ALTA Conference: Part 2

Translating Murakami in Europe

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, originally written in Japanese, shown here in its English, Polish, Danish, and Russian translations.

Haruki Murakami is probably the most widely-known Japanese writer in the West. I was excited to see a panel on his work as I was currently reading his Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and wanted to hear about the challenges of translating literature out of the Japanese. The panel turned out to be fascinating, led by three women translators who, bypassing English completely, translated Murakami from the Japanese directly into Danish, Polish and Norwegian. I found it uncanny their ability to master two languages from strikingly different language families. 

The most compelling points of the presentation dealt with the particularities of Murakami's style; in particular, his philosophical plays on the Japanese language and his deliberately inconsistent use of tense. In several novels, Murakami injects the present tense--a tense not commonly used in English narratives--to play with time, to blur the boundary between dream and reality, or to distinguish the voice of a particular character. To English readers, the present tense is unsettling (it is "the tense of fear," as one of the translators put it) and is generally disliked by English editors. The more familiar past tense, meanwhile, makes the reader's experience comfortable and safe. What Murakami himself said after one of the translators asked him about the subject suggests that the role of tense in a particular language is as much a product of that culture as its grammar, humor, and everything else:

"Western translators should translate into the tense that sounds the most natural to their readers. In Japanese, tense is much less essential to the work than the sound and weight of individual words."

Tense serves an additional purpose for Murakami: it allows him to take the reader on his philosophical wanderings through time. His latest novel, the sprawling IQ84, was purportedly inspired by Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. This seven-volume masterpiece was Proust's self-described attempt to write a "cathedral-novel" that would do narratively what a great cathedral does architecturally--to cut through centuries and space while enclosing within itself a a sacred, nearly static world. (I have only been able to get through the first volume of Lost Time, and while the language really is as breathtaking as a French cathedral, the centuries you spend reading the thing will eventually crumble your willpower).

I have since finished reading the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a dreamy Japanese take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism, and look forward to reading the new Murakami, in light of my new insights.