Ted Goossen Response by Suis

Ted Goossen’s comment about time in regards to Kawakami’s works interested me:

“The issue of time in general pertains not just to Japanese literature, but also to Japanese film and to many non-Western cultures in various ways (I’m thinking of the indigenous peoples of North America, for example). It’s such a tricky concept, and modernity has packaged and limited and boxed it; we’re all forced to accommodate time in a way that allows our modern systems to work efficiently. When it comes to literature, though, we’re operating in a somewhat different arena, and I think we take pleasure in being free from the dictates of modern, waking time. Kamakami certainly accomplishes that in this collection: if one tries to read it in a very narrow, linear way, it’ll be frustrating. We tried to rearrange the stories a little bit for the comfort of the English-speaking reader, but we didn’t want to do too much of that.”

I thought this also pertains to what Ken Liu discussed during his lecture regarding modernity as well as the dangers of categorization of non-Western literature. I read The Tale of Genji last semester for an elective course I took and this theme of nonlinearity came up constantly. Historians have debated on which chapters of the Genji were written first in order to fit it into a linear narrative. Same goes for Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book. However, these works were not read in a linear fashion when they were produced in their era. Furthermore, the Genji was written on scrolls, and one would be picked out randomly to be read on a given day. The themes within the story touch on the cyclicality of life; both the physical form of the written work and the themes within it were/are circular. Goossen says that it would be “frustrating” to read them in a “very narrow, linear way” and that is because they aren’t meant to be viewed through that lens.

Goossen also expresses his aversion to categorization. He thinks “that what Westerners have tended to call magical realism (starting with One Hundred Years of Solitude) has been a way of normalizing that which doesn’t easily fit into our categories” and that “feminism is [also] a bit like realism, too: there’s a different kind within each culture.” Ken Liu also encouraged a similar idea, that Chinese sci-fi should be read on the level of each individual author rather than as a genre. I think that there is a Western impulse to categorize foreign literature, to fit them in linear perspectives, but their labels serve to be reductive to (foreign) works that are richly different in their histories and cultures. That being said, I particularly enjoyed reading Ted Goossen’s translations of Kawakami Hiromi’s short stories, and his interview is a useful preface to such “nonlinear” works.

The collection of works are entitled “あのあたりの人たち” (The people from that area (unspecified area)), and Ted Goossen renders that as “People From My Neighborhood” because he feels a sense of “familiarity” with the characters in the stories via his experience translating the works. I have always felt reading his translations that he enforces a lot of subjectivity to them. (I will talk more about this in my presentation.) However, I think he did a wonderful job rendering the old man’s voice in “Electrician.” In the original Japanese, certain syllables are omitted in the way he speaks, and in the English translation, Goossen did the same thing by using words such as “ain’t” and “‘em.” I felt that he faithfully translated the Japanese voice into the English equivalent.

Lastly, I was very moved by Ken Liu’s proclamation that translation “is not apolitical” and that we should be “aware of one’s politics” when translating.