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Upon realizing that it was just plain stupid to jump into doing a translation without reading the whole story through at least once, I'm doing a first painfully slow readthrough of Mukudori. Halfway through, it's nowhere near as interesting as the starlings on the first page suggested, but still--for a literary relationship story, interesting enough. And we know that there will very likely never be Shizuoka Translation Comptetition passages with space pirates, sadly. Though I wish I'd had the stamina to finish my translation two years ago, when one of the stories had an Edo-era thief. That was a fun story.

And I've been reading through some translation theory books, as well, one of which is Russian and deliciously mean in its excoriation of bad translations.

I am almost done with school for this semester--yes, I still have a paper and a half to write, but they're short. They'll be fine.

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Oh, I forgot something, which is this:

Moon Child is coming out in English translation.

I only just found this out, maybe it's old news by now. Nor am I going to buy it myself; I may well buy the last volume simply because it confused the heck out of me in Japanese. But it is SO PRETTY and SO TRAGIC and AWWWWW. And creepy as anything.

My love for Shimizu Reiko is entirely unreasonable. Just buy it.

Literary translation theory

The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. By Lawrence Venuti

There's theory, and then there's Theory. The subtitle tells you that this is Theory. I found it unreadable.

Literary Translation, A Practical Guide. By Clifford E. Landers.

Far and away the most practical, as it says. The author has no time at all for theories of "resistance," and to him there is a single correct way to translate a text--in order to have the precisely same effect on the reader of the translation as the original text had. As a handbook, it works very well, but there are no great big ideas, and it doesn't make for exhilarating reading.

The Art of Translation: Kornei Chukovsky's A High Art
A translation from Russian. And oh, how I wish this book had originally been in English. The author is so mean! But reading a translation about the problems of a translation is a slightly bewildering thing, and I can only examine the errors at a distance.
This is essentially a polemic against awful translations, so it's of little educational value. I can say that I needed to hear this:
"I speak here about those translators whose vocabulary is wretchedly impoverished: a foreign word to them has only one lonely little meaning. ... To them a horse is always a horse. Why not a steed, or a stallion, or a mount, or a jumper, or a trotter? A boat is always a boat to them, never a ship, a craft, a canoe, or a scow. ... Why is it that so many translators always write that a man is thin, not lean, spare, emaciated, frail, gaunt, or skinny?"
I can't help but be amused by the author flinging barbs at people I've never heard of:
"Instead of Shelley we are given an unfortunate stutterer, a composer of unreadable doggerel whose meaning we have to guess at as in a charade:
Be it calm,
Blessed thy sleep,
Like those who fell, not ours--through sobs.
Just imagine two hundred pages of poetry translated into such gibberish as this."


I am going to make brownies for the departmental Christmas party. It was a great deal of fun last year. There was a skit.