Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, the Novel

Kate: Hills of Silver Ruins is the most recent novel in The Twelve Kingdoms Series by Ono Fuyumi. You have translated many of the others and are now working on the long-anticipated Hills of Silver Ruins. 

Does the book seem a culmination to the series? Does it include recurring themes?

Eugene: Hills of Silver Ruins is Fuyumi Ono's first Twelve Kingdoms novel since 2001, though she published a collection of short stories in 2013 that take place in the Twelve Kingdoms universe. Her previous novel, Zan'e in 2012, is in the contemporary horror genre (the other half of her oeuvre). Hills of Silver Ruins is a sequel to The Shore in Twilight.

Although Youko is the featured character that springs to mind, Taiki has actually commanded as much or more of her attention over the series. The epic Hills of Silver Ruins does feel like her swan song, though along with Hayao Miyazaki (whose absolutely, positively last film, How Do You Live? opens next summer), I wouldn't count out another installment down the road.

Kate: Does the book include recurring themes?
 

Eugene: I see two themes playing out throughout the series. The first is how the divine interferes in human affairs. Though the cause and effect are more explicit than in our world, there are still those who see around them a mechanical universe that, once set in motion, does not need a god to continue operating.

Rousan appears to be carrying out an experiment that Shouryuu (the Imperial En) once mused about when he contemplated what he would do if he got bored with being emperor (since to abdicate is to die). What would happen if he threw a wrench into the gears of that mechanical universe? Would it self-correct and how? The conclusion (so far) is that the universe of the Twelve Kingdoms does indeed self-correct while making the maximum allowances for human agency.

In fact, Ono often inveighs against legalism as a basis for both life and political governance, which brings up the other theme: the difference between reigning and ruling.

Asen was so hellbent on reigning that he gave little thought to actually ruling (and he was a nihilist going in). I wonder if Ono was thinking of Ying Zheng, the brutal king of Qin, when she created Asen. I'm pretty sure Ying Zheng was an inspiration for Shoukei's father (the assassinated emperor of Hou) at the beginning of A Thousand Leagues of Wind.

Another historical reference that springs to mind is Oda Nobunaga's assault on Mt. Hiei in 1571. It roughly parallels Asen's attack on Zui'un Temple. The real Nobunaga and the fictional Asen are two Nietzschean peas in a pod.

The most successful kingdoms are those where the emperor or empress reigns but doesn't try to run everything themselves or try to fix everything all at once. This was a major problem at the onset of the Meiji era. There's no disputing the need for reform but the ruling oligarchy moved so fast they triggered numerous revolts, culminating in the Satsuma Rebellion, that could easily have been avoided.

Gyousou fell into the same trap and even sent Taiki abroad so he could act with fewer checks and balances.

By contrast, Shouryuu once appointed a man to be province lord who was "so busily engaged in pilfering the public treasury he had no interest in plotting political conspiracies or leading insurrections." Because a greedy rich man worries him less than a Machiavellian interested in power for its own sake. Such lowly passions are easier to control with carrots and sticks.

On the other hand, especially in chapter 21 of book 4, Asen comes across as a funhouse mirror image of Saitama from One Punch Man. Asen defines himself in terms of his rivals. The breaking point came when he realized that his rivalry with Gyousou was entirely one sided. He awoke from his prolonged funk when Taiki showed up because Taiki became another player to compete with.

Kate: After multiple translated books and manga, do you find the translation process harder? Easier? 

Eugene: I'm considerably better as a translator than I was when I started out but Fuyumi Ono doesn't make it easy with her extensive use of Chinese and references to medieval Chinese culture. Vocabulary aside, she has a clear and comprehensible style. I usually read about half a dozen chapters ahead. I make so many notes along the way that I have to start writing while it's fresh in my mind.

 

Bronze Devil: Interview with a Translator, Part III

The Bronze Devil

3. Edogawa often breaks the fourth wall (Dear Reader). This is common to a great deal of manga, in which even a somewhat self-contained story will include a tiny note from the mangaka, off to the side in a panel, about how the character feels about being a character in a manga. Of course, these types of asides are also fairly typical of a certain era and genre, such as E. Nesbit’s children’s fiction. Do Japanese authors break the fourth wall more often than western authors? Is it an ongoing staple of the fiction? Or does its popularity rise and fall as it does in the West?

Serialized fiction like manga and light novels are still popular in Japan. By its very nature, serialized fiction creates an ongoing relationship between the writer and the reader. In the manga and anime Bakuman, about the creation and publication of a manga series, the manga artists constantly receive feedback from their readers, on whom their careers depend. I think this encourages the manga artist to engage in ongoing interactions with the audience. Social media long before the Internet.

Though in terms of Japanese authors in general, I don’t know if they break the fourth wall more often than western authors. 

 4. The chapter title for Chapter 6 is “Strange, Weird, and Bizarre.” The words have similar meanings in English but different connotations. That is, each word evokes different emotions and imagery. How important is connotation in Japanese? Connotation can rely heavily on cultural “insider” status, so a word like “slob” can mean something very different (and negative) to Greg’s mother in Dharma and Greg as opposed to Dharma’s parents. Does connotation carry such impact in Japanese fiction? Non-fiction? 

The Japanese expression in the chapter title is kiki-kaikai (奇々怪々), which is defined in the dictionary as: “very strange, fantastic, amazing, bizarre, freakish.” I covered all the bases. Though I think “strange, weird, and bizarre” is a good way of summing up the sense of the phrase.

Broadly speaking, I’d say there is more denotation in English and more connotation in Japanese (although there’s plenty of both in both). So much meaning in Japanese rides on the social context and the social status of the speaker relative to the setting and to the audience. 

Consider all the consternation that occurs in romances about whether to attach an honorific to a name. Or to address someone using a first or a last name. And when it comes to expletives, the same exact word can be translated quite differently depending on whether a child or adult is speaking and who they are speaking to and whether honorifics are involved. 

5. Is another Edogawa translation coming? 

For now, I’m working on Hills of Silver Ruins, a Pitch Black Moon. At over 1600 pages, it’s going to take a while. I may return to Edogawa after that. 

