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January 03, 2007
Page 10
The nearby police station gave me her family's address and phone number and I called to ask about the date of the funeral. As someone said, if you take the time to ask, you'll usually find out.
Her family lived in an old neighborhood. I pulled out my map of Tokyo and marked the house number in red ball-point pen. It really was one of Tokyo's old neighborhoods. The subway, rail, and bus lines looked like the work of a confused spider. A maze of drainage canals and roads clung to the ground like the wrinkles on a melon.
The day of the funeral, I set out from Waseda on the Metropolitan Railroad and got off near the end of the line. I unfolded my map but it was about as helpful as a globe. By the time I somehow stumbled upon her home I had bought several packs of cigarettes, asking for directions each time. Her house was an old wooden building surrounded by a brown board fence. As I passed through the gate, a futilely small garden appeared on my left. A disused old ceramic hibachi sat in the corner with some fifteen centimeters of accumulated rainwater in the bowl. The soil of the garden was dark and moist.
[Notes: So when I come up for air, the questions start coming. What are my values as a translator? Do I strive to represent every action in the original in English? I don't really understand the context for them in the original. Is it a better translation to ignore the "jokes" I don't get or to try to preserve them in their original, albeit apparently unimportant, form? Should I be working harder to understand the symbolism and context of each word in the original? (Hint: Yes.) This is haaaaaaaard.]
Posted by tim at January 3, 2007 11:47 PM
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