'Mujong' (The Heartless') by Yi Kwang-su (Review)

We're back with another slight detour from German Literature Month to Korea, and this time we're looking at a more classic book.  Today's post concerns an early modern K-Lit novel from one of the big names of the time.  It's a book that has lofty ambitions to cover a wide range of societal issues - even if it doesn't always hit the target...

*****
Yi Kwang-su's 'Mujong: The Heartless', translated by Ann Sung-Hi Lee) dates from 1917 (which is probably as far back as I've gone in my Korean reading so far).  The main character of the piece is Yi Hyong-sik, a young teacher in Seoul, whose days are spent pouring his energies into teaching his students and avoiding the temptations of the outside world.  He's a shy, chaste innocent young man, so when he is one day visited by a young woman, garbed as a kisaeng (Korean Geisha), he's rather surprised - especially when she claims she knows him.

The young woman turns out to be Pak Yong-ch'ae, the daughter of Hyong-sik's dead mentor, and having kept her innocence intact despite her years entertaining drunken men, she has come to find the man her father recommended as her husband before his death.  So, is there to be a happy ending for Hyong-sik and Yong-ch'ae?  It's rather unlikely.  This is no fairy tale, and these two young naive people have other destinies...

Let's be clear about something from the start; Mujong is not a book for the average reader to pick up and flick through.  It's a story of an alien place and time, written in a rather dry style for the most part, which may well put many readers off.  I've encountered Yi's work twice this year already (The Soil, Gasil), and he doesn't have the most endearing of styles - calling him didactic is probably being generous ;)

However, if you can get past this, Mujong is an entertaining story.  While the focus is mainly on Hyong-sik and Yong-ch'ae, there is a love triangle of sorts as the young teacher falls for the attractions of his private English student, Kim Son-hyong.  She is a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old (in Korean years...) and makes for a striking contrast to Yong-ch'ae and her kisaeng past.  Hyong-sik, thus far pure of body, is tempted both by his young student (who is later offered to him in marriage) and the beautiful Yong-ch'ae, a woman he feels bound to marry from gratitude to his deceased mentor.

This is very much a book of awakenings, with all of the major characters beginning to think about themselves, and the society they live in, for the first time.  One major awakening is obviously their growing awareness of their sexuality: Yong-ch'ae has been saving herself for Hyong-sik, a deluded fantasy which might yet prove to be dangerous; Hyong-sik is just starting to realise that there's more to life than books.  Perhaps the most innocent of the three, though, is Son-hyong, a young girl who has led a very sheltered life thus far:

"She was the same as when she had been born - the same as when she had been organically and biologically produced.  She was like a machine that had been kept in a storage shed and never actually been used.  She was not yet a person."
p.136 (Cornell East Asia Series, 2005)

Now, with marriage imminent, she's forced to confront the realities of life, including the prospect of physical relations with a man she doesn't really know...

Mujong focuses on social awakenings too, with the book being as much a critique of Korea and its people as the story of a love triangle.  In fact, Yi (through Hyong-sik), frequently uses his opportunity to criticise neo-Confucian norms, cultural ideas which are holding Korea back:

"Hyong-sik believed that while all human beings were the same by nature, an individual or society could be improved and uplifted with the effort of that society or individual.  The women, however, believed that humans had no responsibility for what happened in life.  Human beings just lived life as it happened, with no improvement or reform through human will.  This is how Koreans view life!" (p.209)

One concrete aspect of this fatalism is the failing school system, where cronyism and ignorance need removing so that the country can modernise after the western model.  It's high time that unnecessary customs and beliefs are swept away.

The major area Yi sets his sights on is young arranged marriages, a topic the writer had personal experience of.  Mujong features several examples of unhappy marriages which lead to dismal lives, with concubines, kisaeng and suicide more prevalent than loving couples.  Modern readers will be dismayed by the way in which several disturbing scenes (including female oppression and rape) are glossed over matter of factly, but in many ways this is a book which attempts to fight the feminist cause.  While offensive in parts by 21st-Century standards, Mujong does raise the issue of the way women are treated, in particular insisting on treating the scorned kisaeng like any other woman.

Mujong is a book of its time in other ways too.  It's divided into 126 short sections, reflecting its origins as a serialised newspaper novel, very much as early modern Japanese novels appeared (a fact which makes it a little repetitive at times, as serialised works often are).  In fact, there are other similarities to early J-Lit.  The way Yi uses internal monologues, with the characters going back and forth in their agonised deliberations, is reminiscent of Natsume Soseki's Light and Dark.  While nowhere near as insightful as the Japanese writer's work, Yi's novel can show some surprisingly nuanced psychology at times.

This edition of the novel is actually an academic one, a translation bundled with an extended introduction with information about both the author and the book.  While I appreciate Ann Sung-Hi Lee's efforts, I have to say that it wasn't amazingly illuminating, erring on the side of academic appropriacy over interesting reading.  And, in truth, that pretty much sums up the book as a whole.  As mentioned above, it's certainly not for everyone, but serious K-Lit aficionados looking to broaden their knowledge of the period should definitely check it out :)

'Why Translation Matters' by Edith Grossman (Review)

Something a little different today, in form if not in the general content matter.  With my blog concentrating squarely on fiction in translation, from time to time I like to take a look at more general thoughts on the topic of translation itself.  Today's book is one of the more well-known of these recent works, written by a high-profile translator who attempts to argue the importance of the art.  I rather think she's preaching to the converted round these parts, but let's give it a look anyway ;)

*****
Edith Grossman's Why Translation Matters is a short book which developed from a series of lectures the translator gave at Yale University in 2007.  The title pretty much gives away what the book is about, and Grossman spends a lot of her time arguing for the role of translation in the notoriously monolingual Anglosphere.  However, the book also contains a lot about Grossman herself, and she uses it to discuss her approach towards her most famous translation, the recent English-language version of Don Quixiote, before adding a final section on translating Spanish-language poetry into English.

Grossman has, to say the least, a rather aggressive approach, and she argues for the importance of translation to Anglophone literature, and culture in general.  Translators are the chosen ones responsible for transporting new ideas into a second culture; with authors in other languages acting as 'long-distance mentors', it's the translator who enables this intercontinental meeting of the minds.  Of course, this is not a one-way street, and just as Goethe's call for Weltliteratur envisages, the translator enables continuous circular influences in literature.  Grossman gives the example of the influence of Faulkner and Joyce on García Márquez, who in turn influenced generations of Anglophone writers.  Similarly, she discusses Pablo Neruda's influence on American poets, with today's scene unthinkable without his legacy.