Thanks for the interview! Explore The Bronze Devil more here and here.   

The Bronze Devil: Interview with a Translator, Part II

The Bronze Devil

 2. A great many idioms in The Bronze Devil—as well as the antics of some of the characters—evoke magicians and the circus. Are magicians as popular in Japan as they are in America? Do some magicians get more attention than others? That is, does Japanese culture extol the David Copperfield approach (big elaborate tricks) or the classic stage magician (rabbits out of hats) or the sleight of hand magician (card tricks) or all of them? What about Penn & Teller—or are Penn & Teller a little too ironic/cynical?

I’ve observed that Japanese don’t do the whole “dripping with irony” thing. It’s sand in the gears of a culture that depends so much on going with the flow. So I’d say the Penn & Teller approach is probably a bit too knowing and cynical. I do recall an episode of a police procedural in which the murder victim is a magician who had the audacity to reveal the secrets of other magicians.

Cyril Takayama: Japanese-American

magician: American background

meets cultural Japan. Kate thinks he'd

make a good Fiend in the movies!

In my limited Japanese television-watching experience, I haven’t seen many David Copperfield types. More old-school vaudeville-style magicians. Rabbits out of hats and simple sleight of hand and lots of banter. But the performances always seem to me as more variety show material than the main event.

That said, Edogawa’s stories very often center around elaborate David Copperfield tricks rather than “traditional” crimes. Stage and circus magic acts figure into many of his novels, where the crime is solved by figuring out the trick, not whodunit. A big part of Doctor Magic (1956), for example, consists of Edogawa explaining several stage magic and circus acts. I was familiar with the “tricks.” Though his readers probably were not.

Cyril Takayama reminds me of a certain personality type you see a lot on NHK World. The foreign hosts (varying in Japanese extraction from zero to one hundred percent) walk that fine line between being extroverted enough to attract a crowd and stand out in it but not so much that they become intimidating. It's the art of being comfortably foreign. If you can master it, it's a good gig to have.

New Edogawa Translation: Interview with a Translator, Part I

The Bronze Devil by Ranpo Edogawa, translated by Eugene Woodbury, is now gearing into action!

In longstanding tradition, Interview with a Translator returns:

1. As you mention in the introduction to The Bronze Devil, there are multiple clues in the novel that the events are taking place post-war (despite no direct references to the Occupation)—from the empty lots to the orphaned children to the backstory of some characters. What was Edogawa’s opinion of World War II? The Bronze Devil has a youthful, energetic, and optimistic feel. Is that attitude exclusive to Edogawa? In any way reflective of a general attitude at the time?

I haven’t studied Edogawa enough to know what he thought about the war itself. One of his stories was banned by government censors but he remained active in his local neighborhood organization (he wasn’t a rabble rouser). He mostly wrote under a pseudonym during the war years and set aside his franchise Boy Detectives Club and Detective Akechi series. He was obviously taking a wait-and-see attitude.

The years immediately following the war were hard ones. The economy had literally burned to the ground. The “Reverse Course” starting in 1947 put the idealistic objectives of the Occupation on hold and focused on the economy. This included fiscal austerity measures to counter skyrocketing inflation. The effects were brutal in the short term but laid the foundation for Japan’s future economic growth.

In 1948, Japanese voters rejected plans to continue down the planned economy route—inspired by socialist-leaning New Deal bureaucrats in the Occupation—and voted in a slate of free-market economic conservatives, who have pretty much remained in power ever since. By the end of the decade, Japan’s economy had returned positive growth, even before the outbreak of the Korean War gave it a huge boost.

So in 1949, the year The Bronze Devil was published, things were looking up. This change in attitude is reflected in the “Showa drama” genre. The Showa drama takes place during the reign of Emperor Hirohito (1926-1989), with a focus on the post-war years. I am a big sucker for feel-good Showa dramas, in which the upward arc of the story parallels the economic recovery of Japan after WWII.

Interview with a Translator: Edogawa, Language 2

Kate: As your editor, I could not check your translation against the original. Other than raising questions about the plot and various characters, I focused on the rare occasions when I felt the text needed to clarify pronouns, eliminate passive voice, and rewrite dangling modifiers. I notice these specific issues in other translations that I own. Why do these problems seem so common in English translations of Japanese texts? What is the gap here between Japanese grammar and English grammar?

Eugene: English has SVO word order and Japanese is SOV (like German). But the real
difference is that it is grammatical in Japanese to drop the subject and even the object when it is understood in context (no need for anaphora). As a result, much of Japanese is OV or just V. Add to this the sociolinguistics of indirectness, and the result is that Japanese favors what translates into English as the passive voice.

The translator has to backfill the missing elements to form grammatical English. Tracking down antecedents can be one of the hardest things about translating Japanese. Once you end up with grammatical English, the direct translation is often in the passive voice and really should be rewritten. But because the translator already knows the “meaning,” the surface-level grammar can “disappear.”

That’s why a translation needs a rigorous line edit before it gets a copy edit, even if the translation is 100 percent accurate.

Kate: The book has multiple loose ends, which did not escape your notice. As a writer yourself, how do you handle a book that you enjoy but has noticeable gaps. Is translation your primary concern? Are the plot holes ever an issue?

Eugene: The translator’s job is to best communicate what the author wrote or the best estimation of what the author wanted to say based on the text. While it may be helpful to add parentheticals to clarify what is in the text, it’s not the translator’s job to add information to the narrative that wasn’t there to begin with. If there’s a plot hole, the translator’s job is to translate the plot hole.

Especially at this point, having read only two of the novels in the middle of the Boy Detectives Club series, I don’t want to make any assumptions about authorial intent or get ahead of myself.

Of course, when it comes to adaptations and overseas localization, the “integrity” of the original work is up for grabs. The NHK anime of the Twelve Kingdoms squashed two storylines together and invented a male character out of whole cloth. The English dub of Detective Conan renamed the entire cast. But as long as the copyright holder agrees, well, let marketing lead the way. Though I disapprove of such modifications.

