The March 11, 2011 earthquake that shook northeastern Japan also reverberated throughout Japanese society, forcing it to reconsider many of things things that it had taken for granted—its usage of energy, its relationship to the natural environment, its relationship with the government, and its modes of organizing at the grass-roots level.  Almost immediately, writers took action.  Many figures known for their involvement in social issues, writers such as Ōe Kenzaburō, Tsushima Yūko, and Ishimure Michiko, began respond and publish statements to the press, helping to use their influence to help shape reconstruction efforts and talk about new directions for the Japanese nation.  

Perhaps the segment of the Japanese literary world where the seismic forces of 3/11 were felt most strongly, however, was the poetic world.  Many Japanese newspapers include regular columns that include free verse (shi), tanka, or haiku poems, but in just the few days after 3/11, poetry began to emerge from those small columns and take a more prominent place in the news, eventually finding its way into a central position in the discourse that had started unfolding across the nation. Poetry exploded into the mainstream, serving as one of the ways that the nation thought about and processed its own complicated feelings about the disasters. 

Because I was in Japan at the time and experienced the quakes, numerous aftershocks, and anxiety personally, I have been unable to forget it.  After a few weeks of uncertainty and great worry, everything I had come to Japan to do was cancelled, and so I cut my stay short and returned to the United States ahead of schedule.   As one way of working through the experience and my complicated feelings about returning to America, I began translating a number of poems about the quake and the resulting disasters, mostly poems written by poets whom I admire.  Most of those translations have been published in various journals, mostly online. 

Here is a collection of links to some of those translations.  Some appear with the original Japanese.  Most of the poems first appeared in the May 2011 special issue of Handbook of Contemporary Poetry 『現代詩手帖』dedicated to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown.  Some were also published in a special section in the daily newspaper Asahi shinbun published in commemoration of the first anniversary of the quake.  Others were published in various magazines or newspapers, but still, these poems are only the tiniest tip of the iceberg.  There are thousands upon thousands more poems out there.

TANIKAWA Shuntarō: “Words”　
谷川俊太郎「ことば」

WAGŌ Ryōichi: Pebbles of Poetry (Part I)
和合亮一『詩の礫』抄

TAKAHASHI Mutsuo: “These Things Here and Now”
高橋睦郎「いまここにこれらのことを」

YOSHIMASU Gōzō: “at the side (côtés) of poetry”
吉増剛造「詩のcôtésに」

ITŌ Hiromi: “Cooking, Writing Poetry”
伊藤比呂美「料理する、詩を書く」

ARAI Takako: “Half a Pair of Shoes” and “Galapagos”
新井高子「片方の靴」と「ガラパゴス」

HIRATA Toshiko: “Do Not Tremble” and “Please”
平田俊子「ゆれるな」と「どうか」

TANAKA Yōsuke: “Screaming Potato Field”
田中庸介「叫ぶ芋畑」

OHSAKI Sayaka: “Noisy Animal”
大崎紗香「うるさい動物」

Jeffrey ANGLES: “Return After Earthquake”
ジェフリー・アングルス「地震後の帰国」

The always beautiful literary journal Manoa, published by the University of Hawai’i, has an especially impressive and beautiful new issue centering on the theme of freedom and what that means for individuals, societies, cultures, nations, and religions.  It also contains an extract from my translation of Takahashi Mutsuo’s Twelve Views from the Distance—the entire first, unforgettable chapter of the book about a young boy dealing with his own mother’s attempts to find freedom in adversity.  Check Manoa out by clicking here.   

The new volume (number of 11) of Mantis, the journal of poetry and translation published at Stanford, contains my translation of a series of poems by Yoko Tawada 多和田葉子 done for Worlds 2012, a writer’s conference that Tawada-san and I attended last year in Norwich, England. 

These poems were inspired by the shape of kanji and so the visual quality of the language is as important as the sound and meaning. Below is a picture, taken by Martin Figura last year in Norwich.  I am reading reading the translation, while at the side, just out of the frame of the picture, Tawada is holding up a print-out of the kanji that inspired that particular poem.

