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Giles Murray |
Tokyo |
Date: 22.03.2012
Time: 20:47:46
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Thank you for all your comments. This page is now closed for comments. 
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Giles Murray |
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Date: 18.11.2009
Time: 20:37:03
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I found the following passage in a novel by Paul Auster called "The Book of Illusions." The narrator is translating Chateaubriand's Memoirs into English, having previously written "The Silent World," his own book on a minor silent film star. He reflects on translation as follows.
...Much of the work was mechanical, and because I was the servant of the text and not its creator, it demanded a different kind of energy from the one I had put into writing "The Silent World." Translation is a bit like shoveling coal. You scoop it up and toss it into the furnace. Each lump is a word, and each shovelful is another sentence, and if your back is strong enough and you have the stamina to keep at it for eight or ten hours at a stretch, you can keep the fire hot...
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Giles Murray |
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Date: 26.10.2009
Time: 10:34:02
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Here are the URLs for a couple of Mishima films released a year or so ago by Criterion.
Patriotism
http://www.criterion.com/films/589
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
http://www.criterion.com/films/588
The additional materials that come along with the latter—interviews with Paul Schrader, John Nathan, Donald Richie and the production designer Eiko Ishioka as well as the director of photography—are wonderfully informative.
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Giles Murray |
Mishima Movie Discussion |
Date: 03.09.2009
Time: 21:00:02
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In the July 3, 2009 edition of the BBC Radio 4 "Film Programme," screenwriter & director Paul Shrader talks (among many other things) about making "Mishima," a film with "no finance and no distribution." It will be available to listen for a while yet.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lclqx
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Giles Murray |
To Christian from the UK |
Date: 16.08.2009
Time: 22:07:10
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Christian,
First of all, I hope you see this message. I do not seem able to extract your e-mail address from the message you left so I cannot write directly to you, meaning I have to reply here. Sorry for being so slow to respond.
Anyway, I'm very glad to help bring a lapsed Japanese scholar back into the fold. You are certainly not alone in having doubts about the quality of some of the Mishima (and other) translations that came out in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. The ability to understand Japanese and the ability to form elegant English sentences are two different things & having a professorship is no guarantee of being a good translator. One also gets the sense that certain translators then were a little too eager to hitch themselves to the rising Japanese literary stars of the time, and translated too much, too hastily (though perhaps this is inevitable when you are translating a prolific author in his lifetime).
John Bester translated Mishima very well. Do you know "Acts of Worship"? (I think this is a somewhat later translation than many of the others.)
Comparing Royall Tyler's Genji (early 2000s) with Seidensticker's (early 1970s) shows the gulf between a man with a genuine vocation and a man with stamina and diligence but no aptitude for literature.
Some of what Mishima wrote is simply bad and the best translator in the world is helpless against that. John Nathan, the author of an excellent biography of Mishima, contented himself with translating just one of his works ("The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea") before jumping ship to render Oe into English. As Oe ended up getting a Nobel Prize one can't fault Nathan's instincts here.
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Giles Murray |
An Intriguing Book |
Date: 14.08.2009
Time: 08:46:45
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The International Herald Tribune of August 13, 2009 contained an article about a Mexican novelist called Mario Bellatin. The paper describes Bellatin as having a "fondness for the bizarre." Currently he is working on an "Illustrated Biography of Mishima". The book will tell the story of "what had happened to the writer after his head was cut off".
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Giles Murray |
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Date: 02.08.2009
Time: 13:41:24
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Dear Arik
The Japanese is made up of the characters for "to be anxious about" and "country." Perhaps the presence of the character "country" accounts for the story having been called "Patriotism" in English. As the story is so famous, the title is now itself semi-sacred. "Patriotism" is certainly a better title than the obvious alternative of "nationalism," as the latter is more of a collective political sentiment than an individual one.
On the other hand, "Patriotism" does suggest flags and brass bands and military ritual and epic heroism on the battlefield—everything that the lieutenant in this story is denied! Might there be a soupcon of irony in the English title?
A word similar in connotation to "uxorious" (for a husband obsessing over his wife) might better suggest the hint of morbidity and anxiety inherent in the first kanji character, but to my knowledge no such term exists vis-a-vis a person's relationship with their country. To call it "Morbid Patriotism" would be overlong (the Japanese title is very succint) and would expose an explicit bias against the protagonist which isn't there in the Japanese original.
I think your suggestion of "Devotion" nicely captures the twin ideas of love and fanaticism.
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Giles Murray |
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Date: 02.08.2009
Time: 13:26:06
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Gwindarr
Sorry to be so slow to get back to you, I have been traveling around in India.
With Exploring Japanese Literature, we would have liked to provide audio, but as all the stories remain under copyright (since the authors all died in the late 1960s and early 1970s, or under fifty years ago) this would have required first securing permissions and then charging a great deal more for the whole package. We were only able to provide free audio with Breaking into Japanese Literature because the authors both died young and thus got the copyright problem out of the way for us.
If you look back to the early pages of this forum you can see that I did track down audio of the Tanizaki and of the Kawabata (full length version only), while there is a MIshima "Patriotism" film containing a proportion of the text that is available on the Criterion label.
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Arik |
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Date: 05.07.2009
Time: 05:31:50
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I am wondering if there are any other possible translations for the title. After reading the story I feel like the Japanese might be closer to "loyalty" or "devotion" than it is to "patriotism." I do not speak or read Japanese, so I am just wondering if someone better qualified than I has any ideas.
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Gwindarr |
USA   |
Date: 26.06.2009
Time: 11:00:44
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Was there ever any audio released for any of the stories in Exploring Jap Lit? Is there any plan to?
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