After the Quake and The Question of Translation

[John Bailey]

Flicking through a copy of After the Quake at a bookstore a while back, I 
was surprised to find that I'd read most of it online in fragmentary form. 
Most of its chapters are available as standalone short stories scattered 
around the web.

Seeing how there was a recent thread on Pynchon and Translation not long 
ago, I just thought I'd add a few interesting issues I came across yesterday 
browsing through "Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words" by Jay Rubin, one 
of his translators. Like P (I think, at least in regards to french 
translations), Murakami has an active interest in treating the process as an 
active collaboration. Rubin includes a really great appendix to his book 
which discusses the way his translation of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is as 
much an adaptation as anything else. It edits out (if I remember) around 100 
pages of the original novel! Plus, plot points are omitted, certain details 
are altered to suit a Western audience, and so on...Now, a big heap o' 
debate occurred when the German translations were published, as they were 
translations of the English translations, which some saw as too distant from 
the original. Buuuut, Murakami had had some participation in the Eng. 
translation (note: some) and had even gone so far as to incorporate some of 
the cuts into the republished Japanese paperback versions. So there are 
quite a few definitive versions of this novel out there, most 'authorised' 
by the author. In fact, this process of revision, of treating the novel as 
an open-ended text which might be rewritten by the author as time passes, is 
something I'd love to see P give a shot. I wonder how he would revise GR?

Not that this would ever happen, or that I'm so serious about the idea being 
a positive one, but I do love stories of the writer-as-reader ("what was I 
thinking?!?") Makes them seem a little more fallible.


MalignD wrote:
>Re writerly intentions and readerly inferences:

>An earlier review of Haruki Murakami's book, After the Quake, was briefly 
>recapped today (tomorrow) in >the NY Times Book Review, New & Noteworthy 
>Paperbacks.  It said:

>"Even though they were written before Sept. 11, 2001, these six stories 
>about the emotional >aftershocks of the lethal 1995 earthquake in Kobe, 
>Japan, will resonate with many American readers as >a metaphor for the 
>terrorist atacks. ...  Last year our reviewer, Jeff Giles, found this an 
>'unexpectedly >powerful' collection about a traumatizing shock to the 
>Japanese system.  In fact, he added, 'one sliver >of what makes the book so 
>moving is the sense that on some level it is Murakami's deeply felt 
>get-well >card' to the United States."

>Which, of course, it was not, at least when written.

_________________________________________________________________
ninemsn Extra Storage is now available. No account expiration - no need to 
worry about losing your Hotmail account. Go to  
http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/home&pgmarket=en-au