Granted, I prefer Blade Runner with the “original” voiceover that Ridley Scott loathed and removed in his director’s cut. Then again, I’ve yet to see a director’s cut that improved on the theatrical release. I guess sometimes the “suits” and the marketers know what they’re talking about.

Kate: Referring back to tone, the translation of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ōoku: The Inner Chambersuses (at least in the early volumes) old-fashioned “thee” and “thou” verbiage. I have to admit, it kind of puts me off (I prefer her contemporary works). Is this a common translation approach—does Japanese have an equivalent to King James’ English? Do translators try to match it? Should they?

Eugene: The Ōoku was the rarefied women’s quarters of Edo Castle so this might be an attempt to reflect the hierarchal language of the court. To be sure, the language of the time was as distinct as Elizabethan English is from modern English, so this could also be an attempt to reflect that historical distance and the peculiarities of that social class.

My sociolinguistic stance is that historical characters should sound like they sounded to their contemporaries. NHK historical dramas split the difference, using certain terms and conjugations that are associated with “historical” Japanese, but not so much that the dialogue is rendered incomprehensible. A similar middle ground is what BBC and Hollywood historical dramas use: “Shakespeare with the hard stuff removed.”

Though as in the case cited above, simply getting the terms of address right—finding the right analogues for the honorifics—should often suffice. The dialogue can only withstand so much complexity. 

 Kate: In the past I’ve asked you what you would like to see translated. In general, what do you think DOES get translated? Do the choices reflect translators’ preferences? Their readers’ demands? The ease of translation? Length of text? What is popular in the moment? What seems most likely to transfer between cultures? How does a publisher decide?! 

Eugene: Educated guesses here.

What gets translated is whatever publishers think will sell and whatever they can afford to license. Or what they love. I’m referring to popular fiction as opposed to literary fiction, which exists in a different realm. In the latter case, the reputations of the author and translator will figure into the calculations, as do their professional and academic relationships, such as that between Van C. Gessel and Endo Shusaku.

Clouds Above the Hill, Ryotaro Shiba’s massive retelling of the Russo-Japanese War (think of it as Japan’s War and Peace) was translated into English at the expense of his publisher, who hired three translators to tackle the sixteen-hundred pages. This was a labor of love for the publisher, as I doubt the English translation will ever break even (though Shiba is a bestselling author in Japan).

Right now, the light novel is ascendant, in no small part because of the manga and anime tie-ins. Publishers are going to lean toward titles and authors and genres that are getting good press and good ratings. When GKids or Crunchyroll announce a bunch of licenses, publishers will be looking at all the marketing possibilities for those titles. I’m sure a lot of product packaging goes on too.

Makoto Shinkai does the novelizations for his own films. GKids has already acquired the North American rights for Weathering with You (the film). Yen Press published Your Name (the novel) so odds are they will get Weathering with You as well. I assume that publishers like Yen Press have stables of translators they work with, and that a translator who has worked with an author will keep working with that author.

Frankly, I have no real idea. I mean, Yen Press is co-owned by Kadokawa Corporation and Hachette Book Group, so they’ve got all kinds of access and very deep pockets. I’d love to get the low-down on how they leverage that access. But I don’t know, except that, at the end of the day, they still have to turn a profit.

 Kate: Thanks so much for the interview! It will be exciting to discover with The Bronze Devil what Kogoro Akechi and Yoshio Kobayashi do next!! 

Interview with a Translator: Edogawa, Language 1

Kate: There are a number of colloquialisms scattered throughout the text. Were colloquialisms such as “still as stone” or “cards up my sleeves” your choice or Edogawa’s? Was there a place where you substituted a Japanese colloquialism with an English colloquialism?

Eugene: Most colloquialisms don’t survive a literal translation. I’m always delighted when one comes close (enough) because of linguistic convergent evolution or because of shared cognates.

The expression I translated as “cards up my sleeve” has dictionary translations of “secret skill” and “trump card.” A more literal rendering might be, “Don’t you know I’ve got trump cards I can produce at any time?” So it comes down to what I imagine that character would say in English.

Ultimately, all language arises out of the colloquial and cannot be separated from the constantly evolving culture, which is why the “definition” of a colloquial expression is usually going to be another colloquial expression.

Star Trek: TNG did a cute episode on the subject though it was flat wrong about the linguistics (it’d make sense if everybody was speaking different dialects of the same language). It’s the same mistake that tries to turn kanji into ideograms with transcendent “meanings.” Kanji are logograms. I would go so far as to argue that kanji in practical use are graphically little different than written English words and morphemes.

Which means that if I think about it long enough, I can probably come up with a better version. But translators, especially in manga, anime, and light novels, rarely have enough time. I see now that I used that expression twice (“ace up my sleeve”), so I changed the first one to, “Time for my last-ditch measure. This one will teach you a lesson!”

A running joke in My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU is Hachiman mistaking Saika for a girl (speaking of beautiful boys). In one scene, Hachiman quips, “Would you make miso soup for me every morning?” It’s an old school marriage proposal, but translated literally (as it is in the anime), it will sound strange if you don’t know the cultural background.

Kate: Likewise, there are several places where Edogawa is clearly playing with language. How did you solve a problem like “ash” for both “embers” and “tree”? Where else did you have to solve such a problem? How do word-plays complicate translator’s lives?

Eugene: I’ll pat myself on the back for that one. Edogawa uses the homophones hai (ash) and hae (fly). They sound almost identical, but “ash” and “ash” are identical!

Wordplay is the bane of a translator’s existence. Unless you are truly fluent in both languages, you’re going to miss stuff. The same goes for cultural references. This is one area when traditional literary analysis really helps. Unless somebody points stuff out, you’re stuck at the surface level and whatever you’ve picked up on your own.

Kate: I notice a construction in The Space Alien that I see in many other light novels. An event will occur. Then a character will respond as if from the beginning of the event. For example: 

One, two, three, four, five of them, flat and round and shining with a silver light, shot over Ginza Avenue and flew off toward the west. Ichiro wasn’t imagining things. His father could see them as well.

Is this a typical construction in Japanese novels? Description followed by summary or reaction?