Of course, the most important question here is what a translator is actually doing when they take a work from one language into another, and Grossman gives a fairly good summary of this task:

"To my mind, a translator's fidelity is not to lexical pairings but to context - the implications and echoes of the first author's tone intention, and level of discourse.  Good translations are good because they are faithful to this contextual significance.  They are not necessarily faithful to words or syntax, which are peculiar to specific languages and can rarely be brought over directly in any misguided and inevitably muddled effort to somehow replicate the original."
pp.70/1 (Yale University Press, 2010)

The key, then, is the importance of ideas and intentions over words and grammatical structure.  The focus should always be on translating at a whole-text level - a word-for-word effort, akin to a Google Translate approach, is always going to end up as a failure...

Grossman also comes up with some interesting insights when she runs through the approach she took when asked to create perhaps her most famous work, her recent translation of Don Quixote.  Forced to decide how to consider the task, she drew inspiration from Mexican poet and fiction writer Octavio Paz, whose declaration that there are no original texts (as all writing is merely a translation of the non-visual world) means that the translator is free to create their own work, without feeling burdened by the weight of the 'original' text.  Which is a nice theory ;)

As you'd expect in a book on translation, there are the usual complaints about monolingualism, including a reference to an infamous US bumper sticker:

  "If English Was Good Enough For Jesus, It's Good Enough For Me." (p.42)

While that was probably(?) tongue-in-cheek, the attitude is representative of how the English-speaking world looks at other languages and cultures, and most of my readers would have experienced moments such as one from Grossman's early life:

"I never have forgotten my adolescent self discovering nineteenth-century Russian and French novelists: the world seemed to grow large, expanding like an unbreakable balloon; it became broader and deeper as I contemplated characters more diverse and unpredictable than anything I could have imagined on my own." (p.25)

The need to expand our minds, broaden our horizons and escape from insular attitudes is something which I hope we can all appreciate :)

*****
In truth, though, I can't say that Why Translation Matters is a book I'd really recommend to anyone other than complete novices in the area of translation.  There's very little here that you wouldn't find in a lengthy Twitter discussion (apart from, perhaps, information about Grossman's own work), and the book has a slightly bitter, angry tone, which seems to act as a replacement for any real insights.  Perhaps the reason for this lies in the origin of the text (speeches for undergraduate students), but I was hoping for something a little more substantial.

Her anger at UK publishers for daring to change her words also rubbed me up the wrong way (I remember Philip Gabriel, one of Haruki Murakami's translators, having a similar rant on a Two Voices podcast).  It's ironic that Grossman doesn't understand that her insistence on American English is part of the linguistic imperialism she's railing against in Why Translation Matters.  She claims that this wouldn't happen to books first published in the UK when they make their way across to the US:

"I do not believe publishing houses here reciprocate or return the linguistic insult by going out of their way to Americanize the texts of books first published in the United Kingdom..." (pp.45/6)

Hmm.  This is a claim I find dubious in the extreme - can any American publishers (or British translators) help me out here?

Her stories of reading Woolf and Joyce in the original (her justification for her views) miss the point somewhat.  If I choose to read American authors, I expect that the book will be written in American English, but that's not really the case for translations - I'd appreciate it if a British version at least made an effort to put the text in British English.  Of course, it seems that the new trend is for a more neutral brand of English, with blatant local usage smoothed out (Daniel Hahn recently discussed this, especially the 'got v gotten' dilemma, in his excellent Translation Diary).

In truth, this is just one example of an America-centred attitude which takes much away from Grossman's arguments.  Other than her complaints about British publishers, there's little here that ventures outside American borders, with no mention at all of places like Ireland, Australia or India.  It's telling that in discussing her work on Don Quixote, she talks about how her work has to focus on the cultural differences between 17th-century Spain and 21st-century America - and she wonders why UK editors might want to alter her work ;)

*****
Let's face it, I'm probably not the right reader for this; if you're newer to the idea of literary translation (and American!) you'll probably enjoy it a lot more.  Lest you think that I'm alone in my reservations about Why Translation Matters, please check out Tom's piece from a few years back in which he skewers it in a much less waffly manner :)

It's a shame, really, because it goes without saying that translation does matter, and good books on the subject are important for the spread of this message (one I would recommend is the excellent In Translation, edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky).  As a reminder of the importance of the art, I'll just leave you on a sombre, and telling, note.  I read this book on the 17th of April - the day Gabriel García Márquez died.  While I didn't think much of Why Translation Matters, my thanks go to Grossman, and García Márquez's other translators, for bringing his work into our paths...

'The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature' by Michael Emmerich (Review)

Despite having read many works of Japanese literature over the past five years or so, one which I haven't managed to get around to as yet is the undisputed classic of J-Lit, Murasaki Shikibu's epic The Tale of Genji.  Having decided, then, that 2014 is the year to rectify this shortcoming, I thought that a nice way to warm up for the main event might be to learn a little more about the book and its history.  But how, you might ask?  Well, it's funny you should say that...

*****
The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature (from Columbia University Press, review copy courtesy of Australian distributor Footprint Books) is a non-fiction work by well-known scholar and translator Michael Emmerich, in which he takes a close look at the legacy of Lady Murasaki's classic novel.  Surprisingly, though, it's not a work which lingers overly on the actual book itself; instead, Emmerich discusses the myth of The Tale of Genji as the quintessentially Japanese novel and focuses his energy on some fairly surprising areas.

The book begins in November 2008, with Japan in full Murasaki fever, ready to celebrate the millenium of her work.  As the nation rejoices in Genji's anniversary, praising a novel which has been read for a thousand years, Emmerich takes the reader by the hand, leading them back to the early nineteenth century - where we discover that the idea that The Tale of Genji was always popular is actually not all that accurate.

The truth of the matter is that the 1673 Kogetsushō edition of the book was to be the last new publication of the novel for over two centuries, which meant that while most people had heard of The Tale of Genji, by the start of the nineteenth century, very few had actually ever seen a copy.  When you also take into account the fact that the original book was written in an archaic Japanese, rendered in a script illegible to the uninitiated, you begin to realise that Murasaki's work was in danger of becoming nothing more than a faded memory...

