How to translate Japanese

How to translate Japanese

JAY RUBIN

 

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Minae Mizumura
THE FALL OF LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF ENGLISH
Translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter
256pp. Columbia University Press. £24 (US $35).
978 0 231 16302 6

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TLS

 

Published: 17 June 2015

Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi) and Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) in Norwegian Wood (2010) Photograph: ASMIK ACE/FUJI TV/TOHO/THE KOBAL COLLECTION

 

 

Writing in 1931, the great British historian of Japan G. B. Sansom bemoaned the historical accident that made Chinese the first writing system with which the Japanese first attempted, in the fifth century, to record the sounds of their language. 

 

“Those sounds, simple and few in number, are very well suited to notation by an alphabet, and it is perhaps one of the tragedies of oriental history that the Japanese genius did not a thousand years ago rise to its invention. Certainly when one considers the truly appalling system which in the course of centuries they did evolve, that immense and intricate apparatus of signs for recording a few dozen little syllables, one is inclined to think that the western alphabet is perhaps the greatest triumph of the human mind.” 

 

Even now, after some seventy post-war years of attempts to simplify and rationalize the Japanese writing system, its “appalling” mixture of Chinese characters and two supplementary phonetic scripts remains the single greatest stumbling block to foreigners who wish to become literate users of the language (to become literate in a language, you have to know its literature). Not even those few of us who survived boot camp and went on to read a good part of Japan’s literary canon in the original have it easy. As Minae Mizumura accurately (if somewhat ungraciously) observes in The Fall of Language in the Age of English, “Foreigners, even those who teach Japanese literature at a university, cannot read novels written in Japanese with any ease”. 

 

Of course, it should matter not at all to the Japanese that foreigners have trouble mastering their language. Imagine trying to fix the crazy spellings in English just to help foreign students. But many Japanese themselves have espoused radical reform of the traditional writing system or even wholesale abandonment of the language, most notoriously the very first minister of education, Mori Arinori (1847–89), who advocated replacing Japanese with English. Notice Mori’s dates: he was assassinated before his forty-second birthday for his supposed disrespect of the national gods, though I like to think it also had something to do with his proposal to chuck the language. Needless to say, if men like Mori had been successful, the Japanese would have been cut off for ever from their incredibly rich literary and cultural heritage. No one would have had access to it besides a few antiquarians; the modern Japanese novel would never have blossomed as it so remarkably did in the early twentieth century; and the Japanese people would no longer be Japanese. 

 

Many Japanese themselves have espoused radical reform of the traditional writing system or even wholesale abandonment of the language

 

As Mizumura sees it, however, that is exactly what is happening to Japan even now. The Japanese written language is increasingly a victim of the kind of “phonocentrism” (evident even in the Sansom quote above) that has been running amok among Japan’s post-war language reformers, with their misguided notion that written language is merely a recording of the sounds of spoken language. The time and effort devoted to teaching the literary heritage in schools keeps dwindling, and the drive to correct “Japanese people’s hopelessly poor English” has reached the state of a “hysterical obsession”. Mizumura discusses the problem in a broad cosmopolitan context, warning the world not only of the impending fall of Japanese but the likely fall of all national languages in the age of English and the internet. Japanese is just the canary in the coal mine. The book is fascinating for readers who have no special interest in Japan or its language.

The most lamentable sign of the decline of the Japanese language, as Mizumura sees it, is the current state of Japanese literature, which is written by “brainless writers of crap”. The literary scene is “like a playground where everything [is] small and clamorous – just juvenile”. 

 

“Representative works of today’s Japanese literature often read like rehashes of American literature . . . . [W]orks of contemporary fiction tend to resemble global cultural goods, which, like Hollywood blockbuster films, do not require language – or translation – in the truest sense of the word. No wonder Japan’s best and brightest have turned their backs on literature.” 

 

There are a few exceptions, she suggests, but the youngest writers she mentions were born in 1935 and 1943. Fans of contemporary Japanese literature may wonder where the presumptive Nobel nominee Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) fits into Mizumura’s bleak landscape, but one can only assume that he is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. His Vonnegut-flavoured narratives are surely the worst of the “rehashes” that Mizumura so abhors. 

 

The title of the original Japanese edition of which this book is an adapted translation is Nihongo ga horobiru toki: Eigo no seiki no naka de (When the Japanese Language Falls: In the age of English), but the title of this delightfully readable English version reflects its broad applicability to the problems faced by all the world’s local and national languages when they are confronted by “universal” languages. At earlier stages in history, Latin, Chinese and French bolstered the strength of national languages among true bilinguals, whereas now, aided by the internet, English threatens to undermine the authority of languages incapable of crossing national boundaries. 

 

The ongoing “Fall” of language bemoaned in the English title has even more dire implications in the original Japanese, where it is a verb, envisioning a time when the Japanese language finally “falls” or “perishes”. The verb (horobiru in the original) echoes a famous sentence spoken by a pessimistic social critic in the novel Sanshirō (1908) by the literary giant Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916). When pressed by the novel’s young protagonist, Sanshirō, to agree that Japan is surely going to go on developing, the man coolly declares, “Japan is going to perish”, which is translated here as “Japan’s headed for a fall”. 

 

The translators, Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter, try to assure us that the original title doesn’t mean “that the Japanese language is at imminent risk of perishing under the dominance of English”. Rather, they say, Mizumura “is concerned about the quality of written Japanese and about whether Japanese modern literature – that is, those [pre-Murakami] works worthy of being passed on for generations to come – will continue to attract readers”. In fact, Mizumura does do an excellent job of calling attention to declining educational standards that threaten to cut future Japanese off from their literary/cultural heritage, and she even offers some practical policies for improving the situation, but her Sōseki-inspired title sets the tone. 