Eugene: This is a construction in Japanese fiction that others have taken note of, that is, flipping the usual sequence of objective description and subjective reaction. I see this “out of order” style with dialogue tags too (which I usually “fix” to avoid confusing the reader). Dialogue can be “self-tagged” by the use of pronouns and conjugations that indicate who is speaking, something that doesn’t work well in English.

In western narrative fiction, an unattributed observation is attached to the POV character or to an omniscient authorial voice. It’d be interesting to study whether anything profound can be concluded about writing styles that link (and how tightly) or separate the observation and the observer.

An article by Chiyuki Kumakura, “History and Narrative in Japanese,” presents a fascinating analysis of the paradox of who exactly is doing the talking in Japanese narrative fiction and when (grammatically) the act of recollection actually takes place. Indeed, I often encounter a mix of past and present “tense” in Japanese prose that in English would be written all in the past tense or all in the present tense.

Kumakura’s explanation is that

The Japanese verb system functions not in terms of “person” like European languages but in terms of the ways phenomena are perceived by the speaker. For this reason, Japanese time consciousness is focused only at the moment of perception or recognition, and therefore, there is only one moment, and one moment only, namely the present time that is crucial in Japanese.

In the original Japanese, the passage cited above contains two descriptive sentences in the present and present progressive tenses and two “reactions” in the past tense. Here is a more grammatically literal translation.

[It = “the strange spectacle”] is flat and round and shining with a silver light. One, two, three, four, five of them are flying at tremendous speed over Ginza Avenue and off toward the west. And then back to the past tense for the reaction of the POV character: “Ichiro wasn’t imagining things. His father could see them too.”

Interview with a Translator: Edogawa, The Story

Kate: Torai’s assistant is a beautiful, mysterious, faintly sardonic young man wearing possible military garb. These young men populate manga and anime! What is the fascination? Why do they show up so often in Japanese art? (As opposed to the big, tough, rough & ready young men in British/American adventure stories who wear lots of guns and safari garb?)

Eugene: There is no shortage of muscled tough guys in manga and anime, especially those aimed at the Young Jump demographic. Sports series like Ashita no Joe in the 1960s and 1970s and action series like Fist of the North Star in the 1980s were so over the top that their over-the-topness has become iconic. Today, One Piece and Dragon Ball are two of the most popular anime in Japan and around the world.

And yet, as you observe, the inverse is just as true. I haven’t formulated a good theory to explain this.

As during Shakespeare’s time, men played women’s parts in traditional Kabuki (called onnagata or oyama). They still do today, and draw legions of loyal fans.

Also true of the lower brow Taishu Engeki (“popular theater”), vaudevillian troupes that feature both female leads and oyama. And then there’s the Takarazuka Revue, the famed all-female theatrical group, where the women play men.

Kate: Apologies occur in the story. Are apologies—versus lawsuits and jail time—a typical Japanese plot device?

Eugene: I think this is more reflective of Japanese culture itself. More recently, these cultural expectations have run headlong into “modern” legal principles like substantive due process, which in Japan can seem stuck back in the Edo period. A current example concerns the travails of Carlos Ghosn, the once savior and now fired CEO of Nissan/Renault. In the fallout of a boardroom coup, his involvement in a number of financial shenanigans came to light.

In the U.S., he would have paid a hefty fine to the IRS and SEC and gotten a few slaps on the wrist. In Japan it’s become the crime of the century. Except he won’t apologize!!!! Or confess!!!! He insists he is innocent!!!! Carlos Ghosn refuses to play by the “rules.” This attitude is obviously driving the prosecutors nuts. “But we’ve got you dead to rights!!!!” To western observers, on the other hand, the whole thing is starting to look like Javert obsessed with Jean Valjean.

Interview with a Translator: Edogawa, the Boy's Adventure Part

Kate: Like Robinson Crusoe and the middle of Moby Dick, Edogawa spends a great deal of time explaining the workings of a stakeout or a piece of machinery. Although assumptions are always fraught with complications, boys’ adventure stories seem to contain many more such passages than do literature aimed at girls. Why do such detailed “how to” passages fascinate boys?  

Eugene: Not just boys but men of all ages. Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. The male mind is dominated by left-brained, how-the-world-works thinking probably because a successful caveman had to have a theory of how the world worked and put that theory into practice by tinkering with it until he came up with something useful. The Tim Taylor model of social evolution.

Science fiction emerged in the mid-19th century with Jules Verne when a growing middle class had the time and resources to make a hobby of tinkering. As would Jobs and Wozniak, guys like Edison and the Wright brothers turned tinkering into careers.

A big driver of the computer revolution during the 1970s and 1980s was that the personal computer sated the tinkering impulse in a big way—without getting your hands literally dirty. Those early computers were like old car engines, demanding geeky how-to knowledge and using tools and taking things apart and sitting around the newsletter and magazine campfires and discussing the problem with other similarly-minded guys.

Now the metaphorical campfires are on the Internet. Computers have become appliances and the enthusiastic tinkerers have moved on to high-end gaming machines. And robots. And code.

Immediately after WWII, the black market in Akihabara became a magnet for electrical equipment startups. It grew into a Mecca for electronics wholesalers and hobbyists and today is the center of the otaku universe. Even in 1953, Edogawa was plugged into the state of the art. The same way guys devour magazines about cars they can’t afford and computers they don’t need, I’m sure his audience was eager for more.

After all, they would be the ones building modern Japan.

Kate: I remember you building go-carts in the garage when I was growing up. (Basically, my childhood was living with Sid, the kid next door in Toy Story.)  What are the Tim Taylor parts of your personality?

Eugene: I’m not a "more power" kind of guy, and have no desire to own a home or pick up a tool heavier than a hammer, but I’m a fan of This Old House and similar DIY shows and love wandering around hardware stores. I once owned all of Asimov’s science essay collections.

Kate: The Japanese enjoy lots of How-To shows. How does how-to show up in Japanese fiction? Is there an equivalent to Tim Allen's Home Improvement?

