Some Notes on Translating Murakami
By Baryon Tensor Posadas

I was planning to write a paper on this some months ago after finding an old copy of the original Birnbaum translated Norwegian Wood in the library here. Never quite got to work on it though, but I figured you guys might find some of my old notes interesting reading.

I guess one of the key things to keep in mind;about Jay Rubin in his capacity as a translator is his academic background, which is something Birnbaum doesn't have (I'll skip over Philip Gabriel for now, but he has some quirks of his own). Certainly, seen from an academic translation standpoint, Birnbaum's work is indeed very loose. By loose, I mean he most certainly takes quite a few liberties with the text (at least more so than Rubin, as he's not exactly a 'literal' translator either -- The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a case in point). Particular examples of Birnbaum's looseness can be seen in the two earlier novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The Japanese title of A Wild Sheep Chase for example (hitsuji o meguru bôken) strictly speaking translates to 'an adventure in search of sheep,' with no implication of the English idiom.

In Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, on the other hand, several examples of this are seen. The characterization of Birnbaum's INKlings, for example, make no appearance in the Japanese. There, they're known merely as yamikuro (literally, dark-black) and as a reader, I get a more sinister sense of them in the Japanese. The speech pattern of the old scientist in the Birnbaum translation is also absent in the Japanese.

This is not to say I think any of this is a bad thing. A very good strength of Birnbaum, if you ask me, is that he's an exceptional reader of texts. He's able to communicate much of the stacatto rhythm and general hipness in terms of Murakami's language use that becomes rather straightforward in Rubin's translations. Even his choice of translating yamikuro into INKlings isn't particularly troublesome for me as I feel that his decision to allude to the mythical kappa only furthers Murakami's intention in constructing a mythic mimetic virus-like figure of the underground.

But perhaps a good example of Birnbaum's keen sense on the matter is his use of tenses. For the most part, Murakami sticks to the past tense in his narrative style. Birnbaum, however, plays with this a little, to good effect. Unable to render the nuances of the Watashi-Boku (both 'I' in Japanese but with different levels of politeness) pronouns in English, he chooses to translate all the End of the World sections in present tense, capturing the immediacy of the casual Boku's contrast to the stiff Watashi of Hard-boiled Wonderland.

Granted though, Birnbaum can be particularly annoying when you're writing a paper on a novel he's translated (particularly if you're the type to dig into specific linguistic features). If you notice something in the English, there's a large chance that it's something Birnbaum completely made up on his own. And while it most certainly enhances the novel, if the paper you're doing is concerned with the original, it can lead you into all sorts of dead-ends. I guess a simple way of keeping this short is that as a critic, I certainly have a preference for Rubin. His changes tend to be subtractive for the most part and his approach is more naturalizing. Birnbaum, however, if you ask me, ultimately makes better reading. But the belief that Rubin is close to the original is itself apocrphyal, actually (he's only 'closer' in academic terms). Certainly, Birnbaum is fairly loose with his translations and has a tendency to add his own specific readings to the text itself. But in terms of structuring and organization of the narrative, he's actually much less liberal than Rubin. Birnbaum, for the most part, follows Murakami's sentence structures and sequences. Rubin, on the other hand, will connect sentences and sometimes move whole sections of a scene to a later part. A simple way of putting it might be that Birnbaum enhances and emphasizes the Murakami style into a sort of hyperreality, whereas Rubin diffuses it and essentially polishes Murakami's prose (which can admittedly be rough and jarring at times). I'll talk about Philip Gabriel another day. I am supposed to be writing a thesis, after all.

posted by Baryon Tensor Posadas 21 April 2003 9:39 PM