So why is The Tale of Genji world-renowned today?  Emmerich has several explanations for this, and they all revolve around the idea of translation, in one form or another:

"Any academic study of 'Genji' will inevitably connect, then, in one way or another, to the fields of canonization and translation studies, and to the recent burgeoning interest in world literature."
p.8 (Columbia University Press, 2013)

However, this idea of 'translation' is not limited to what we would expect (a version appearing in a foreign language) - the word is used in a much wider context, explaining a wide range of adaptations.

The first of Emmerich's 'translation' choices is an illustrated serial which began appearing in 1829, Ryūtei Tanehiko's Nise Murasaki Inaka Genji (A Fraudulent Murasaki's Bumpkin Genji).  This work, a beautifully-illustrated adaptation of the original Genji, brought Murasaki's story back into the minds of the ordinary people, preventing the classic from disappearing completely from view.  Emmerich devotes the first half of his book to Tanehiko's creation, arguing that far from being a cheap knock-off of a sacred text, the Inaka Genji was actually a worthy adaptation of Genji itself, one that replaced the original in the eyes of most Japanese.

Another important step was the translation of the original work into English, and here too the writer is eager to right common misconceptions.  While many credit Arthur Waley's full translation of The Tale of Genji (the first volume of which was published in 1925) with spreading awareness of the work in the West, Emmerich shows that the earlier partial translation by Kenchō Suematsu in 1882 actually made a much bigger splash than many people realise.  It is Suematsu's work, both in translating and promoting The Tale of Genji, that raises the profile of the novel and leads to the first modern reprints of the book in Japan in 1890 - translation leading to a reappreciation of the text in its native country :)

Finally, Emmerich turns his focus towards the first translations of the original text into modern Japanese, a turn of events which allows ordinary Japanese readers to experience the book for the first time.  However, even here, he has a few surprises up his sleeve.  Instead of heaping all the praise on Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, the famous writer who published three modern translations of the classic, Emmerich again looks at two slightly neglected figures when he apportions praise.

The first is Akiko Yosano, a poet who actually brought out a modern translation of The Tale of Genji a quarter of a century before Tanizaki did.  The second is Hakuchō Masamune, a literary critic whose essays on Genji, particularly the ones written after having read Waley's translation, were a major factor in influencing Tanizaki to take up his pen on behalf of Lady Murasaki and her amorous hero.  As he said:

"I have the feeling, though, that if this English translation were translated anew into Japanese, it might attract a large and avid readership that would enjoy it as one of the great novels of the world." (p.328)

And Tanizaki was obviously listening.  Were it not for these two unsung heroes, Genji's return into the public domain may have been even further delayed...

While a little scholarly at a times, Emmerich's book is eminently readable, even for lay persons such as myself, and the story behind Genji's resurrection from literary oblivion is a wonderful one.  The first half of the book, centring on Inaka Genji, contains many fascinating illustrations, and the writer explains their significance so skilfully that the reader almost envies the old Tokyoites (Edoites!), wishing there was a copy of Tanehiko's book to hand.  Perhaps not everyone will be as intrigued as I was - however, this is a book that anyone with an interest in Japanese literature is sure to enjoy.

And yet....  There's something missing from Emmerich's book, for all its dedicated research, and that's the original itself.  You see, after four-hundred pages about the modern history of the work, I am still, unbelievably, none the wiser as to what actually happens in Murasaki's story!  Some might say that this is an unforgivable oversight on Emmerich's part, but in fact the opposite is true.  All this talk about Genji has just whetted my appetite for the real thing :)

That's enough for today, but if you liked the sound of all this, stay tuned for some more Genji news - I'll be setting off on my great journey soon enough, and I'll be happy to have some companions along for the ride...

*****
***Footprint Books say that this book is available in good Australian bookshops and directly through their website :)

'Modern Japanese Stories - An Anthology' by Ivan Morris (Ed.) (Review)

It's time for another January in Japan post, and today we're looking at short stories.  I've already tried two J-Lit collections (The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and Donald Keene's Modern Japanese Literature), and I had my eye on another collection for quite a while.  Eventually, I managed to get an old first edition cheap on Abe Books - and I'm very glad I did :)

*****
Modern Japanese Stories - An Anthology does exactly what it says on the cover - well, almost.  Ivan Morris brought together twenty-five great stories by some of the best modern Japanese writers, translated by himself along with Edward Seidensticker, George Saitō and Geoffrey Sargent.  There is one thing which you need to know before we begin; while the book says modern, it was first released in 1962.  At the time Yasunari Kawabata was the president of Japanese PEN (with his Nobel Prize in the distant future), and Yukio Mishima was merely a promising new talent.  If you're looking for something by the likes of Murakami, Ogawa or Yoshimoto, you'll be sorely disappointed ;)

Several of the stories are by very familiar names.  Kawabata contributes a typically elegant tale called 'The Moon on the Water', a story where a woman looks back to her time with her first husband, regretting the choice she made to remarry after his death.  Kafu Nagai's 'Hydrangea' is also instantly recognisable in its telling of an incident in old Tokyo's pleasure quarters, and as for Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's 'Tattoo'... well, anyone who has read any of his novels will be at home with this short, erotically-charged piece...

As always though, the real strength of the collection is in the great stories it showcases from less famous writers.  Even though the anthology barely reaches the post-war years, there are some great stories from a wide variety of styles and eras; anyone with a fair knowledge of J-Lit wanting to expand their horizons could do a lot worse than trying this collection to get some ideas for their next book.

Some of my favourite stories were among the longer pieces, and most were by writers I'd never encountered before.  One of these was Fumio Niwa's 'The Hateful Age', a superb story about a very contemporary issue, the burden of caring for elderly relatives in an ageing society.  There's no false respect for the aged here - it's a very bitter, selfish tale:

"As Ruriko trudged toward the station, she soon realized that though Granny weighed no more than a child, her body with its long legs and relatively short trunk was very much harder to carry.  The thin lanky legs were clamped like a painful brace around Ruriko's waist, and by the time they approached the station, walking had become an agony.  The ordeal was not only physical.  In carrying someone eighty-six years old, one is supporting not just a body, but all the weight of a personal history that has accumulated ponderously over the decades."
'The Hateful Age', p.326 (Tuttle, 1987)

There's little Confucian respect for the elderly here, but when you see how the old lady of the piece behaves, you may just sympathise with the long-suffering relatives.