Eugene: The Japanese fascination with "how-to" is fully on display in what I call the "Cute girls doing interesting things in a cute way" genre. The typical approach is to have the protagonist get interested in a relatively unique activity, discover that her friends are interested in it too (or enthusiastically recruit them), and plunge in.

Plots are slice-of-life, often with little actual drama and only the rudimentary scaffolding of a plot, but with considerable attention given to the specifics of the activity, very much as a how-to guide. Recent examples include Encouragement of Climb (hiking), Laid-Back Camp (camping), and Long Riders (bicycle touring).

A related (and more plot-driven) genre has the protagonist mastering a sport or activity that most people know about but don't know a lot about. Enough expository material has to be integrated into the story so the audience can follow the drama. Recent examples include Chihayafuru (karuta), March Comes in Like a Lion (shogi), and Tsurune (Japanese archery).

I can't think of a series specifically like Home Improvement, though the movie All About Our House is basically an extended Home Improvement episode. There are plenty of programs similar to those you find on PBS Create.

Kate: And the connection to sci-fi? 

Eugene: Remember that long sequence from Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Like coverage from an auto show or an air show only in the future. The geek-out mentality is what produced it, and they thought it was so cool they didn’t edit it. It’s what Kyle Hill does on Because Science and Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman do on Mythbusters—come up with empirical and how-to explanations for improbable things.

Hard science fiction is figuring out the how-to for the future. Caper flicks, from Kelly’s Heroes to the whole Mission Impossible genre, are the same—as much about the how-to as the derring-do.

I think even conspiracy theories are driven by the desire to understand the world in a Newtonian and clockwork manner. As Archimedes said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the whole world.” Of course, the problem with conspiracy theories is that one should never attribute to brilliant malice that which is adequately explained by mundane stupidity.

Interview with a Translator: Edogawa, The Genre

Kate: It appears that everyone is fascinated by aliens! Edogawa’s book is reminiscent of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and, even more so, Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast of Wells’ famous book. What about Roswell? Is Japanese fascination with aliens equivalent to that phenomenon? Or does Japanese fascination take its own particular path?

Eugene: Very much the equivalent, and no less pervasive in popular culture. On a sociological level, it’s not hard to read this fascination as a metaphorical or psychological representation of Japan’s historical encounters with the outside world, from the 16th century Jesuits and Portuguese traders to Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships” in the 19th century to the Occupation following WWII in the 20th.

Aliens show up in droves in the sillier Godzilla sequels. In the 1970s, Leiji Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato defined the “combat” space opera, with evil aliens destroying the Earth Independence Day style, and another race of “good” aliens providing Earth with the technology they need to survive, except the Yamato has to fight its way through enemy territory to get it.

Also starting in the 1970s, Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura took an I Dream of Jeannie approach, with a cute alien called Lum attaching herself to a hapless teenage boy. Basically, aliens are everywhere in Japanese genre fiction.

Kate: Do the Japanese enjoy The X-Files? How do the Japanese feel about conspiracy theories?

Eugene: The X-Files is still popular, so much so that the theme music is used during talk and infotainment shows to indicate that something “mysterious” is about to be discussed.

Conspiracy theories are great fodder for plot material. As in Witch Hunter Robin and Hellsing, institutions like the Catholic Church and the historical Inquisition show up in the most unlikely places. Superheroes often work out of Buddhist and Shinto temples, while exercising their superpowers undercover. A good example is Noragami, which has the gods as well conspiring against each other.

The wide-ranging Magical Girl genre is rife with secret organizations, while everything remains “normal” on the surface. Alice & Zoroku is a recent example par excellence (it also riffs off Alice in Wonderland). Watching Alice & Zoroku, I couldn’t help seeing parallels between the “good guy” agents and Mulder, Scully, and Skinner.

The “conspiracies” can also have a kind of fairy godmother function, as in Oh My Goddess, in which the Norse goddesses labor behind the scenes to keep the Earth on an even keel, but now and then slip up and grant rather unusual requests.

The police procedural Aibou (“Partners”) mostly does “cozy” mysteries during the
regular season, and then wraps up with a two-hour TV movie special. The specials often involve complicated government conspiracies with secret agencies vying against each other and some poor sap getting murdered in the process. I personally prefer the cozy mysteries.

I don’t mind the conspiracy genre as long as I’m not being asked to take it seriously as some sort of higher political commentary.

Kate: Parts of this novel have a strong horror element—more creepy than merely suspenseful. Is horror a popular genre in Japan? What type of horror? Slasher? Monster? Hitchcock? Ghosts? All of the above?

Eugene: Definitely all of the above. Horror is huge in Japan and has been for centuries, if not millennia. You can find every type of horror in abundance, from low-brow exploitation and splatter flicks to psychological to theological, mixed and matched with an enormous library of folk and fairy tales, from which, for example, the whole “girl ghost with long black hair” character emerges.

In Makai Tensho (“Samurai Resurrection”), remade at least three times with varying degrees of explicitness, the leader of the 1637–1638 Shimabara Rebellion, the “Christian Samurai” Shiro Amakusa, rises from the dead to wreak vengeance and it’s up to Yagyu Jubei (another historic character and samurai flick favorite) to save the Shogunate.

Japanese writers eagerly tap into Japan’s long history with Buddhism and Shinto, and Christianity since the 16th century, and do not hesitate to borrow whatever religious elements might make for a good story. One result is Saint Young Men, a slice-of-life comedy that has Buddha and Jesus hanging out in Tokyo.

According to the critics (I’ve only read his young adult novels), Edogawa favored a psychological and modernist approach in his novels for adults. It stands to reason that such material should work its way into his young adult novels.

Kate: Like Dracula, The Space Alien indicates a fascination with new technology. This combination has been largely—though not completely—split in the West with Supernatural, for example, occasionally employing high tech, and Star Trek occasionally having a horror episode. Are the genres split in Japan? Do they overlap more than they do in the West? Or less?

Eugene: I’d say it never occurred to Japanese writers to split them apart. To be sure, there are the traditional categories like space opera and horror and mecha and magical girls and the ever-popular police procedural. But in Mob Psycho 100, a teen coming-of-age dramedy in the John Hughes mode blends in the horror and action genres, with a Buffy-style world-almost-ending in the second cour.

