[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Considering  translation from the vantage of an individual transla-tor, seeing it caught up in a flurry of different versions of itself, each onetrailing its own history, allows one to settle on one s own working defini-tion of the word, recognizing that no definition will ever be more thanprovisional.One might formulate a definition specific to the particularlanguages a translator engages with, emphasizing problems and issuesthat another translator who deals with different languages might neverconfront, or even imagine.One might define the word in a manner rele-vant to a given genre translating a novel from one language to anotheris not the same, after all, as translating a cookbook or subtitling a movie.Or one might acknowledge that the notion of translation as an act per-formed only at the confluence of different languages is itself somewhatlimited, and focus instead, for instance, on forms.Translating a scriptfor performance may well require a different approach from translatinga script for publication in a literary magazine.Translating a printedbook into Braille is not the same as translating a poem from Punjabi intoSwedish.Translating Dante Gabriel Rossetti s complete writings andpictures into the form of a hypermedia archive is not the same as trans-lating 138 penciled note cards into a facsimile codex edition of VladimirBeyond, Between: Translation, Ghosts, Metaphors51Nabokov s The Original of Laura.And yet each of these different acts is,or could be considered, an instance of translation.I myself define translation, very simply, as any change wrought upona piece of writing intended to make it accessible to a new audience withparticular needs or preferences.This is an extremely broad definition.But from my perspective as a scholar-translator who works with Japa-nese books, it seems an appropriate one.Or rather, I suspect that for allits malleability, this definition feels right to me precisely because I am ascholar-translator who works with Japanese books.The particular na-ture of its breadth, the direction its openness takes, betray the influenceof my experiences with the languages I know, above all the two lan-guages I translate from: Japanese and classical Japanese.Not every-one will agree that The Original of Laura or the Rossetti Archive can orshould be considered translations; my engagement with Japanese liter-ature, especially literature in classical Japanese, is a large part of thereason I do.The Japanese language has a long history.For most of that history,writing of the sort we would now describe as  literature circulated ex-clusively in handwritten copies.Woodblock printing found its way intoJapan as early as the eighth century, but until the seventeenth centuryits use was reserved for texts deemed more valuable than mere fiction.The Tale of Genji, for instance, which was completed in the early eleventhcentury, survived for its first six hundred years only because membersof the elite and their scribes kept transcribing it, each in their own cal-ligraphic style.Then, at the start of the seventeenth century, fictionalworks, including The Tale of Genji, began to be printed and sold in wood-block editions.These new printed books could be mass produced, un-like the old labor-intensive transcriptions, but because the blocks werehandcarved from manuscripts, essentially they were facsimiles of hand-written, calligraphic copies.If a person wanted to read a printed editionof The Tale of Genji or any other work, she still had to be able to readcalligraphy.This situation changed dramatically in the final decades of thenineteenth century, when moveable type rapidly supplanted woodblockprinting.People soon grew accustomed to reading typeset text, andschoolchildren no longer learned to read the calligraphic forms of earlierages, whether written by hand with a brush or printed from woodblocks.And so it became necessary to reprint early works of literature in the newPart I: The Translator in the World52form of the typeset book.In 1890, the first typeset editions of The Tale ofGenji were published in Japan, and new ones have been appearing eversince.These days, apart from a tiny group of specialists, hardly anyonewould ever try to read The Tale of Genji in a calligraphic form, whetherhandwritten or printed, for the simple reason that they couldn t.Thatold, calligraphic Japanese is utterly illegible to the vast majority of mod-ern readers, even those rare souls who have a good knowledge of classi-cal Japanese grammar and vocabulary.In order for modern readers toread The Tale of Genji, they need to have it transcribed into a recognizableform: the familiar, typeset Japanese of novels, signs, and menus.Theyneed, in short, to have it translated even when they can understand thelanguage of the original.But just what does that mean? What are we referring to when we speakof  the language of the original ? If someone were to read a sentencefrom a calligraphic copy of The Tale of Genji aloud, then read the samesentence from a typeset transcription, the two readings would sound thesame.And yet most readers of classical Japanese would find the calli-graphic copy illegible, and have no problem whatsoever reading the tran-scription.The two texts are the same, then they are written in the samelanguage precisely to the extent that we ignore the visual form of thewriting.They can be said to be the same, and to be written in the same lan-guage, only if we agree to ignore a difference so significant as to make onetext legible and the other illegible.The tendency to conceive of language phonocentrically and in termsof grammar and syntax, independent from its material forms, has deeproots and a long history, and it is hard to shake.My experiences withmodern and classical Japanese, however, have impressed upon me justhow much writing matters.I find it hard to ignore not only the visual ele-ment of writing, the marks on the page, but also its broader spatial di-mensions: the physicality of paper itself, and of the book.Translation, asI understand it as I define it for myself is not simply an act of engage-ment with language as grammar and syntax, as mere recorded speech;when I translate, the original to which I address myself is not a specimenof Japanese language heard in my inner ear, but a piece of Japanesewriting, a collection of pages, a Japanese publication.In 2005, I published a translation of a novel by Akasaka Mari calledVibrator.About halfway through the book, the narrator, a woman withvarious psychological troubles who is riding from Tokyo up to northernBeyond, Between: Translation, Ghosts, Metaphors53Japan in the cab of a truck driver she barely knows, finds herself gazingout the window into the night:Once more I looked at the map.Route 353 went around the southernside of the mountain.The shrine must be up at the peak, and that gate-way we went under earlier must have been the outermost, the one thatmarks the entrance.The air down at sea level had been dry, but nowthat we were at a higher altitude I noticed tiny crystals drifting throughthe air, here and there, glittering.I kept gazing out at these crystals,and then after a while little white things started appearing, mixed inamong the crystals.The white things soared through the air, weavingbetween the crystals as they dropped [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]