Recent posts tagged translation
2022
All Of This And Nothing
More about Buddhism's most misunderstood concept, "emptiness".
2021
An All-New 'Epitaph' -- Two, In Fact
Two, two, TWO new translations of Machado de Assis's amazing novel came out when my back was turned!
2017
Speaking In Tongues (And Writing In Them, Too)
"Translators are people who read books for us."
2011
Losing It In Translation (Again) Dept.
I have been preparing for the English-language release of Usamaru Furuya's manga adaptation of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human by re-reading the original novel in its English translation (by Donald Keene), with the Japanese text open to the side. It's...
Then and Now Dept.
[I've been deeply embroiled in work, but I've found some pieces I wrote but never published which I thought would be good to post after a little cleanup, just to keep things rolling here. I'll be posting one a day...
2010
Found In Translation Dept.
Between working on The Underground Sun's 2nd draft, working (for actual money), and waiting for a whole Imelda Marcos's closet full of shoes to drop -- which really can't happen fast enough, let me tell you -- I have been...
The Big Takedown Dept.
I tweeted about this earlier, but since both Twitter and Tweetdeck are being unreliable pieces of junk (trying to access the MT online editor in Chrome isn't much better; the rich-text editor doesn't even come up when I select it...
Words Worth Dept.
A very good piece about translator Juliet Carpenter: The bright career of a literary 'shadow hero' | The Japan Times OnlineCarpenter isn't a stickler for literal meaning. She likens translation to acting, in that translators take words written by someone...
Goin' Guin Dept.
Wild cries of joy were to be heart at Chez Genji after Sentai Filmworks announced it had clinched a licensing deal for the Guin Saga anime. A splendid time will be had by all (who can afford it). There are...
Lost In Translators Dept.
The surest way to get people riled up in any field is to have one of its own scions slap it in the face. To wit: Matt Thorn, whose c.v. for manga translation is probably beyond reproach, recently had some...
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's "Rashōmon": My Own Translation
I've dabbled in literary translation before, but never to any great end. Most of that was because my command of Japanese was only middling, but over time I've built it up to something I hope is decently passable. As an...
2009
In Print Dept.
AICN Anime has news on a couple of upcoming books in translation.Ryu Murakami's Audition novel, source for the Takashi Miike movie, will be released in North America in June.[*]The next Yasutaka Tsutsui (Paprika, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time)...
Dog Soldiers Dept.
Anime fans ought to be at least passingly familiar with Hakkenden, the 13-episode adaptation of Bakin Takizawa's feudal-era epic about eight reincarnated warriors embodying different samurai ideals. Readers of this site probably remember the Sonny Chiba live-action version, directed by...
Suehiro's First Gasp Dept.
It's been reported elsewhere, but worth echoing here: Last Gasp is publishing a previously-untranslated Suehiro Maruo title in English, The Strange Tale of Panorama Island. This one sounds more straightforwardly surreal and strange than out-and-out grotesque for Maruo, but we'll...
Contextual Dept.
Reading Sōseki Natsume's Ten Nights' Dreams brought back many old questions about how translation is supposed to work. The opening line to each chapter is the same, and while the original Japanese text is unambiguous --こんな夢を見た。-- you could render this...
Tin Omen Dept.
Ha Jin, the author of Waiting and War Trash, reflects on why he left the Chinese language behind for the sake of English, 20 years post-Tienanmen.His essay is short (i.e., go read it) and makes his case in plain language....
Talkabout Dept.
My interview with translator Camellia Nieh (of Vertical's new edition of Black Jack, among many others) is now live. Go read it -- it's in four parts, so remember to click the links at the bottom to move ahead....
Getting Into Trouble Dept.
I've mentioned before how my Japanese is "just good enough to get me into trouble" -- meaning that about half the time I can read right off the page without even looking at a dictionary, and the other half the...