A slightly more historical perspective is provided by Kan Kikuchi's story 'On the Conduct of Lord Tadano', set in the early seventeenth century.  Taking place at the end of the Warring States era, the story begins with the fall of Osaka castle, where Lord Tadano distinguishes himself in the battle.  Praised by Tokugawa Ieyasu himself, the young nobleman is at the height of his powers - until he discovers that his belief in his supremacy in all areas of life is based on a huge lie, sending him into a dangerous downward spiral...

'Nightingale', by Einosuke Ito, provides a comforting change of pace.  The story begins with an old woman hobbling into a police station... and that's where we stay for the next forty-something pages.  The longest story in the collection, 'Nightingale' shows us how the police station of a small town is the true focal point of the community, a bustling centre of government with people dropping in at all hours.  In the twenty-four hours we spend in the company of the law, we meet midwives, peddlers, thieves and philanderers, yet they are all treated fairly and kindly by the hard-worked public officials :)

The last of my selections is Ango Sakaguchi's contribution, 'The Idiot'.  Set during the Second World War air raids on Tokyo, it's the story of a journalist who takes up with a simple-minded woman when he finds her hiding in his room.  It's a bitter, spiteful tale, one which lashes out at the stupidity of war and the people who expect everyone to take part in it.  I haven't read a lot from this period of Japanese history, so this is a fascinating look at what was happening in Japan towards the end of the war.  Be warned though - it is a little gruesome at times:

"Among the ruins of the great air raid of March tenth, Izawa had also wandered aimlessly through the still rising smoke.  On all sides people lay dead like so many roast fowl.  They lay dead in great clusters.  Yes, they were exactly like roast fowl.  They were neither gruesome nor dirty.  Some of the corpses lay next to the bodies of dogs and were burned in exactly the same manner, as if to emphasize how utterly useless their deaths had been."
'The Idiot', p.403

As Sakaguchi's 'In the Forest, under Cherries in Full Bloom' was also one of my selections from the Oxford collection, perhaps it's time I looked for more of his work :)

Apart from the stories themselves, there's a lot to like about this collection.  Morris' thirty-page introduction discusses the origins of modern Japanese literature, explaining why there was such a break in tradition after the Meiji restoration, and it gives a great overview of the major names, styles and schools.  Each story also has a brief biography of the writer before the main feature begins and a full-page woodcut painting of a scene from the story (all by artist Masakazu Kuwata) - now that's what I call added extras :)

Of course, it's not perfect.  There a couple of omissions (Natsume Soseki for one), and with only two female writers in the whole collection, it is definitely the choice of a very different time.  However, I enjoyed this book greatly and would recommend it to anyone interested in expanding their J-Lit horizons.  Of course, you've got to get hold of a copy first - the best of luck to you with that...

'Shades of the Other Shore' and 'Ballade Nocturne' (Review)

It's been a while, but I've finally found a few hours to devote to the other two beautiful Cahiers I received from Daniel Medin at the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris.  Last time, I looked at an interesting piece from László Krasznahorkai and an alphabetical guide to the life of a translator - today's offerings are just as interesting and varied :)

*****
Shades of the Other Shore, like many of the cahiers, is another mix of prose and imagery.  Writer Jeffrey Greene and artist Ralph Petty are two Americans with a new life in France, and their words and paintings provide an outsider's view on the country.  Petty's vivid watercolours accompany Greene's mix of poetry and prose nicely, but (of course) I'm more focused on the literary side of the partnership...

The writing shows some interesting juxtaposition at times (e.g. Jeanne d'Arc and Steve Irwin...), but many of the pieces come back to the two constant themes of his mother, who lives with him in France, and death.  In 'On Hoarfrost', the writer turns cleaning his frosty windscreen into something deeper in his attempts to remove the white, equalising covering:

"My mother is already seated in the car, engine running with the defroster blowing, and as I scrape away the hoarfrost, her face and figure emerge from under the glass, looking out as if I were exhuming her from the next world into this one."
p.8 (Sylph Editions, 2013)

'The Silent Gardener' treads a similar path, but in a more poetic vein:

"My mother sleeps under a fig tree
 with no leaves, only the spring sun" (p.16)

The title also seems to examine this preoccupation with 'the other side', although he might just be talking about France.  If I'm honest, this wasn't really my thing, but there were some nice lines, and the pictures were very pretty :)

*****
The second work was one I was a little more interested in checking out as it was by a writer whose work I've enjoyed before, Gao Xingjian.  While all the work I'd previously read by the Nobel laureate had been prose works, the subject of this cahier is a short play, originally written in French, translated (by Claire Conceison) into English directly, but with a possible Chinese version in mind.

The play, Ballade Nocturne, is a short piece, with a focus on music, pictures and dance.  There are just four roles: a musician, two dancers and an actresss who also plays a character called 'she'.  Anyone familiar with Gao's prose work, especially Soul Mountain, will recognise the focus on shadowy pronouns as descriptors...

'Elle', the focus of the piece, is all woman:

"On dirait une femme nature,
 mais pas fatale.
 On dirait une femme perdue,
 mais sans rien de public,"
p.2 (Sylph Editions, 2010)

"One might call her a natural woman,
 but not a femme fatale.
 One might call her a lost woman,
 but not a common whore." (p.17)

First we are introduced to her as a person, then the writer positions her as a representative of her gender in a battle of the sexes:

"Oh là là, femme contre homme,
 une dure bataille.
 Qui sera le vainqueur?
 Et qui sera conquis?" (p.4 )

"Oh la la, man versus woman
 a tough battle.
 Who will be the conqueror?
 And who will be conquered?" (p.19)

In the eternal struggle, Gao suggests that men need first to understand women to be worthy of them.

This theme of the struggle is taken up more literally as the play continues (at one point, the musician - the only male character - is trussed up and dragged off stage!).  It's very clear that 'she' is protesting against a man-made world and would like to propose some alternatives:

"et s'il ya une religion en laquelle croire,
 ce sera notre propre corps." (p.11)

"and if there is a religion worth believing in
 it will be our own bodies." (p.29)

If women ruled the world...

