10/19 Comments

 

A point that Hibbett brings up, which reminded me of something we’ve discussed before in class with regards to Murakami, is a text where Tanizaki uses hiragana and katakana to distinguish between two in-story authors of certain parts of the text. In the Murakami text, we mentioned that the two different narrators used different pronouns for “I”, and the distinction was made in English translation with tense, where one part is rendered entirely in past while the other is in present tense. I thought that was a really clever way of approaching the issue and making the distinction very clear, but on the other hand, Hibbett says that he simply chose to attempt rendering one part in a more feminine voice. This strikes me as interesting since I think it would probably be a lot subtler and harder to spot for the English reader, but at the same time it would probably, in terms of the sense conveyed, be a more faithful rendering, so to speak.

John Nathan touches a lot on faithfulness, and I think his points are particularly fascinating. In particular, it seems to me he draws a parallel on how since a language is always in flux and changing, so too can the original work change, especially in relation to and in interaction with translations. I thought this was an interesting concept, especially in relation to Japanese, which has a lot of old works which would be hard to understand to someone completely unfamiliar with Classical Japanese, even if they were perfectly fluent in the modern.