Murakami, Reading the Same Book in Different Languages

What interested me most was Emmerich’s idea of readers experiencing different “Murakami worlds.” I used to assume that even if people read a book in different languages, they were still basically reading the same author. American students described Murakami differently from East Asian students, and even the Chinese and English translations can give him different voices. It makes me wonder whether there is really one Murakami that international readers all know, or many different versions of him. Murakami has been translated into English mainly by Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, and Philip Gabriel, and each translator gives him a somewhat different voice. The same thing happened in China. Lin Shaohua's translations were described by critics as having more influence from classical Chinese writing, while Shi Xiaowei's later translations were considered closer to Murakami's Japanese style because he lived in Japan for 20 years. 

Lesser’s article made this idea even more interesting because she shows that you don't even need to change languages to experience a different Murakami. Two English translations can make the same character sound different because of choices in tense, sentence structure, and vocabulary. Lesser clearly prefers Birnbaum’s translation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is objectively the most correct version. It might just be the Murakami she first became familiar with. I think this shows how our idea of an author can depend on our first experience with their work.

I think this is especially interesting for international literature because two people can say they have read the exact same book but may not have experienced exactly the same book. Also really interesting for bilingual learners like me, for example, I have read Journey to the West in both the original Chinese and in English. Even though the story is the same, the experience of reading it can feel very different. Some expressions, humor, cultural references, and even the personalities of the characters feel more natural to me in Chinese. The English version has to make choices about how to present these things to a different audience. Like for example, Wukong's ability 筋斗云 in Chinese has more of the fantasy-like feel but in the English translation it is Somersault Cloud or Flying Nimbus which to me, who knows both languages, does not sound really fit.

Terry