Dimension W starts out as hard science fiction with a premise borrowed from Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, tosses in an action hero straight out of the Fast & Furious franchise, a cute android sidekick (from Asimov’s robot novels), and often ends up with stories that would work as X-Files episodes.

A SF&F genre I consider unique to Japan, arising not only from the previous century of Japanese history but from the past thousand years, starts with an apocalyptic event that destroys a major city, after which the population picks themselves up and gets on with life. It’s not the end of the world. In fact, as in Blood Blockade Battlefield (a hellmouth opens in the middle of Manhattan), it’s a good opportunity to start a new business.

Interview with a Translator Returns!

Give a hearty Earthian welcome to The Space Alien by Ranpo Edogawa, translated by Eugene Woodbury! A new translation of a classic, The Space Alien is now available on Amazon. An introduction to Edogawa begins the book. These upcoming posts deal (mostly) with the translator and the art of translation.

The posts will cover the following: An Introduction to Edogawa & His Translator, The Genre, Boys' Adventure Stories, The Plot, and Language.

Kate: Where/when did you first come across Ranpo Edogawa’s works?

Eugene: Like Arthur Conan Doyle, Ranpo Edogawa is part of the zeitgeist. More people know of him than have read him. (At the other end of the literary spectrum, also true of Kenji Miyazawa.) He is referenced everywhere on Japanese television, from Antiquarian Bookshop Biblia's Case Files to Bungo Stray Dogs to the hugely popular Detective Conan.

Incidentally, Arthur Conan Doyle is no less a metaphysical presence. The titular character in Detective Conan goes by the pseudonym “Conan Edogawa.” Recent manga and anime titles include Holmes of Kyoto and the upcoming Kabukicho Sherlock.

Kate: What attracted you to this book specifically?

Eugene: Aozora Bunko (the Blue Sky public domain library, the Japanese version of Project Gutenberg) has all of his novels online. After reading Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro on Aozora Bunko, I was looking for lighter fare that’d be fun to translate. Edogawa’s young adult novels seemed a good place to begin and The Space Alien had an intriguing title.

Kate: What is Edogawa’s influence in media? 

Eugene: I compiled the following list of derived work from the Japanese Wikipedia entry for “Boy Detectives Club.” As with Sherlock Holmes, there’s always room for another adaptation.

A 1956 radio drama. Eleven movies released between 1954 and 1959. A television series from 1958 to 1960 (81 episodes). A television series from 1960 to 1963 (152 episodes). A 1968 anime series (35 episodes). A 1975 television series (26 episodes). A 1977 television series (26 episodes). A television series from 1983 to 1984 (47 episodes). A 2015 television series (11 episodes). A 2016 anime series (no end date).

Recent editions of the books were published by Poplar Books, in 26 volumes featuring original and revised covers, plus five volumes of stories by contemporary authors.

Kogoro Akechi brings to mind a less flamboyant version of Joe Shishido’s hard-nosed private eye in Detective Bureau 2-3. But the entire story structure of the Boy Detectives Club series is largely reflected in the Detective Conan series (ongoing since 1994, spinning off both animated and live-action series and movies), in which it is called the “Junior Detective League.”

It is easy to make one-to-one associations between the two series. The names of the Conan Edogawa and private detective Kogoro Mori are homages to Edogawa. One big difference is that Conan solves most of the cases but gives the credit to Mori, who functions as a kind of well-intentioned Lestrade. The “Black Organization” is more malevolent than the “Fiend,” their crimes are more violent and felonious.

Kate: Are you planning to translate more of Edogawa’s works? If so, which ones?

Eugene: I’ve started The Bronze Devil.

Kate: What other translations are you planning? 

Eugene: Fuyumi Ono’s massive new Twelve Kingdoms novel is scheduled for release this October and November in four volumes. Even after it’s published, I won’t be doing anything other than reading it for a while. But I plan to get around to it at some point.

Interview with a Translator, Part 2: Words Words Words

From Holy Kaw

Wrapping up with some reflections on language.  

Kate: What accounts for the excessive passive voice and vague pronouns in poorer translations?

Eugene: It's mostly from translating Japanese too quickly and too literally.

Japanese advantages its close integration with the culture and society to "compress" the grammatical structure whenever possible, shifting most of the heavy lifting to the verb and a myriad of agglutinative conjugations at the end of the sentence.

Consider as well that the shadow of feudalism lasted into the 20th century. Along with it came the lexical complexity of marking status and using honorifics. Thus dropping the subject of a sentence became a desired efficiency. (Along with titles taking the place of pronouns.)

But the "compression" in Japanese is often "lossy," which is difficult to reverse because of lost information. Unlike English, which tries to pack all the available data into self-contained sentences (and uses subject placeholders like "it" to keep the structure intact), Japanese can scatter information all across the page.

From the perspective of English grammar, Japanese favors "passive" formations that skip the subject ("Mistakes were made"), and sees no problem in failing to mention the subject for another several paragraphs. A Japanese writer can easily create a page of third-person narrative that fails to clarify the sex of the POV character. That's hard to reproduce in English.

One translation "shortcut" is to have a native Japanese speaker do a rough translation and then have a native English speaker do the cleanup. The problem here is that the cleanup editor may have no way figuring out the antecedent to one of those vague pronouns.

Purple Prose,  Prather-style

Kate: Some light novels have what is sometimes referred to as "purple prose"--it varies considerably from poetic to explicit. Do translators make a conscious choice which approach to take? Does the original text make the decision for the translator?

Eugene: I'd say the original text pretty much dictates the final product. There's always leeway in tone and word choices, but the explicitness of the terminology pretty well controls the explicitness of the prose.

Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and Elmore Leonard wrote detective novels, but their use of "vocabulary," shall we say, is quite different. It mostly comes down to a matter of discerning the sociolinguistic milieu and the genre, and then deciding who the audience is.

 Harlequin novels--rights likely obtained for cheap--turned

into manga by Japanese artists.

