Juliet Carpenter

Joey Potter

    When I read Jumping into the Pond I was surprised at the crossover with my own experience translating a couple of the poems for this week. Carpenter talked about how in her experience with the Mozart picture book, "Even if you get a different feeling for the music yourself, you’re stuck with the feelings that the author had or that Mozart had." Also, how translation "is very like coloring in a coloring book. You’re stuck with this picture that somebody else drew...you cannot change the picture. You cannot take out somebody who is there." 

    Later on, she talked about changing vs keeping the order of the sentence when translating (gyakuokuri vs junokuri): "Take a sentence like, “The eyewitness reported that the plane crashed and burned.”...you do have to decide whether it is more effective to start with the crash or end with the crash...In poetry that’s very important."

    In my experience, in my reflection on my poem translations, I talked about how dissatisfied I was with the order of the lines in 閑さや岩にしみいる蝉の声. I really want the first and last 5-syllable sets to be swapped. I even considered doing so in my translation, as in translating poetry, we have more liberty, and, as we can see in the example translations, translators sometimes do go ahead and swap around lines. Also, in 東京へ発つ朝母は老けて見ゆこれから会わぬ年月のぶん, I didn't really understand why Mom seemed older as opposed to younger. But I just left it like that. I was "stuck with the feelings that the author had".

    So, the reading made me feel better about my ultimate decision to preserve the original. I think I landed on the right side of the 'preserve the original' vs 'fix the original' debate despite my urges to changing it in my translation. I followed my directive as a translator and just colored in the pre-drawn picture.

    Also random question: does the translator always read the whole book first before translating? Or translate as you read? The mystery novel question (about what if the murderer is someone you didn't expect) she addressed in the reading made me wonder.

Accompanying illustration to Basho's famous haiku, by Basho

(note: only 1 frog)