Copeland and Hibbett Reading Comments - Yang

Hearing Voices: My Encounters with Translation by Rebecca Copeland

It's cool that Edward Seidensticker himself was her professor in college. I think a good way to translate the unique hair ornaments (kôgai and kanzashi) would have been to just leave them the way they are and add footnotes to give a more detailed explanation of them, as equivalent objects simply do not exist in the Western world.

I can see how translating the Tokushima dialect that the puppet-maker speaks in Ningyôshi Tenguya Kyûkichi can be very challenging, and I agree that translating "voices" in general requires a lot of creativity. I thought her approach of talking to someone who's somewhat native in the dialect was very smart, as this will allow you to grasp the nuances and unique traits of the dialect, whereas dictionaries and other written sources would not be able to do the same. I recall our discussion during class regarding translating the 標準語 of Tokyo compared to 関西弁 from places such as Osaka. As someone who grew up around people who spoke 関西弁, I can see how difficult it is to somehow explain the differences between 「だめ」 & 「あかん」, 「ない 」& 「へん」, etc. The only way I can think of is to find a similarly correlated dialect in English, such as AAVE or a southern accent, but that could also bring about many controversial issues regarding the cultures and meanings behind these dialects.

It's really interesting to read about the differences between a commercial press and a university press. It seems like the commercial press focuses on sales and the appeal to customers more, which makes sense considering its main goal is to make money, whereas the university press aims to stay true to the original and not alter the original text. I agree that Seidensticker's opinion that a translator should just be a counterfeiter and should not reshape is not very realistic. I agree that sometimes reshaping (such as in the context of Grotesque not being suited for the average Western reader) can definitely be helpful and can even be considered staying closer to the original text. 

On Tanizaki Jun'ichiro by Howard Hibbett

It's odd that people considered Tanizaki to lack "thought" or 思想. I wonder if this was because he "stood outside of the mainstream literary world in Japan." Perhaps he did this on purpose so that he didn't have to deal with the social and political issues of the real world in his writing. I thought it was funny to call "ero, guro, and nansensu" the unholy trinity. Although these three were characteristic of Edo literature, it seems that many Japanese authors nowadays still tend to use these elements generously in their writing, such as Murakami. 

I think it's very interesting that Tanizaki is accused of writing about "exotic Japan" and making it seem like the perfect country with beautiful landscapes, friendly people, delicious food, etc. I don't think this is necessarily an aestheticization of Japan in the same way that Western tourists view Japan nowadays. Perhaps Japan was really like that, and he just chose to omit some of the less desirable aspects.

The different styles between the man's diary (square katakana) and the woman's diary (hiragana) can definitely be hard to translate, and it reminds me of the challenges I faced when translating Night of the Spider Monkey for our first translation assignment. I recall using different fonts to represent the speaker, with the narrator using a normal font and the spider monkey using a more comical font. Perhaps the difference between the masculine and feminine styles of writing can be shown by choosing fonts that are somehow more masculine and feminine, respectively.