January 02, 2007

始めよう

How are you gentlemen !! All your blog are belong to us.

From now on, this blog and its corresponding RSS feed will be devoted to my new translation project. Each day (or so the hope is), I'll be translating a page from Japanese author Haruki Murakami's 「羊をめぐる冒険」("A Wild Sheep Chase") into English in order to practice my translation skills on a work I know and love.

All indications are that this project will fail miserably. Let's give it a go anyway.

Move 'Wordtank.' For great justice.

Posted by tim at 09:32 PM | Comments (4)

January 05, 2007

１９７３年のピンボール

No translation tonight. I read Pinball, 1973 today (in English!) instead, so I'm going to talk about that.

A bit of background: Pinball, 1973 is the second of Haruki Murakami's novels, falling between Hear The Wind Sing and A Wild Sheep Chase. All three books together are known as The Rat Trilogy as they center around the same unnamed narrator and his friend The Rat. The books are written in the first person and Murakami's narrators use the first-person pronoun "boku" (僕), which is a less formal, masculine version of the more traditional "watashi" (私). As a consequence, his narrator is frequently nicknamed Boku in discussions of his works, which is a convention I will adopt if I ever get there.

Hear The Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 were never published in English translation outside Japan. Murakami feels that the books are "weak" and do not represent his best work. They were, however, published in English translation by our beloved Alfred Birnbaum in Japan for the Kodansha English Library series, which featured modern Japanese works published in English translations with translation notes in the back to help Japanese learners of English. This makes them more or less tantalizingly out of reach in the US. But! Kathleen, a friend of mine and fellow Murakami aficionado, happens to have borrowing privileges at the UMass Amherst library, which is, by all reports, "huge." They have a copy, which she checked out and brought home and which I promptly stole from her.

My impressions: Murakami's kind of right! It's less mature (and shorter) than his other works. It's also kind of the same story it ever was if you've read A Wild Sheep Chase or Norwegian Wood. There's a character named Naoko -- oops, there was a character named Naoko. Guess what! She's dead, though we don't learn how in this book. She also has a lot to do with wells. There's even a brief discussion of dormitory life, though this one's tangily co-ed. Cats, as expected, appear at crucial junctions throughout the book, and there's a critical metaphor involving the geometry of Boku's ears.

Let's talk about themes. Boku and The Rat are each trapped in different sorts of empty, meaningless, routine life. Boku translates brochures and articles into Japanese from English with his partner in a translation agency while The Rat is an unemployed slacker living with his rich parents in a small seaside town (and frequenting J's Bar). Over the course of the book, the characters separately begin to understand the depth of their existential pain and begin to desire to resolve it. Boku even compares himself to a kamikaze pilot or a worker at Auschwitz as he begins to feel his inner emptiness. That resolution ultimately occurs, or at least begins, in A Wild Sheep Chase. Oh, and pinball. A few pages in, the book announces itself as a book about pinball and proceeds to give an exciting description of pinball as anti-ego. In the middle of the book, Boku develops an obsession with a particular variety of pinball machine before the arcade it belongs to suddenly disappears and, near the end, begins to develop his resolve to rescue himself after a mystic experience communing with the pinball machine in a former cold storage warehouse. It's kind of trippy.

And I haven't even mentioned the twins, Kant, or their involvement in the telephone switchbox funeral yet. The twins, which Boku cannot tell apart, appeared out of nowhere one day, live with Boku, and sleep in his bed. They leave at the end of the book. And Boku reads Kant a lot. And the switchbox... you know what? Forget it. It's too much fun to be summarized.

So in conclusion! It's a fun book to read if you're a Murakami geek like I am but it's pretty much more of the same: it's not groundbreaking or earthshattering and you've pretty much already heard the important parts. Interestingly, sex is only hinted at, unlike in his later books where it becomes more explicit and acquires thematic importance. There's more visible angst here than usual and it's a bit clunky, but then there are parts where you can see both Murakami and Birnbaum starting to really hit their form.

So that's that. I don't know if this is even readable, but I'm tired of writing and editing so I'm going to post it. Have a good night!

Posted by tim at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)