There is an intense focus on what is going on around the actors, and the cahier is full of stage directions, descriptions of the background music, and the dances the two dancers are to perform.  To an uncultured novice like myself, it's all rather arty, and Ballade Nocturne is described in the translator's introduction as a 'polymorphic' work, one which can't be pigeon-holed into 'theatre', 'dance' or 'art'.

As always, there is an abundance of beautiful extras.  In addition to Conceison's insightful introduction, the 'reader' is treated to Gao's beautiful ink-wash illustrations, as well as the original French-language version in a pamphlet insert.  It's a book which is a joy to read and admire - being totally honest, I'm not completely sure I'd enjoy sitting through the actual play though!

*****
The Cahiers Series produces beautiful pieces, coffee-table books for those interested in good literature and translation, and I'm very grateful to M. Medin for sending some my way.  Sadly though, with two young kids around, they're unlikely to be sitting on my coffee table any time soon.  Perhaps some of my readers will have more luck with that idea...

'Open City' by Teju Cole (Review)

My focus on literature in translation means that I rarely read English-language fiction, but there is the odd exception.  My last-minute decision to attend an event at the Melbourne Writers Festival a while back led me to make one of those exceptions, as I really enjoyed the way American writer Teju Cole talked about the future of the novel in his keynote address (and the ensuing discussion).  Of course, it's a little risky to read a novel because you like the person, but don't worry - the book certainly lived up to the good impression the writer made on me...

*****
Open City probably needs little introduction; Cole's first novel has been a worldwide success, winning a string of awards.  It centres on Julius, a Nigerian-born Psychology resident working and walking his way through the New York winter.  Having recently broken up with his girlfriend, he spends much of his time outside work alone, listening to classical music, reading good books and pounding the pavements of his adopted hometown.

Julius enjoys his walks, which allow him to process, and escape from, the mental rigours of his daily work.  He's a man who needs solitude, and even when he does catch up with friends, there's a sense of detachment, a feeling that while he is present in body, the mind is still roaming the streets of New York.  A short trip to Brussels, a vain, half-hearted attempt to reconnect with a family member, is a short distraction, but it proves to be in vain.  Julius is a successful, well-educated man, one who you'd expect to be happy, and the reader gradually begins to wonder if his detachment has a cause...

Cole's novel is a beautiful book, an elegant story of a city in four dimensions, and a haunting tale of a man who struggles to find his place in it.  What strikes the reader on reading the first few chapters of the novel is the importance of the setting, and Open City, at times, comes across as a love letter to New York, a subtle ode to the big city.  Within a few chapters, the adjective 'Sebaldian' came to mind, as Julius' tangential asides about the buildings he passes and the streets he walks through instantly reminded me of the style of The Rings of Saturn (as I quickly found out, this wasn't exactly a unique comparison I was making...).

What makes Cole's novel even more Sebaldian though is the way in which Julius sees beyond the current status, experiencing the past of the city as well as the present:

"Out, ahead of me, in the Hudson, there was just the faintest echo of the old whaling ships, the whales, and the generations of New Yorkers who had come here to the promenade to watch wealth or sorrow flow into the city or simply to see the light play on the water.  Each one of those past moments was present now as a trace."
p.54 (Faber and Faber, 2011)

Julius' New York is not just a maze of skyscrapers and subway stations; it's a hole where the World Trade Center used to stand, which once stood on narrow streets, which had replaced markets, which in their turn had been built on land inhabited by native Americans.  Most people don't notice the traces of the past that hide amongst the clamour of the present, but Julius (and perhaps Cole) feels almost more at home amongst these reminders of a distant past.

Which is not to say that the novel neglects people, individuals - far from it.  Julius has many encounters with fellow citizens and travellers, and the majority of them are, like our 'hero', newcomers, immigrants, men and women who are straddling the divide between two (or more) cultures.  From Professor Saito, Julius' academic mentor, to Dr. Mailotte, a Belgian surgeon Julius meets on a plane; from the man who shines his shoes to the aggressive autodidact running an Internet café (and studying) in Brussels; Cole shows that the world is full of people struggling to adapt to their own four-dimensional existence, trying to reconcile past and present.

Just as the novel deals with both the then and the now, it also discusses the global and the individual.  Julius talks with the people he meets about their lives and concerns, but the bigger picture is never far from our view.  One of his clients, a native American historian, writes about the conflict between her people and the conquering white settlers, and the effect history has at a personal level:

"I can't pretend it isn't about my life, she said to me once, it is my life.  It's a difficult thing to live in a country which has erased your past." (p.27)

In many ways, Open City is a gloomy, pessimistic novel, with a sense of decay and entropy, leaving the reader feeling that it is not so much about progress as it it about decline.  Then again, I suspect I'm beginning to read a little too much into things here...

It's not just what the book's about which makes Open City such a good read though; it's Cole's style which really makes it enjoyable.  The soothing, flowing prose accompanies the reader on a thinker's tour of New York, and while you may struggle to discern a plot of any kind (especially throughout the first half), there is a gradual development of sorts.  In the talk I attended, Cole mentioned the slow solace of the novel, something which helps you to slow down from the hectic pace of the digital world, and it's an idea he has definitely built his own work upon.

In fact, you suspect that there is a lot of the writer in the book, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  However, I wonder how he plans to follow up the success of Open City and where he wants to go from here.  Will he continue with his Sebaldian mixture of descriptive narrative, or will the next book bring something completely different?  I have no idea, but I'll be very keen to accompany him on his next walking tour :)

'In Translation' by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky (eds.) (Review)

Over the past couple of years, as regular readers may have noticed, I've become much more deeply involved in the translated-fiction side of life in the literary blogosphere, and my ratio of books originally written in languages other than English has sky-rocketed.  I've also found myself reading more in German, and for a while now I've been contemplating an alternate universe, one in which money and free time magically appear, allowing me to go off and study again, this time in the field of literary translation.  It's unlikely (sigh) to ever happen, but if I get many more books like today's offering, my arm might just be twisted...