This photo is particularly amusing to me because the character “rice” (米) also is used as an abbreviation for “America” or “American.”  It rather looks as if Tawada-san is holding up a sign announcing my nationality.

Click here for information on how to order a copy of Mantis.

I just read Peter Minter’s essay about Japan, poetry, translation, and the productive power of forgetting in Southern Review.  From it comes this haunting passage.  Check out the entire essay by clicking here.

Against the sheer existential horror of all we forget, each poem in a life becomes a fugitive, delicately precise machine for remembering an event and its organic dislocations. A poem is like an ark for a moment or series of moments, a small vessel amidst a sea of epic or reflexive forgetfulness that we glide off headlong toward our friends and readers or indeed future selves. Perhaps that is what our species has been doing for thousands of years, making poems to send information forward and outward so others can see and remember. Madeleines for the survivors. Holographs of the forgotten. Genealogies of invisibility.

Since its founding decades ago, Poetry Kanto has been instrumental in introducing many Japanese poets to the English-speaking world.  Recently, the editors of Poetry Kanto placed all of its annual issues since 2005 online.  This means that a small treasure trove of Japanese poetry is suddenly accessible to anyone with a computer.  

I have published a number of poems in Poetry Kanto over the years, including translations of Tada Chimako 多田智満子 (2007), Itō Hiromi 伊藤比呂美 (2012 and 2011), Arai Takako 新井高子 (2012), Minashita Kiriu 水無田気流 (2007),and my own poetry (2011).  Click the links above to go directly to the pages for each of these writers.

The Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University is publishing a new journal. We invite submissions of up to four translated poems from Arabic, Chinese, French, Old French, German, Classical Greek, Latin, Japanese, and Russian into English. Be sure to provide each poem in its original language along with its source information in MLA format as an attached PDF. We strongly encourage you to write a reflective commentary on the translation process, including particular challenges posed by the text or particular translation choices you made. All submissions will undergo a peer review process. Our reading period is October 1 to January 15, 2012.

The New York Times ran an article about the tribulations of translating humor, inspired by the recent ALTA conference in Rochester, NY.  Here are a few of the highlights. 

“The received wisdom that you can never translate a joke is worth examining a bit more closely,” Bellos told me. The trick to translating humor, Bellos argues in his book, “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything,” is to abandon the idea of perfect fidelity and instead try to find a joke that rings some of the same bells as the original. By this standard, many simple punch lines, from the morbid to the absurd, are not that much harder to translate than the weather.

When complications do arise, they are usually caused by one of two tricky areas: cultural references and wordplay, according to those seasoned in the art. Culture-bound humor often presents a dilemma: you can either lose readers with a cryptic allusion or you can burden the text with explanatory footnotes. In an increasingly English-speaking world, the best solution is sometimes to let it stand.

The author is talking here about translating from English into another language, but I wonder to what extend he would agree when talking about translations from other languages, which quite different senses of humor, into English.  It is hard to imagine that an American audience would be terribly patient with puns in Japanese or jokes that play a very different sorts of sensibilities, or am I wrong?   

The online literary journal Words Without Borders has a fascinating on-going series of articles in which they talk to translators about the art of book reviews, especially book reviews about books that have been translated from other languages.  The question about how to write a good review of a book translated from another language, especially when the reviewer does not have access to or knowledge of the source language, is a thorny question—so thorny, in fact, that relatively few journals publish reviews of translated literature.  Many of the people that have written for this series of articles inWords Without Borders are among the top translators working today, including Edith Grossman, Susan Bernofsky, and Suzanne Jill Levine.

The new October 2010 issue of Gendaishi techō 現代詩手帖 [Handbook of Contemporary Poetry] is a special issue dedicated to the translation of poetry, and it contains a number of articles about translation, roundtable discussions, original works of poetry, and some translations themselves. 

Among them, is my own poem called 「同居人」 (The Co-habitant) in which I use the image of a stalker outside a house, rather like one might see in a horror/suspense film, as a metaphor for the work of a translator.  Also in the same issue is a transcript of a talk that I did last year in Tokyo with the talented poet Tanaka Yōsuke 田中庸介 and the haikuist and translator Miyashita Emiko 宮下惠美子.

