This week‘s readings mainly focus on Murakami and his translators, but what interested me most was how they all discuss the relationship between an original and its translations. In “Mysteries of Translation,” Wendy Lesser writes about her experience as a monolingual reader who can only access a literary work through its different translations. Even when two translations can both be considered good, one translator’s voice might feel more fitting than another. At the end, she imagines language as a kind of prison and the perfect translator as a “merciful guard” who might someday arrive with the right keys and let the reader out.
I find this image very powerful because Lesser seems to have an almost romantic faith in translation: somewhere out there, perhaps, is a translation that can finally give the original its perfect voice. However, I think about translation a little differently. To me, a translation can come infinitely close to the original, but the two will never completely overlap. Yet this is also precisely what makes translation fascinating. I do not think language is necessarily a prison. Language is the medium through which information and feelings become accessible to us in the first place.
I imagine translation more like trying to understand the shape of an object in the dark. We may never see the whole object clearly, but every time we touch it from a different angle, we understand its shape a little better. A new translation does not necessarily replace an older one or finally “free” us from language. Instead, it allows a little more light into the room. Sometimes even a small amount of light is enough to change what we thought we were looking at.
This question becomes even more complicated in Philip Gabriel’s discussion of Kenzaburo Oe. Gabriel recalls that Oe asked him to edit parts of a translation so that they would better fit his ideas. Gabriel writes, “What I got from it is how writers, Murakami included, often tinker with and rework their stories. There is an authoritative text—but maybe only for the moment.”
This surprised me because I had unconsciously imagined the original as something stable. The original comes first, and translation comes afterward. Therefore, the original seems to possess a kind of unquestionable authority. But Oe’s example disrupts that hierarchy. If an author can use the process of translation to reconsider or revise the work, then translation can become another stage of creation. In that case, the relationship between original and translation is no longer simply one-directional. The original produces the translation, but the translation can also turn back and reshape our understanding of the original. It even makes me wonder: once a literary work has left the author’s hands and entered the world, how much does it still belong to the author? If the author changes something through a translation, is that translation becoming more faithful to the author’s intention, or less faithful to the original text?
Michael Emmerich’s interview made this question even more interesting to me. He mentions that students who read Murakami in Chinese tended to describe his writing with words such as “loneliness” and “healing,” which are relatively close to the image of Murakami that circulates in academic discussions. Students reading him in English, however, described him as “realistic” and a “difficult writer.” I was surprised that readers encountering the same author through different languages could develop such different impressions of him.
But even saying “Murakami in Chinese” is too simple, because there is no single Chinese Murakami. Emmerich discusses differences between Chinese translators as well. An older translator renders Murakami in a more literary and formal style, while a younger translator stays closer to the style of the Japanese original. This made me wonder whether different generations of Chinese readers might actually have encountered different Murakamis. If the translations popular among one generation sound different from those read by another, then their impressions of Murakami may differ not only because they are different generations, but because the author they encountered through translation was, in a sense, a different author.
All three readings therefore made me less certain about what we mean by the original. Each translation reveals something while also inevitably changing something. Returning to the image of an object in the dark, every translator touches the object from a different angle, and every reader encounters a slightly different shape. Maybe there is no final moment when all the lights turn on, and we see the object exactly as it is. But perhaps that endless process of approaching, touching, and seeing differently is part of what makes translation so interesting.
Kerry
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