*****
Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky, two noted American literary translators, have put together a wonderful book on the art and science of their metier, In Translation (published by Columbia University Press, review copy courtesy of Australian supplier Footprint Books***).  It consists of eighteen essays by leading translators and writers, each giving a small insight into the art of translation and the life of the translator.  The first section is mainly concerned with theory, and the essays here come complete with footnotes and academic jargon; the second part then moves onto practice, with real-life examples from a host of renowned practitioners.

Before we get onto the nitty-gritty though, we gain an insight into the unglamourous, and often thankless, role of the translator.  Peter Cole discusses the ethical dilemmas of the translator, often a choice in the eyes of the public between invisibility and treachery (to the author and to the original text).  Eliot Weinberger suggests an image of the translator as tradesman, not artist (one who really should be better paid!).  While David Bellos muses over the concept of 'foreign-soundingness', Michael Emmerich shows us how translation can be just as much about the visual as the phonological - in Japanese, snow literally (almost) falls down on the page...

If you think these issues sound a little abstract and unimportant, others are a touch more controversial.  Alice Kaplan, in an essay on the trials and tribulations of translating, talks about her battle of wills with authors (and her own translator), also mentioning the time when Nabokov ordered all the copies of a Swedish translation of Pnin to be burnt.  Whoever said the author was dead...

In the final act of the first part, Esther Allen cautions the unwary reader against assuming that translation is a given for any particular book; you see, it's not quite as straight-forward as that:

"...any given act of literary translation is a product of unique political, linguistic, cultural, technological, historical, and human contexts."
p.101 (2013, Columbia University Press)

The reality is that it takes a unique combination of factors, a whole myriad of planets aligning, to get any one particular work published in the English-speaking world.  Quality is only one small factor.

Once we dive into the practical side of things, we also get to hear from, and about, some superstars of world literature.  Maureen Freely discusses the problems of translating Orhan Pamuk, a story of an 'ethnically-cleansed' language, a head-strong writer and an unexpected venture into Turkish politics.  Cuban poet José Manuel Prieto explains the difficulties he had in translating Osip Mandelstam's most famous poems into Spanish, and Haruki Murakami explains how (and why) he took 'his' Gatsby into Japanese (on a side note, it was nice to see these last two in the collection - translated by Esther Allen and Ted Goossen - as a work on translation without any translated pieces seems rather silly...).

Once you've got your head around what you're going to translate, you need to give some thought to who you're actually translating it for.  One of my favourite pieces had Jason Grunebaum pondering this issue in translating a novel from Hindi into English.  Should he be concentrating on American English, or Indian English?  After all, if you're looking for a large potential market...

Laurence Venuti had a slightly different dilemma in wrestling with the issue of anachronism in his translation of 12th-century Italian poetry.  A poet monk criticising the Pope - what voice would work best in English?  Venuti's answer - Slim Shady:

You spoke with forkéd tongue
and deeply I was stung:
it has to lick my sore
to show the plague the door;
because I'm sure my grief
can't find the least relief
without the execution
of your absolution (p.205)

At any rate, it's certainly original...

If you're a polyglot, In Translation provides you with many great opportunities to test your skills.  Whether it's Russian, Polish, Hindi, German or 16th-century French ballad lyrics, there's something of interest in every piece.  My only issue with the collection (ironically) is that for the Englishman in me it's a little narrow, and slightly US-centric.  A piece on the US-UK language divide would have been nice (as would more British contributors...)

Still, it's a wonderfully-absorbing collection, one which has given my nascent ambitions a further push.  For those of you who think Goethe had more than Dan Brown on his mind when coining the phrase Weltliteratur, let's give a big thank you to the people who show us that there's a lot out there that is worth reading :)

Before I finish though, I'll leave you with some final advice from Susan Bernofsky, who discusses the need to let go of the original text, and the importance of both frequent revision of translation and taking the odd semantic risk:

"It takes a certain amount of pluck - not to mention aesthetic sense and the ability to write well in English - to let go of an original long enough to allow oneself to fully imagine the English words that will take its place, but without this no fully realized translation is possible." (p.233)

That sounds like a job for me :) 

*****
***Footprint Books say that this book is available in good Australian bookshops and directly through their website :)

'Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words' by Jay Rubin (Review)

Jay Rubin is an American academic who is well known for his translations of Japanese literature, including works by Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Natsume Soseki.  However, he is undoubtedly best known in the west for his work on some of Haruki Murakami's back catalogue, including Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and After Dark.  Not content with just translating Murakami's fiction however, Rubin, who knows the writer quite well, decided to write a book about the man and his creations - and a good one it is too...

*****
Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words is the next logical step for Murakami fans to take when they've burned through all of his translated works.  It's a book which gives an insight into the author's life while also shedding some light on what it is he is actually trying to say in his writing (something which has puzzled me for a long time...).

We follow Murakami through his less-than-stellar school days and his riot-interrupted time at university, finding out about his early marriage and his years running a jazz club along the way.  He was never a typical Japanese writer, showing little interest in his native literature or culture, preferring instead to experience American novels and jazz (which will come as little surprise to anyone who has read any of his books).  Eventually though, he decided to try his hand at writing - and the rest, as they say, is history...

As interesting as Murakami's life is though, what we're really here for is the guided tour through his books, and Rubin is just the man for the job.  He carefully takes the reader through assorted novels, stories and non-fiction pieces in chronological order (which isn't always the order, or the format, they appeared in overseas), explaining the thought processes behind the books and highlighting connections between the various works - some obvious, others not quite so easy to spot at first glance.

Rubin shows how Murakami was the first of a new breed of writers, one who (unlike his predecessors) was in tune with the new Japan:

"...Murakami has been called the first writer completely at home with the elements of American popular culture that permeate present-day Japan.  He has also been seen as the first genuinely "post-post-war writer", the first to cast off the "dank, heavy atmosphere" of the post-war period and to capture in literature the new Americanised mood of lightness." p.17 (Vintage Books, 2005)

As well as this difference in style, Murakami was also a literary outsider in other ways.  He was not a member of any literary group (very unusual for a Japanese author), and his books were initially frowned upon by such heavyweights as Kenzaburo Oe.

However, this difference was not quite as marked as first appears.  His stories, with their typical unresolved endings, are compared to traditional Japanese writers such as Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, and he is also the latest in a long line of writers to enrich Japanese literature through his work in translation (following in the footsteps of Tsubouchi and Futabatei!).  In fact, for those not overly familiar with Murakami, his work as a literary translator may come as a bit of a shock.  According to Rubin, he has translated dozens of American novels and short story collections and has been responsible for a resurgence in the popularity of American literature in Japan.