2012/11/19（Monday) 19:00～21:00
Lecture & Reading: “The Monster of Translation” with SHIBATA Motoyuki, SUGA Keijirō, and Jeffrey ANGLES in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo

翻訳という怪物

異なる言語と言語の間には、ぐんと羽ばたいたり、ぬらぬら這い回ったり、時には凶暴に襲いかかったり する、翻訳という名の「怪物」が棲んでいるのではないでしょうか。それは、新しい文学の創造はもちろん、 私たちの暮らしや日々の言葉にも、とてつもないパワーを及ぼしています。いま、大活躍の翻訳家３人が、 自らの作品朗読を盛り込みながら、この怪物の魅力、秘密、そして最前線を語り明かします。日本文学、 アメリカ文学、世界文学の扉がつぎつぎ開く夕べへ、ようこそ！

講師紹介
柴田元幸：1954年生まれ。翻訳家。主な著書に『アメリカン・ナルシス』（サントリー学芸賞）、訳書に ポール・オースター『幻影の書』、トマス・ピンチョン『メイスン＆ディクスン』（日本翻訳文化賞）などがある。

菅啓次郎：1958年生まれ。翻訳家、詩人。主な著書に『斜線の旅』（読売文学賞）、『オムニフォン』、 詩集に『Agend’Ars』、訳書にル・クレジオ『歌の祭り』、サン・テグジュペリ『星の王子さま』などがある。

ジェフリー・アングルス：1971年生まれ。翻訳家、詩人。主な著書に『Writing the Love of Boys』、訳書に 多田智満子英訳詩集『Forest of Eyes』（日米友好基金日本文学翻訳賞、ランドン翻訳賞）、伊藤比呂美 英訳詩集『Killing Kanoko』などがある。日時 2012年11月19日（月) 19:00～21:00 定員 80名　※定員になり次第締め切らせていただきます。主催d-labo会場東京都港区赤坂9-7-1　ミッドタウン・タワー7F

セミナー参加の申し込みはE-MAILにて承ります。

『キャット・イン・ザ・ハット』
ドクター・スース作
伊藤比呂美・訳　(2000)
The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
Translation by ITŌ Hiromi (2000)

At the MCAA Conference on Sat., Sept. 22, 2:15-4:15 pm, I’ll be giving a talk called “Seuss Straddles the Pacific: Translation, Ideology, and Kid’s Culture” about the history of translations of Dr. Seuss into Japanese.  Here is the abstract.

This presentation examines the history of the translation into Japanese of perhaps the most quintessentially American children’s author—Theodor Geisel or ‘Dr. Seuss.’  As this presentation argues, there have been several waves of translation, but at all times, larger ideological currents have played a large role in determining which books were translated and how.  This article pays attention to the ways that the choice of text and translation style reflect larger ideological currents.  For instance, the Japanese version of The 500 Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins, translated by Ōmori Takeo in 1949, was published during the SCAP Occupation, an era in which Dr. Seuss’ liberal, anti-imperialist story held special resonance for the Japanese population.  Later, during the 1970s, the prominent translator Watanabe Shigeo, translated a dozen Seuss works, but in ways that modify the messages in order to better match the zeitgeist of the time of the era in which he was working.  The most translations have been spearheaded by the feminist poet Itō Hiromi, who has translated Seuss in ways that decenter and destabilize the male privilege implied in the original texts, thus carrying his liberal agenda in a new direction appropriate for our contemporary moment.

The conference will be at the Fetzner Center on Western Michigan University’s campus.  Admission is free to people with a WMU student ID.

Itō Sei 伊藤整, 1931
“A Department Store Called M”「M百貨店」
Translated by Jeffrey Angles

The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, vol. 1, ed. J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel (NY: Columbia University Press, 2005) pp. 418-28.

