Why I Hate Japanese Translations

Recently I finished reading the novel Mon by Natsume Soseki. I read it in the original, but it is often my habit to have a translation of the original on hand when reading a novel in Japanese, since, when I come to any part that I don’t understand, it’s usually quicker to look up the corresponding page in the translation than to consult a dictionary. However, it’s not always more enlightening to do so, and it can be downright misleading. Since learning Japanese, my faith in translations and translators has plummeted. Having a tendency to be interested in foreign literature, I must have read a great many translations over the years, and prior to my loss of linguistic innocence, I implicitly trusted the translator – but no more. I have to say that, I think the situation in Japanese literature is particularly bad, because, academically, Japanology is still very much a Mickey Mouse subject. It lacks the dignified tradition in the West that Sinology has. Any fool can go out to Japan with JET, pick up a smattering of Japanese, have a string of Japanese girlfriends with names all ending in ‘ko’, read a few crappy Manga comics, and think he is an expert. And this is usually what happens, too. I’m sure that translations from other languages are also full of inaccuracies and betrayals of the author’s original intent, but in the field of Japanese literature it seems like you don’t even have to be able to speak English for someone to publish your translation. This makes me spitting mad.

In the case of Mon, I had Francis Mathy’s translation on hand as guidance through the tricky bits. However, I may as well not have bothered. I know absolutely nothing about Francis Mathy, not even whether the name belongs to a he or a she, so all my comments are completely impersonal. However, the bits of the translation that I actually read made me so angry that I ended up feeling sick. The examples of his/her artistic and linguistic infidelity are so myriad that I cannot possibly list them. I will give one here, and let that stand as a representative for the many. Towards the end of the novel, much against his expectations, the main character, Sosuke, survives the restructuring of the civil service while companions lose their jobs all around him. Soseki writes as follows:

月が改って、役所の動揺もこれで一段落だと沙汰せられた時、宗助は生き残った自分の運命を顧みて、当然の様にも思った。又偶然の様にも思った。立ちながら、御米を見下ろして、
「まあ助かった」とむずかし気に云った。その嬉しくも悲しくもない様子が、御米には天から落ちた滑稽に見えた。

Tsuki ga aratamatte, yakusho no douyou mo kore de ichidanraku da to sata serareta toki, Sousuke wa ikinokotta jibun no unmei wo kaerimite, touzen no you ni mo omotta. Mata guuzen no you ni mo omotta. Tachinagara, Oyone wo mioroshite,
‘Maa tasukatta,’ to muzukahige ni itta. Sono ureshiku mo kanashiku mo nai yousu ga, Oyone ni wa ten kara ochita kokkei ni mieta.

It is particularly the last sentence at which I wish to look. Francis Mathy translates it as:

He [Sosuke] seemed neither happy nor sad about it. In fact, at that moment he looked to Oyone like a clown fallen from the sky.

Now, let’s ignore, for the moment, the fact that the majority of those who translate Japanese literature have no sense of the rhythm of the English language whatsoever, and seem to feel it their duty to make their prose as plodding as possible. What I would like to ask here, is, what exactly does that last phrase convey to you? Like a clown fallen from the sky. Oh yes, I know the experience very well. Clowns are always falling from the sky in front of me.

I would not have even read this sentence if I had not wished to check on the particular nuance of the word ‘kokkei’ in the original. It is usually used as an adjective, but here was used as a noun (translated as ‘clown’). As an adjective it means something like ‘comic’ or ‘absurd’. I looked at the translation and found the ridiculous sentence quoted above. Checking in the dictionary I discovered that, as I suspected, nowhere does ‘clown’ appear in the definition of ‘kokkei’. Not only that, but what Mathy has translated as ‘sky’ is really much closer to ‘heaven’. Okay, I can accept that maybe he/she does not want to make a literal translation. However, what about making a translation that is at least comprehensible? My impression is truly that he or she just did not understand the original sentence and so wrote any old thing. And that’s why I am angry. “Oh well, it’s only Soseki, the most revered novelist in Japanese history. No one will notice if a fifth-rate hack like myself fudges a line here and there and there and there and there and there.” There is absolutely no respect for Soseki here, no respect for the reader, no respect for anything. Why on Earth did Mathy even bother? I can’t believe it paid very well. I think it must be some obscure kind of ego thing, to have ‘accomplished’ the translation of a novelist who clearly doesn’t even interest you very much. And Mathy is not alone in this at all. There are very few translations of Soseki that won’t give you the impression that the man was educationally subnormal. But what you have to remember is – you’re not reading Soseki at all; you’re reading some fucktard who took a degree a few points too pretentious for their IQ to deal with.