For me, the most useful part of the book though was the focus on themes in Murakami's work.  Rubin concentrates very heavily on Murakami's handling of the subject of memory and its unreliability, claiming that:

"Perhaps no other writer concerned with memory and the difficulty of reclaiming the past - not Kawabata, not even Proust - has succeeded as well as Murakami in capturing the immediacy of the experience of déjà vu." p.60

While I'm a little dubious about that boast (and in certain blogs I frequent, I'm sure them's fighting words...), it's true that the writer is fascinated with the way we see the world and the impossibility of ever knowing the truth about the past and other people.

Rubin also devotes a lot of time to Murakami's concept of 'the other place', the space occupied by the things that are not present in our current location.  Whether it refers to the psyche, an afterlife or another dimension, it's ever-present in Murakami's writing, and many of his protagonists are trying to bridge the gap between here and 'the other place'.  How?  Well, some of you may have noticed that there are a fair few wells, tunnels and corridors in his books...

While I could misinterpret Rubin's ideas all day, I think I'll leave the analysis there.  Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words is an excellent book and one I enjoyed immensely.  Still, there are a few issues I'd like to quickly point out.  If you haven't really read a lot of Murakami, I'm not sure that this is for you.  Part of the fun lies in recognising the stories Rubin is discussing - and there are a lot of them.  I was able to frequently refer to the many books on my Murakami shelf to jog my memory and spent a lot of time rereading certain short stories.  If all you've read is Norwegian Wood, leave this one for the future.

Another possible issue is that it doesn't always pay to see your heroes up close, warts and all.  On the whole, Rubin (a close friend) paints a very favourable picture of the writer (and any mention of his wife Yoko verges on hagiography), but I was a little troubled by a couple of images.  For one thing, his style of writing appears a little haphazard, and he rarely seems to know where he's going with the books he's writing.  He could also be accused of writing for the sake of writing as his output is truly phenomenal (and covers all kinds of areas and genres).  For a fan of translated fiction like me though, perhaps the most worrying revelation is that he is comfortable with translations of translations, preferring his work to get to readers quickly, even if it isn't quite what he wrote in the first place...

Still, nobody's perfect, and anyone expecting perfection deserves all the disappointments they get.  Readers who set their bar a little lower will have great fun with this book - just don't blame me if you get hooked on hunting down translated rarities of Murakami's work...

*****

...speaking of which, I have a little story to tell you ;)

I recently saw a comment on the January in Japan blog where someone signed up for the challenge, and (like a good host) I popped over to check out the blog.  The blogger was Carola of brilliant years, and she had just published a post - one in which a link was given to a translation of a rare Murakami work.  It's called The Sheep Man's Christmas, and while the quality of the translation (and the formatting) may leave a little to be desired, it's still a fun piece of writing with that inimitable Murakami sense of humour.

I was very happy with my unexpected Christmas present, and I'd urge you all to have a look too :)

'Ukigumo' ('The Drifting Cloud') by Shimei Futabatei & Marleigh Ryan (Review)

I've been interested in Japanese literature for a while now, but I feel that the interest may have got a little stronger over the past couple of years.  This has left me wondering if there is a line between interest and obsession - at what point does your harmless pastime start to become a little too serious?

All of which coincidentally brings me to today's book, a 1960s translation of (and commentary on) a nineteenth-century Japanese novel, one which is extremely difficult to find, meaning I had to buy it second-hand and have it shipped from the US. I suspect that if there is a line, it may just have been crossed...

*****
Ukigumo (The Drifting Cloud) by Shimei Futabatei, translated by Marleigh Ryan, is often described as the first modern Japanese novel.  The hero of the piece is Bunzo Utsumi, a civil servant living with his uncle's family in Tokyo while saving up money to establish his own house with his mother.  While his aunt, Omasa, is not overly keen on Bunzo, his uncle intends to marry off his daughter, Osei, to her young relative, and the young couple are slowly working their way towards an understanding.

That is, until Bunzo unexpectedly loses his job, a victim of office politics.  Now his aunt is free to convey her displeasure (especially as his uncle is almost permanently away on business), and her attitude is bound to rub off on Osei.  Enter, at this point, Noboru Honda, a former colleague of Bunzo's who has managed to keep his job.  In fact, thanks mainly to his sycophantic attentions to his boss, he has even managed to get a raise - and now he is turning his attentions towards Osei...

If Bunzo could only pull himself together, he would easily be able to master the situation.  Sadly, he is the very model of indecision, brooding over his unjust treatment in his room, while Honda works his charms on both Omasa and Osei.  Although Bunzo is a much better person than any of the people surrounding him, he is repeatedly humiliated - what's more, rather than admitting defeat and moving out, he stays in his room, hoping that Osei will change her mind.

By the end of novel, he has burnt most of his bridges, with none of the other main characters willing to talk to him.  Yet still, as the story comes to its conclusion, Bunzo harbours hopes of a reconciliation and reinstatement to his old position.  At which point, the average reader may well decide that he deserves everything he gets...

*****
Ukigumo is an interesting story, but it's not amazing by modern standards (and some people argue that it was never really finished...), so you might think I regret buying it.  Nothing could be further from the truth - this was a great buy.  Why?  Because the actual novel is accompanied by Marleigh Ryan's extensive 200-page commentary, which contains an extended biography, background information about Meiji-era Japan and the creation of Ukigumo.  Wait, come back - that's a good thing...

In what is suspiciously reminiscent of a PhD thesis, Ryan introduces the reader to Futabatei, but also to his friend Shoyo Tsubouchi, a minor novelist who became a much bigger name in the field of literary theory.  Tsubouchi was one of the first Japanese theorists to champion foreign styles of writing, demanding that Japanese writers pay far more attention to characterisation than had previously been the case.  His ideas greatly influenced Futabatei, who ended up writing the style of novel Tsubouchi himself was unable to manage.

Tsubouchi was also responsible for starting Futabatei off on a career in literary translation.  The young writer had studied Russian at university and was the first to translate certain classic stories into Japanese, including many by Turgenev.  This double career as writer and translator (a situation copied by later Japanese writers - including a certain Haruki Murakami...) enabled Futabatei to draw on these Russian realist influences, especially the idea of the 'superfluous hero', when he came to write Ukigumo.  And his translation work would also help him with another rather tricky problem...

