1Q84

[Mark Kohut]

Did I write that he works with his English translators?, although no stories 
on whether that is specifically true for 1Q84...
 
So many large works, from Hamlet, Milton, Moby Dick, War & Peace, Against the Day
have been said to be too long....
 
And lotsa forgotten ones were....
 
I, at this stage, will (mostly) trust Murakami...

From: Technopaegnion Tapinosis <technopaegniontapinosis at gmail.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org 
Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 8:21 PM
Subject: Re: 1Q84


There's definitely a lot lost in translation with this one. People
>who've read it in the original have said that the translations are
>overly simplified and even lazy, as well as adding in lots of new
>lines that explain things deemed too "japanese" but which are pretty
>lame additions that make everything seemed overly spelled out.
>

Right. That is my impression. 


>And even from my limited knowledge I've spotted plenty of references
>to Japanese myth as well as characters and scenes from earlier
>Murakami novels.

My first shot at this novelist, so...


I haven't read a review that tries to grapple with
>the ontological issues of the novel, which is essentially about two
>people writing each other (Tengo and Aomame are fictions created by
>one another), or the Little People metaphor which to me seems a direct
>comment on the culture of patriarchal violence, conformity, complicity
>and the sexual degradation of women and young girls in contemporary
>Japanese society - in fact the most political statement the author's
>ever managed.
>

The ontological, the two hands, Escher's hands, is ...well, interesting...and...I'm just speculating here, but maybe the styles bleed or blend. Don't know. This couold work seemlessly in the Japanese of the author and feel and read strange to me in English. 

As mentioned by Mark, the author is fluent in the language and has excellent translators....so I don't know what to think. 



>All of this said, even given the mistakes in translation and reading,
>this is a long book that doesn't justify its length in English and I
>wouldn't recommend it particularly. You'd need to have an interest in
>Murakami and Japan to want to bother even trying to work out what's
>going on beneath the surface.

But something has hooked me....so
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120118/84dd3410/attachment.html>