It is no accident that Sōseki is the touchstone for Mizumura. She obviously identifies with him very closely, perhaps even to the point of seeing herself as a spiritual heir. Her first piece of fiction, published in 1990, was a sequel to his last, unfinished novel, Meian (1916; Light and Dark). In a famous lecture called “The Civilization of Modern-Day Japan” (1911), Sōseki sees Japan as headed for a national nervous breakdown under the relentless pressure of Western civilization: “That is my only conclusion. I have no advice to give, no remedies to suggest, because I do not believe there is anything anyone can do about it. I am simply lamenting the sad fact of it all”. A similarly lugubrious tone runs through much of Mizumura’s volume. 

 

Mizumura comes across as someone who feels out of place in all situations, and she never hesitates to share this discomfort with her readers. Her readers were initially Japanese – lots and lots of Japanese, who made the book one of the most widely discussed non-fiction titles ever published when it first appeared in 2008, because they instantly identified with the author’s discomfort among other languages and speakers of other languages. As a participant in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2003, Mizumura finds herself surrounded by “the kind of people who would have been called ‘Aryan’ . . . . People who I secretly thought would look perfect in Nazi propaganda films as members of the Hitler Jugend”. 

 

Mizumura was brought by her parents to live in Long Island, New York, in 1963 at the age of twelve. Instead of plunging into American teen life and becoming perfectly bilingual, Mizumura spent the next two uncomfortable decades “avoiding English” by shutting herself up in her room with a sixty-three-volume set containing the modern Japanese literary canon and, later, majoring in French literature in college and graduate school (both at Yale). She longed for Japan the entire time she was away, and she went back hoping to find herself surrounded by the contemporary heirs to Sōseki, Tanizaki and the other great pre-war novelists. Instead, she discovered the above-mentioned “brainless writers of crap”. 

 

Haruki Murakami is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. His Vonnegut-flavoured narratives are surely the worst of the “rehashes”

 

The wonder of this book is that it exists at all. The author tells us of her native language: “What a bizarre and amusing language Japanese is . . . Fast and loose in its logic . . . ” and “As unbelievable as this may sound to the users of Western languages, Japanese sentences do not require a grammatical subject”. She says that having an “orderly brain” is “a trait common among American intellectuals but rare among speakers of Japanese, a language that doesn’t even require a clear distinction between ‘and’ and ‘but’”. 

 

And yet, despite the language’s many deficits, this book actually was written in Japanese, and it very often seems to make perfect sense in English. Take this passage, for example: 

 

“Seated in the back of the bus were several buff East Asian men at the peak of their manhood, Chinese or Korean or both. In the middle of the bus was a woman with the air of a girl. The line from cheekbone to chin, as keen as if carved with a knife, reminded me of the women in the film The Scent of Green Papaya, which I had seen about ten years earlier. She must be Vietnamese, I thought, or some other Southeast Asian nationality”. 

 

Mizumura is, after all, a novelist, and she often appears to be describing people and places with the eye of a seasoned observer, even though she is writing in Japanese. If we examine the original Japanese text, however, we find that much of the graceful style and linguistic precision of the English are due to the translators. A more literal rendering of this paragraph would look like this: 

 

“Large rickshaw back floating, Middle Kingdom Han Country full crotch muscles bulge. Large rickshaw middle floating girl woman. Skull bottom sharp like Green Melon Smell 120 lunar cycles. My brain Vietnamese? Something else? Not know”. 

 

No, as we American hayseeds like to say, “I’m just funnin’ with ya”. But be honest: did you, if only for a second or two, think that my “literal rendering” might be a true representation of the Japanese? There is so much nonsense circulating about the ineffable mysteries of the Japanese language that it’s hard to know what to believe. That old red herring Mizumura cites about Japanese sentences not having subjects, for example, is a myth. All Japanese sentences have subjects. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be sentences. (See my Making Sense of Japanese, 2012.) And Mizumura’s use of the long-discredited term “ideogram” to refer to Chinese characters seems calculated to drive linguists crazy by preserving another myth – that you have to see Chinese and Japanese to understand them. (The translators of this volume, it should be noted, do an excellent job of Englishing Mizumura’s lucid Japanese original.) 

 

Although she seems to buy into the myths concerning the shortcomings of Japanese, Mizumura still asserts that Japan (and only Japan?) possesses “a magical written language”, owing to which “the idiosyncratic and inventive style of Sōseki’s texts makes them nearly impossible to translate”. In the corresponding passage of the Japanese edition, she goes so far as to declare: “It is virtually impossible to gauge the true worth of Japanese literature when reading it translated into Western languages”. Does she mean to imply (as wartime ideologues used to claim) that the “spirit” of Japanese makes it untranslatable while the lack of any such “spirit” in Western languages makes them perfectly translatable into Japanese? All literature loses something in translation, Japanese no more than others. 

 

I have always found Americans to be especially naive where matters of translation and linguistic differences are concerned, a poor reflection on American complacency and smug “exceptionalism”. Mizumura is distraught that native speakers of English have so little awareness of the struggles faced by native speakers of other languages. Where the original edition was addressed exclusively to Japanese readers, this one cries out to self-satisfied monolingual users of English. Mizumura ends her adapted final chapter with a heartfelt appeal: “If more English native speakers walked through the doors of other languages, they would discover undreamed-of landscapes. Perhaps some of them might then begin to think that the truly blessed are not they themselves, but those who are eternally condemned to reflect on language, eternally condemned to marvel at the richness of the world”.

Jay Rubin is Emeritus Professor of Japanese Literature at Harvard University and a translator of Haruki Murakami and other modern Japanese writers. His novel, The Sun Gods, set in Seattle during the Second World War, was published in May.