown perfectly in meaningless stamps like "Splendid", "Unique", "Fresh" on covers. Neither the publisher nor the buyer have an idea of what exactly they get out of this and that book; that's not the focus. The selling revolves around creating hype and pushing buttons, the receiving end participates in it because it feels exciting and entertaining. There is pervasive purposelessness in actions taken by both parties, and neither searches for particular meanings - in my opinion. 

I think that, in contrast, Boris Dralyuk does ask the "difficult questions" about the parcel that are Julia Nemirovskaya's poems and does elaborate on what the someone gets out of reading them, namely the angle of equal and deep empathy to all beings and even inanimate objects, a connection to one's lost inner childhood, non-habitual lenses to look at ordinary things and "charging" of the spirit. The translations were not always accurate, and I believe that was the sacrifice worth making for the sake of preserving the lighthearted rhythm and rhyming. It is also good to witness Russian poetry successfully living on in niches after grandiose "golden" 19th and "silver" 20th centuries of Russian literature. 

-Ksenia

4/4 Reflections

 While I personally learned a lot from David's talk, I was slightly worried if like he had said, the details might have been a bit too niche at times. Regardless, I did very much enjoy his candid anecdotes regarding his encounters with editors in both spheres of literature. Looking back on it now, the talk he gave really does echo a lot of themes found in his research that I had come across when I was gathering material for my presentation; mostly centering around Japanese literature translation as a whole, and how it has changed over the years. Of course the time I spent with both David and Allison prior to the talk itself was very enlightening, and overall I felt as if I had learned a great deal about publishing translations within the Japanese to English context. I would have however, enjoyed hearing about some examples of the process and how they lead to changes such as the change in translation from The Briefcase to Strange Weather in Tokyo. 

Reading through the translations of Julia Nemirovskaya, it is hard not to notice that the translations have a rhyme scheme to them, and thinking back to what we read of Onegin translations, this really does make me question what was sacrificed in order to create the pattern. But clearly, especially in the Asymptote article, Boris Dralyuk seems to be not as concerned with what is explicitly written down on the page; rather than the methodical dissection and judgement hereafter that causes Nabokov to judge that his poems are impossible to render unto English, Boris seems to instead be more in-tune with the emotional response induced by the poem, almost as if for him the act of translating the poems is akin to reading them. I also do very enjoy the metaphor of translation as smuggling, 

Steven

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 

Karashima and Dralyuk: 4/4/2022

 

Earlier in the semester, we passed around a copy of The Key by Tanizaki. The paper was beautiful; I think the cover might have been hand-stamped. In Professor Vincent’s class too we have seen several beautifully made and produced Japanese books. For this reason, I was struck by the cover designs of some of the books that David Karashima shared. Although the English translations did not share the same style or unparalleled attention to detail that Japanese publications seem to contain, they still seemed in conversation with them. They were objects that lovers of books would want to look at, to hold, to own. And while of course the saying goes, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” inevitably people do, and so Karashima’s visuals made me think: Could this be a way to encourage readers to read works in translation? Through design and aesthetics? At the very least for Japanese literature, but perhaps for other literatures as well.

 

Dralyuk’s translations of Nemirovskaya’s poetry stood out most to me for their use of rhyme. It seems most contemporary translators avoid rhyme in English, dismissing it as impossible to replicate or too simple-sounding in English. Often, I think this dismissal is warranted, so I’m interested to hear more about why Dralyuk chose to try to bring it across in English and if it was a real challenge. It seems rhyme holds a more significant place in Russian literature, and Nemirovskaya’s “humble” and “somewhat childlike” voice perhaps allowed for the rhyme to be brought over as well. I found the mixture of rhyme and slant rhyme especially engaging and poignant in “Neighbor”—like two entities trying to connect, communicate, and empathize with one another but not always getting it exactly right.

-sharon

A late Late Night with David Karashima

 Boris & Nemirovskaya

While Boris Dralyuk writes of the deep reservoir of sympathy and the youthful capacity for wonderment that characterize Nemirovskaya’s work, I’m impressed by how these elements in no way exclude the poet’s modernist sensibility.  For example, the extension of fantasy in “At a Glance,” the speaker feigning blindness with the same inventiveness with which she sees trees made of honey and imagines her eyes being a downspout of the whole world, dovetails with Wallace Steven’s “Anecdote of the Jar.” In both cases, the perceiving subject possesses the capacity to constitute (or to consume) her/his environment.  The following poem (“Ostankino Park”) asks what source of meaning can engender and sustain the fibers of a society once its alleged deities exist on the same plane as “rattling trucks” and flaps of cardboard.  The Spanish poet Luis Cernuda pursues the same theme—and via a similar image—in his “Resaca en Sansuena” when a marble statue, once the centerpiece of a community’s civic and religious life of, is thrown without ceremony into the sea.

I don’t mean to suppose that Nemirovskaya modeled her work on figures of an American or Spanish 20th-century tradition but rather to suggest that translation facilitates a dialogue between literatures, an intertextual conversation otherwise impossible, and foregrounds the point that the best literature—in whatever tradition and from any language—is in the final analysis one literature, an attempt to unravel the unending complexities of the human experience.

Nemirovskaya is also keenly attentive to the progression of time as, I suppose, her poem entitled “Time” would indicate.  If texts, as Esther Allen argued, are fundamentally unstable, Nemirovskaya envisions the inherent instability of the world they presume to describe.  Sometimes, “a long-dead poet’s voice” is as close as one’s own thoughts; others, the admired poets of the past, such as Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, are so remote that any effort to reach them is swallowed up by the “greedy maws” of decay.  In sum, DB’s foreword predisposed me to look for one sort of poet, one most interested in sentiment and imagination, and I’d now say Nemirovskaya possesses those qualities along with a lucid eye and a rigorous complexity of thought.

David Karashima

Accustomed to a theoretical or maybe romantic view of the writer (a young Don Delillo laboring in a monastic Manhattan hovel, an unknown Cormac McCarthy surviving in a backwoods cabin built with his own hands, toiling daily at the page), I enjoyed DK’s survey of the ancillary mechanisms which prop up or even create a writer’s stature.  To what extent is Murakami the fruit of his pen, and how much of his reputation is the product of publishing tics, marketing pitches, fortuitous turns, and of course, widespread translation?  I wonder, furthermore, if an aspect intrinsic to his work—its themes, its style, its aptitude for translation—makes it especially amenable to the extrinsic cultural apparatuses which have catapulted him to worldwide renown.

As a reader/writer reared under American literary conventions, I was fascinated to hear that the Japanese institutions encourage the novella, the proverbial no man’s land for the aspiring American litterateur whose name isn’t Crane or Melville.  I was also struck by the intensity of the visual aspect.  That is, while it may be true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, one can surely observe that any book, be it hardcover or paperback, has a cover, and those DK featured were bright, colorful, and even loud, evocative and sometimes strange, one more strategy for building a brand and for perpetuating an author’s mystique.  A picture, if projected on the exterior of the Tate Modern, goes for a thousand words at least.

 

-Josh