Or rather, figuring out who the author pictured as his readers. Once you get all those variables adjusted properly, so that you are writing in the same mindset for the same readers, you don't have to think about it that much.

Although there is always the challenge of making purple prose not sound so purposely purple.

Kate: In the previous interview, we discussed colloquialisms—the difficulty/necessity of translating figurative language between cultures versus letting the phrases/references stand. Some translators seem to fall back on clichés due to lack of imagination. Sometimes, however, the original writer appears to deliberately use a cliché. How does a translator recognize and handle clichés?

Eugene: In a very real sense, all language is a cliché or we couldn't understand each other. Like continents and species, language drifts and mutates. Before long, the past and the present (and the here and there) are miles apart and have adapted to quite different environments.

Language is thus a moving window that attempts to pin down usage within a certain time-frame in order to maximize comprehensibility. Most usage is effectively transparent. We process it without paying undue attention to the semantic and syntactical structure.

When we do start paying attention, that window starts moving. Some usage, like the subjunctive, dwindles away over the protests of a few stubborn grammarians. A lot is like fashion. Some usages never go out of fashion, and others can't go fast enough.

Stock Phrase

So there are expressions that last for centuries, while others, like bell-bottoms, get shipped off to the Salvation Army with a roll of the eyes. And maybe some creative soul will find a totally self-aware use for them that brings the cliché back to life again.

In Japanese, there is a whole category of what are called four character idioms, often adapted from Chinese. They are expressions compressed to their essence, like saying "Two birds one stone." A couple dozen would qualify as cliches. The rest can get quite arcane.

And as in English, Japanese has stock phrases. For the non-native speaker, it can be difficult to identify an ironic usage when it comes into play. Luckily, Japanese tend to avoid irony. But contemporary references can be just as tricky. You can at least look up historical allusions.

Kate: Speaking of allusions, they can crop up unexpectedly. As P.J. O'Rourke mentions, when Senator Kennedy mocked Vice President Bush during the 1988 Democratic Convention by asking, “Where was Bush [during Reagan’s scandals]?” the reporters watching immediately responded with, “At home, in bed, with his wife.”

Is the creation of contemporary allusions/slogans easier or harder to see in another culture? How “current” do you have to stay in order to “get” other cultures’ allusions?

Eugene: The most recent Godzilla movie apparently makes veiled references to Fukushima and the subsequent political storms. Those are easy enough as long as you keep up on the news. Harder are trends that truly are "socially constructed," that come and go like mayflies.

On the other hand, language that is to subjective would probably not be accessible to a foreign audience either, so translated too literally you could end up with translated language that isn't any more comprehensible. 

Kate: Different countries use different punctuation. For example, American quotations are double (“) on the outside, single (‘) on the inside; the reverse is true in much British literature. And when I was taking French literature, many of the books used <> to indicate a speaker speaking.

What do the Japanese do? Do you “translate” punctuation?

Introduction to Japanese Punctuation

Eugene: I've always found Japanese punctuation to be logical and comprehensible. Perhaps because there is no interference from the familiar conventions I already associate with Latin scripts, my brain maps punctuation marks pretty much on a one-to-one basis.

Japanese has adopted several punctuation marks directly from Latin script, including the exclamation point, question mark, parentheses, and the comma. And increasingly uses smart quotes (“…”) alongside the traditional kagi kakko (「…」 and 『…』).

Emphasis (italics) is indicated with a dot or comma next to (or above) each character (bouten, meaning "side mark").

NHK in particular likes using smart quotes rather like "air quotes." Kagi kakko remain the standard in narrative fiction and the usage is almost the same, although it is quite common for any dialogue enclosed in kagi kakko to be separated into its own paragraph.

Yes, this can at times make it easy to lose track of dialogue tags.

Kate: Is there any grand unifying theory that explains how language works? And does a grand unifying theory help the translator?

Eugene: Language universals do exist, but it's tricky getting from there to the "universal grammar" concepts pioneered by Noam Chomsky, that tie language to structures in the human brain that work exactly the same for everyone everywhere.

As a result, a "linguistic theory of everything" remains as elusive as it does for physicists, who end up with compelling explanations and neat ideas and no way to empirically test them.

Unfortunately, Chomsky was still all the rage when I was in graduate school so I had to study transformational grammar. This was Chomsky's attempt to create a calculus of language.

It is a useful tool for analyzing language but not necessary for creating real-world

Language is a grass-roots thing.

functionality or for describing how language actually works in the minds of the human beings using it.

But in the 1980s, Moore's Law was taking off. The revolution in computer technology
triggered much wishful thinking that rules-based computing could solve all the difficult algorithmic problems that had eluded the more mechanical processes to date.

One of the goals of the Fifth Generation Computer project, initiated by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry in 1982, was machine translation. It pretty much completely failed.

Simply consider the imprecision of rule-based grammar checkers. They're useful only when paired with human beings who can weed out all the false positives.

A chess or go program based on algorithms alone can play a pretty good game. But beating a smart human requires pattern recognition based on massive real-world data sets and machine learning systems. Saying "Oh, this resembles that" a billion times a second.

Pattern recognition is the key. It's at the core of all modern machine translation systems. It's what the human brain does best (so well we eagerly perceive patterns where they don't exist).

But, again, we can't confuse explanation with application, descriptions of how language works with prescriptions of how it ought to work. What's of actual use to a translator also involves universals but at a much higher level. I'm talking about story universals.

In other words, Joseph Campbell instead of Noam Chomsky. Less universal grammar and more monomyth. (Well, and you do need a good copy editor.)

Granted, art can get so abstract at one extreme, and so culturally-bound at the other, as to defeat reasonable attempts to identify the shared patterns. But neither is there a point in translating stories without universal appeal.

Ah, words are not enough . . . except, Thanks, Eugene!

Interview with a Translator, Part 2: The Act of Translation

Poseidon of the East

The next two posts deal with the nitty-gritty aspect of translation: "All those words"!

Kate: While translating, what enables the translation process to get easier? What still causes difficulties?

