After the Quake and The Question of Translation

[Cyrus]

John Bailey wrote:

> 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. 


Very interesting, though it sounds to me like a monster. Imagine having 
a kid, and then a few years later giving it a series of plastic surgery 
sessions (including prosthetics, mutilations etc.) in order for it to 
meet your "new specifications". Why not have another kid instead?

Revising GR would probably create such a monster. But I would really 
like to see Pynchon write a sort of "intro" discussing how he views it 
now, after all these years.

I would also like to point out how much easier the work of the French 
must have been compared to us poor bastards translating into a different 
alphabet. Not to mention that many of the "difficult" words are the same 
in both English and French.

Cyrus