On June 20, 2012, Michael Stein published an article about the opinions of the three winners of the EU Prize for Literature, who were speaking about the position of writers from smaller languages in the worldwide marketplace of literature.  The entire article is here, but the passages about the importance and problems of translation were particular striking.  It is disturbing how translation, especially into English, tends to determine the entire fate of “world literature,” not to mention the fortunes of individual authors working in “smaller” languages.  

It was interesting to hear these writers give their own take on the usefullness of agents, with the exception of Kalin Terziiski, who rejoined the discussion by saying “Bulgaria doesn’t have agents…I am a single warrior, I am my own PR manager and literary agent — a very single warrior.”

Rădulescu explained why the process is not as simple as it seems: “If I want to be published in Germany I won’t go to a publisher but to a translator, who will then prepare a sample and take it to a publisher.” […]

Zmeškal went on to say that unless a writer is translated into one of the big languages – English, French, German, Spanish – then it becomes very hard to get translated into the smaller languages because those publishers are waiting for the kind of validation that comes with being published in a big market.

The difficulty of getting translated into English clearly tops the list of big markets. At that point Alexandra Büchler, director of Literature Across Frontiers, outlined some of the specific features of the English-language literary world that keeps the number of translations so low. Exoticism isn’t enough for a publisher to put out a writer from Eastern Europe because it can be provided by an English-language writer from a Commonwealth country such as India, she said, adding that countries like the UK and US have long been used to exporting their culture to a welcoming world. She also stressed that the amount of work before, during and after a translation is something a writer shouldn’t have to take the time for. […]

Zmeškal closed the disussion by pointing out the imbalance between translators to and from larger languages. “To be translated into English there are only four or five translators at the highest level, while there is no problem being translated to Czech.”

Indeed, in my own field of Japanese literature, I am often struck at how translation into English determines the fate of writers in Japan, how successful they are on the world stage, how often they appear at literary festivals, and how much nourishment they receive for their art. 

Despite this fact, there is little incentive for translators to dedicate themselves to represent world literature.  Publishing houses tend to look at it suspiciously.  Literary translation makes shockingly little money and give translators little credit, often not even including translator’s names on the covers of books. 

Let us hope that the situation improves in the near future.  The world needs translators, and without us, world literature cannot exist.  The world will become smaller, narrower, and far less interesting. 

New Voices in Translation Studies, an online journal published by IATIS has a new issue up.  In it are a number of interesting articles, including one on Japanese translations of teen fiction, including Harry Potter. 

ARTICLES

When Skopos Meets Logical Meaning in a Korean Bible Translation: implications of using clause combination as an analytic tool
Gyung Hee Choi, University of New South Wales, AUSTRALIA
[Abstract] [Article]

Contrasting Visual and Verbal Cueing of Space: strategies and devices in the audio description of film
Maija Hirvonen, University of Helsinki, FINLAND
[Abstract] [Article]

Creating Personae: the translator’s afterword in Japanese translations of teen fiction
Isabelle Bilodeau, Nagoya University, JAPAN
[Abstract] [Article]

Online Paratexts and the Challenges of Translators’ Visibility: a case of women translators of the Quran
Rim Hassen, University of Cambridge, U.K.
[Abstract] [Article]

Found in Translation: Franco-Irish translation relationships in nineteenth-century Ireland
Michèle Milan, Dublin City University, IRELAND
[Abstract] [Article]

Publishing Contemporary Foreign Poetry in Post-War Italy: a Bourdieusian perspective on Mondadori and Scheiwiller
Mila Milani, University of Manchester, U.K.
[Abstract] [Article]

Translating the Greek Civil War: Alexandros Kotzias and the translator’s multiple habitus
Kalliopi Pasmatzi, University of Manchester, U.K.
[Abstract] [Article]

Co-constructing Dyadic Sequences in Healthcare Interpreting: a multimodal account
Sergio Pasquandrea, Università per Stranieri di Perugia, ITALY
[Abstract] [Article]

Chasing Ricoeur: in pursuit of the translational paradigm
Deborah M. Shadd, University of Ottawa, CANADA
[Abstract] [Article]

Translating the Author-Function: the (re)narration of Christa Wolf
Caroline Summers, University of Manchester, U.K.
[Abstract] [Article]