Eugene: What enables the translation process to get easier is translating. The more you translate a particular author, the more you get used to that author's particular use of the language. Though you tend to absorb it along the way, so it's not something you pay a lot of attention to, if you notice it at all.

The fast pace at which translations have to be churned out to be profitable means you have to end up going with the "good enough" or even the "I'm pretty sure it's not totally wrong" version.

When you've only got time for copyediting (forget about line editing), an easy mistake to make is translating a certain expression the same way every time. Not all redundancies are created equal.

For example, it's not a good idea to get clever with a word like "said." But when readers point out that I've overused a particular expression, that I've simply translated the same expression the same way isn't a good excuse. When the reader starts noticing the prose, something's wrong.

The Wings of Dreams

Kate: In my various light novel readings, obvious differences about the original authors come apparent (some are better at plotting than others). It is harder to gauge tone--so much depends on the translator! However, some differences do tend to appear. Do you sense a difference in tone when translating?

Eugene: Not really, at least probably not during the translation process.

The problem with tone is that it arises as a byproduct of the entire effort. To be sure, I can get a grasp from the start on genre, whether the prose is "hard-boiled" or "romance" or "high fantasy, and that dictates the tone and register of the translation.

I tend to begin with assumptions and adjust them along the way.

I do notice writing quality. The better the writing, the easier it is to translate. Vocabulary is of only peripheral importance. The Chinese cognates Fuyumi Ono uses don't make her prose more difficult to understand, though it can take longer to think up translations for fantasy terms.

If the worst thing you can say about somebody's writing is that you have to look up some words in the dictionary, you're on firm ground.

I've been surprised at how readable Natsume Soseki is. Granted some of his vocabulary and usages are dated (as well as the geographical references to Tokyo a century ago), but his prose does not otherwise suffer from any lack of clarity.  

Shadow of the Moon

Kate: Many of the light novels I've encountered--with a few exceptions--seem quite Jane Austen-like in their semi-omniscient narrators. Points of view shift easily within a chapter. Do Japanese novels worry about point of view or is that a Western obsession? 

Eugene: I don't know if this is something that Japanese writers writing about writing worry about to the same extent that English writers writing about writing worry about it.

In Shadow of the Moon, Fuyumi Ono maintains an admirably strict third-person POV with the omniscience voice limited to the protagonist alone, the world seen only from her perspective. And even in her multiple POV novels, she doesn't let her omniscience wander.

Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with "head-hopping," but I think this speaks more to the skill and style of the writer than to the culture. I suspect the ongoing tension between the two is a pretty universal concern--among those of us who think excessively about such things.

For everybody else, what matters is whether the author tells a compelling story. Less about how.

A Thousand Leagues of Wind

Kate: As a reader, I occasionally note plot errors in novels. One paragraph said that the character went home but the next paragraph clearly indicates that the character went to school. I don’t assume it is the translator's fault! As a writer, I am always wary of making these types mistakes (a character sets out to do something in the morning but in the next scene, I mistakenly refer to the time of day as "twilight"). Have you ever encountered these errors as a translator? Do you fix them? Do you think translators should fix them? Or leave them as original to the text?

Eugene: I wouldn't be so certain [a change in tense or time of day] is not the translator's/editor's fault. Japanese narrative prose tends to follow the same POV rules as English prose. Tense, however, is far more fluid, switching from "present" to "past" tense in the same paragraph.

In Japanese it's easy to confuse aspects of the perfect tense and participles in general with the present tense. As an oversimplified example, a participle phrase can be split off in the present tense, and followed by the rest in the past.

"Floating in the pool, I gazed up at the clouds."

"(I) float in the pool; gazed up at the clouds."

This use of the "historical present" is VERY common, and is independent of the "quality" of the writing. When translating, I will simply render everything in the past tense.

(I studiously avoid fiction written in the present tense and loath the trend of narrating historical documentaries in the present tense. If it happened in the past, put it in the past tense!)  

The Shore in Twilight

Kate: Are you ever tempted to the fix bigger issues, such as stories with no pay-offs or lack of character development? Or is your main focus on making the language work?

Eugene: As for actual mistakes in narrative structure, I tend to unconsciously knit everything together so it makes sense on the page. Though as noted previously, during the translation process, I can get so close to the text that I completely miss these types of mistakes.

I avoid thinking much about bigger issues. It being completely out of my purview, to start with, and not having the time in any case.

I don't think it's the translator's job to make those kinds of editorial decisions, so if I don't have an editor to bounce things off of, I don't.

Dreaming of Paradise

Kate: C.S. Lewis stated in his autobiography that he knew he had begun to master Greek when he no longer translated the word into English first. The Greek word “boat” brought up the image boat, not the English word (followed by the image). But translation involves doing exactly this—thinking of the word rather than the image. In fact, translation appears to involve multiple skill-sets from understanding to writing to rearranging words at the sentence level—do you feel yourself switching “hats” as you translate?

Eugene: There's the meaning part and the wordsmithing path. Like good acting, good writing shouldn't normally call attention to itself. The right words pull the right meaning out of our experiential memory banks. The better the word, the better it does that (without us noticing).

One problem comes when the words access the wrong thing.

A good example (from the Nibleys) is "Aegis" as the name of a ship vs. "Aegis" as a class of guided missile cruisers (referring to the combat system). And translating Fuyumi Ono, I have to keep the Chinese references distinct from the Japanese references.

At times, the only thing in a particular memory bank location is wrong. Or is blank. The etymology only goes so far, so I have to find something to fill it. The Internet makes that much easier. I can Google Image a Chinese word and realize, "Oh, that's what she means."

There's also the problem of the words themselves gumming up the works—to continue with the above metaphor, acting that calls so much attention to itself that it distracts from the story. The challenge is to find the right word that doesn't trip over its own two feet.

If you're John Lasseter, then you hire Neil Gaiman to rewrite the script for Princess Mononoke. That's not usually in the budget. There's more leeway with subtitles because the visuals and voice acting can cover much of the "wordsmithing" chores for you.

With prose, if the story starts to sag for any reason, the tattered edges of the words will start to show.

Coming Next: WINDING UP with "Words Words Words"