Brennan Corrigan 1/30 Response

 I greatly enjoyed Ken Liu's talk on his two case studies in translation. One of the moments that stuck out to me was when he said that, for most people living today, modernity is a translated experience. This is definitely true for the indigenous South African man he mentioned in his talk, who claimed to have no words for many modern things in his indigenous language. Ken went on to say that this is also true for speakers of Germanic languages, since our words for modernity are Greco-Latinate. However, I think there is a difference between a "translated experience" and the etymological facts of English. First of all, many native English speakers don't know the difference between descent and borrowing, (that English is directly descended from Latin is a misconception I have heard many times) and probably could not pick out of a sentence which words are Latinate and which Germanic. Ken Liu even pointed out the fact that Jack London got this point wrong in An Unparalleled Invasion. I personally didn't start considering modernity to be a "translated experience" until I started studying Latin, and entering the upper levels of academia where my modern information technology was primarily being used to access the works of the ancient and medieval past.

As to Ted Goosen, I was interested in his opinion on using the term "magical realism" to describe anything Japanese. He seemed to think that because the Japanese stories to not fit precisely into the Western categories, the term should be abandoned entirely. I think this represents a serious lack of faith in the Western reader, as if we couldn't account for the fact that Japanese magical realism will draw on some different traditions and conventions from those we are familiar with. There isn't anything wrong in my mind with taking a category word and applying it to something new. Doesn't that do a service to the category itself, by broadening and deepening it? By being included in magical realism, Creta Kano and other stories improve the genre. That is to say, as Lu Xun and Schleiermacher show, the translation improves the target language.