...you see, for me one of the most fascinating aspects of the commentary was Futabatei's struggle to create a variety of language which would suit the style of literature he was hoping to write.  Up to this time, Japanese had a very formal Chinese-influenced writing style which was totally unsuitable for modern literature; however, the only other option was the spoken language which, as well as being considered unworthy of literature, was divided into mutually unintelligible dialects.  In order to drag the Japanese novel out of the middle ages, and create something which measured up to the Russian works he loved, not only did Futabatei have to persuade readers to accept characterisation over a sensational plot, he also had to codify a new style of literary language.  Now that is a tough task.

Once you understand the issues the writer faced in creating Ukigumo, its importance in modern Japanese literature becomes a little more understandable.  By itself, the novel is merely a pleasant read.  However, when combined with Marleigh Ryan's excellent supplement (and the fascinating footnotes), it becomes a whole lot more, fully deserving of the title bestowed upon it.

While I'm very happy that I decided to buy this book, an excellent addition to my burgeoning J-Lit library, I'm not sure it's for everyone.  Before you start trawling through second-hand book sites, perhaps you should first ask yourself which side of the metaphorical line you're on.  I suspect that Ukigumo is for those of you who are already a lost cause as far as J-Lit is concerned...

Oriental Odds and Ends

The more J-Lit you read, the more addictive it becomes, and anyone with a serious passion for Japanese literature, particularly that of the early twentieth century, is bound to want to expand their horizons at some point and explore what else is out there.  For this reason, collections are a great help to the budding Japanophile, and last year I read my first, the excellent Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories.  Today's post looks at my second foray into the area of collected Japanese fiction - was it just as successful?  You'll just have to read on to find out...

*****
Modern Japanese Literature, an anthology edited by Donald Keene, is a collection of Japanese writing covering the period from 1868 (the start of the Meiji Era, traditionally considered the beginning of 'modern' Japan) to the middle of the twentieth century.  Unlike the Oxford collection, Keene's book is not restricted to short stories - it also contains traditional and Western poetry, a couple of plays and extracts from classic novels.  Running to 438 pages, there's enough here to give any beginner a fair overview of the must-read writers of the period covered.

It would be impossible to cover all the works in detail, but I thought I would briefly touch on some of the ones I liked most from the various genres (concentrating on things I hadn't read before).  In terms of extracts from novels, Shimei Futabatei's The Drifting Cloud, an incomplete work from the late-nineteenth century, is one that appealed, with its story of a bumbling civil servant trying to find love in Meiji Japan.  I'm also tempted to splash out on Jun'ichiro Tanazaki's novella Captain Shigemoto's Mother and Yukio Mishima's semi-autobiographical work Confessions of a Mask on the strength of the extracts given here.

There were several short stories I liked, and I wish there had been many more of them.  Among the best were Ichiyo Higuchi's Growing Up and Kafu Nagai's The River Sumida, both of which are lengthy, historical, coming-of-age stories set in and around the red-light districts of Tokyo.  Another favourite was Riichi Yokomitsu's story Time, a beautifully-written tale of a troupe of actors on a dangerous night journey through the mountains (running away from an unpaid hotel bill...).  Finally, I also enjoyed Osamu Dazai's story Villon's Wife, another of his tales of mistreated women and badly-behaved men in post-war Tokyo, similar in style to his novel The Setting Sun.

Of course, there was a lot to be savoured beyond my usual prose diet, but poetry is not really my preference, so to be honest none of it really stuck in the memory.  However, of the two plays included, I did like Kikuchi Kan's The Madman on the Roof, a short work on the subject of... well, I think it's pretty self-explanatory really ;)  Kan's play makes the reader look at the behaviour of both the sane and the insane and decide who the mad ones really are...

*****
Despite its good points though, I wasn't entirely happy with the anthology.  One issue I had, the abundance of novel extracts, was my own fault as I really should know what the word 'anthology' means...  However, there were some other problems as well.  For one thing, the label 'modern' is a complete misnomer as the collection was released in 1956.  Anyone looking for Murakami, Yoshimoto, Ogawa or Abe will be sadly disappointed, and Mishima and Dazai are included as examples of the young generation!

In addition, the feel of the book is very old fashioned.  Both in the introduction and the short explanations which appear before each work, Keene's comments appear patronising by today's standards.  It smacks a little of exoticism, presenting the work of noble savages who are imitating Western art, some of them even doing so successfully.  While there is little that is outright insulting, the underlying tone is one of detatched superiority - and it grates a little...

A final issue I had with the collection though was a feeling that the translations weren't always up to scratch.  This is a contentious issue, and many people are loath to believe that you can judge translations, but I actually had a few texts to compare.  In my private library (!), I have other versions of three of the works included here: Ryunosuke Akutugawa's classic story Hell Screen; Natsume Soseki's Botchan, a staple of the Japanese school curriculum; and Ogai Mori's The Wild Geese, one of the most famous of the early Japanese novels.

The translation of Mori's work was not as good as the one I have, but the difference wasn't enormous.  However, in the other two cases, the contrast was like night and day.  While I wasn't completely convinced by the more recent J. Cohn translation of Botchan when I read it, I'm now much more of a fan as the older Burton Watson version was stiff and stuffy, and detracted from the humour.  Similarly, compared to Jay Rubin's excellent, irony-laden treatment of Hell Screen, W.H.H. Norman's version is a little dull, losing the flavour of Rubin's interpretation.  I'm never going to know which of the versions is more faithful to the original, but in terms of excellence in English, I'm with the modern ones all the way...

*****

Modern Japanese Literature is far from perfect, and compared to The Oxford Book of Short Stories it doesn't come off too well.  However, it's still worth a try; there is a lot of good writing in there, much of which I wasn't aware of before opening the book.  Still, if you have the choice, I'd go with the Oxford book as a first collection of classic J-Lit.  It's a lot more consistent and, more importantly, more consistently rewarding.

Of course, what I'd really like is another collection of Japanese writing - the abridged version of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (even if reading it would cause me multiple injuries!).  So, if anyone was thinking of sending me an early birthday present... ;)