So, what does the original sentence actually say? Well, in a case like this, where I was not sure of the meaning – or nuance – of the original, what I would do, and what any responsible translator must do (what Mathy clearly did not do), is consult a native speaker. However, without consulting a native speaker, the best I can say is that ‘kokkei’, in context (remember context, Mathy?) appears to mean something like ‘absurdity’. Sosuke’s demeanour, neither happy nor sad, seemed to Oyone like an absurdity fallen from heaven. Such would be the literal translation. To render that into intelligible English, one might say something like, an absurdity ordained by heaven, or fate. You get the idea. Isn’t it beginning to make a bit more sense than ‘a clown fallen from the sky’?

Now, I don’t want to appear unduly harsh (and perhaps I have). All I want to say is STOP VIOLATING DEAD AUTHORS’ GRAVES. Just because you know a smattering of Japanese, it doesn’t mean you can translate great works of literature.

This brings me to my second big point. There is a golden rule in translating, that is ALWAYS TRANSLATE INTO YOUR MOTHER TONGUE. Because of the woeful dearth of good translators in the field of Japanese literature, this rule is unfortunately ignored by far too many Japanese people keen to introduce their great writers to a Western audience. I recently tried to read Takashi Kojima’s translation of Akutagawa Ryunosuke, and I had to give up. The prose was so poor that it was hard work for me just to get through a page. And this is translated from someone so revered in Japan that the most famous Japanese literary prize is named after him – the Akutagawa Prize. Some Mickey Mouse academic called John McVittie, in his truly awful, patronising and trite introduction, which he has deigned to call “A Sprig of Cherry”, states that:

But what we might feel we lose from the fact that the English is not the translator’s natural tongue, is offset by our own awareness that the translator’s thoughts, his feelings, his character, are – as were Akutagawa’s – Japanese.

Really? What a fucking scoop that must be. After all, there are only about one hundred million Japanese people in the world. You’ve really set the bar high here. No wonder the translation is so good, when you’ve managed to find – somewhere – an actual Japanese person, just like Akutagawa himself.

This is obviously disingenuous bullshit. The translation is plain bad, and McVittie clearly knows it. He is casting around for something good to say in his introduction, or anything to say at all.

Quite probably, in this case, Takashi’s intentions are good, but they are misguided. Westerners who try to read this collection are liable to come away with the sneering opinion that if this is the best Japanese literature has to offer, then it’s clearly utterly eclipsed by Western literature, and not worth investigating. Rather than castigating Takashi, I would like to give a piece of my mind to all those he thanks in his Preface. Apparently they read his manuscript. If so, they are either illiterate or lazy, because the published work is simply not good enough. It needs to be sent back to the editor and put into readable English.

Takashi’s intentions may be pure, but one cannot assume that this is always the case. In my experience, there is no subset of human culture so small that it goes uninfected by corruption, and this is also true of translation. I have personal experience of this. A couple of years ago someone asked me to write the introduction to a translation on which he was working, since I had studied the author in question. I was happy to oblige. However, the translator shared in common with Takashi that incredibly rare trait of being Japanese, and as a consequence, needed a little help from a native-speaking editor. His usual editor did not speak Japanese, and was having more than the usual trouble in correcting the translator’s English this time. Hearing this, I offered to take a look at the translation and, if necessary, help the editor out on those parts he found most difficult. When I made this suggestion, the translator – whom I shall not name – leapt at his chance and asked me to edit the entire thing.

When I read through his manuscript, I was appalled. The English was so bad that much of the time it was impossible to tell what the translator was trying to say. Not only that, he clearly had not understood the author much of the time, and the text was full of schoolboy errors. For instance, a number of times, one of the main male characters was referred to as ‘she’. No wonder his usual editor had given up. I wrote back, politely refraining from telling the translator just how bad his work was, and told him I would require a month or two working full time to edit the piece, and that I would therefore like to be paid. In the meantime, I had sent him some samples of the work I had edited. He liked these and asked me to continue, but didn’t answer any questions about money. He continued to be evasive about payment, and continued to ask me to complete the work. Eventually, when pressed, he sent me a very irritable e-mail saying translating is harder to break into than I think, and that he would do for me what he had done for his other editor. When I checked, I found this meant that my name would be written in small print as someone who had ‘advised’ him on his translation. As I was, by this time, having to discard his translation almost entirely, and translate the book from scratch myself, this seemed wrong to me. He would get all the money and credit, while I did all the work. I realised that he had used the same kind of arrangement before, but had managed it because he had not picked on an author quite as difficult as this one. He was a vile, talentless, scheming opportunist. He did not even care about the author in question. He had chosen her because there had been much interest in her in the press recently, and he hoped to ride on the tide. I cut my association with this vile man. I sincerely hope that he has not found anyone else to do his work for him. I dread to think that he might have desecrated the grave of an author who means a great deal to me.