10/5 readings

 

    One of the things Carpenter points out is that she had at one point read a Natsume Soseki novel and was not impressed, but had read another and thought it was really good. She emphasizes the fact that whether you enjoy a book that's been translated from another language or not can be severely influenced by whether or not you like the translator's style of writing. It's possible that the author isn't to blame if you didn't like a book, it may have been the translator's taste that wasn't to your liking.  

I found it interesting that she says you're not really able to change the picture when translating. You can maybe add a tree here and there, but you can't get rid of the person standing in the middle of the frame. However, she mentions a rare exception to this rule. Arthur Binard's self-translation of his Japanese poem only used the word "mother" once, whereas in Japanese it's mentioned many more times. This isn't the kind of change that we can usually get away with as translators, I don't think.

She also mentions that when translating Japanese poetry, you have to decide to start your poem with the bit at the end, or the bit at the beginning. Much like with what we had to do over this weekend when translating the haikus and tanka, you just have to do the best you can, as it'll never come out the same as in the original. It can be especially tough to keep the same feeling with the translation of a Japanese poem, especially because of it being SOV, rather than SVO in English.

In the interview, she gives examples of the evolution of a couple of the sentences in the book "A True Novel". I found interesting the variation between the first and final drafts, as well as seeing where the author had wanted more attention, like when she wanted more focus on the moonlight. The dedication to the translation of that book is incredible, considering the fact that it took 3 years and the effort of 5 different people to pull it off.