
On the Homogenizing Dangers of Easily Translated Literature (2016) - oska
https://lithub.com/the-murakami-effect/
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barry-cotter
> The growing dominance of English has come to mean that European, African,
> Asian, and Latin American writers are considered to have “failed” if they
> are unable to reach an international audience.

Is this really true? I can absolutely see it as a possibility for countries
that see the US as the centre of the intellectual and political world, like
Germany, the U.K. or the Netherlands, but do countries with highly inflated
senses of their international importance and power, (France) or a great sense
of the beauty or transcendence of their high culture (Italy, Russia) really
look to the US so much?

~~~
ahartmetz
Reporting in from Germany, not true. The domestic market is fairly big and it
is understood that works of non-English origin usually don't do well in
English-speaking countries.

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yorwba
The mentioned difficulties do not appear to actually be due to translation,
but instead due to lacking the background to appreciate a given work as worth
reading.

> _Zoku meian_ [Light and Darkness continued], is a tour de force in which she
> creates a very plausible, stylistically pitch-perfect ending to _Meian_
> [Light and Darkness], the last, unfinished masterpiece by Natsume Sōseki,
> Japan’s most important modern novelist.

...

> As a fragmentary, dependent work, standing in relation to a classic text
> that is largely unknown outside Japan except to a handful of experts, it is,
> in effect, impossible to render into comprehensible English or, for that
> matter, any other language

If "Light and Darkness continued" had been written as a continuation of an
English translation of _Meian_ , it is likely that it would have failed to
gather any significant readership except translated into Japanese as _Zoku
meian_. That's simply due to targeting an audience that is already familiar
with _Meian_ and might pay attention to a well-written continuation.

A similar problem arises for _Star Wars_ novelizations, without any
translation involved. Being invested into the universe that serves as backdrop
for the story is essentially a prerequisite for becoming a reader. If you
tried to "translate" an English _Star Wars_ novel for the English mass market,
you'd fail the same as when translating a novel full of Japanese cultural
references for the same market.

The "homogenizing danger" then isn't so much about writing to be translated,
but about writing to be read by the largest possible number of readers, be it
in translation or not. Other literature can exist, but you shouldn't expect it
to get popular outside a small niche. Sometimes the niches are separated by
language boundaries, other times they're not. I'd assume translated _Star
Wars_ novels to also appeal to Japanese _Star Wars_ fans, for example.

~~~
nerdponx
Maybe this is just coming from my background as an academic and general nerd,
but personally I would rather read a book that I don't fully understand, but
had lots of notes and references to explain the context, than something that's
been conceptually "translated".

~~~
Chestofdraw
As a general nerd I feel like this is a common experience and one that I've
quite enjoyed when reading countless sci-fi/fantasy books.

You start of and many cultural references or things seem completely alien and
only start to click once you're part way through.

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ijpoijpoihpiuoh
As with most literary criticism, I'm pretty skeptical of this. Thinking in the
opposite direction, Snow Crash would be easier to translate than Neuromancer.
Neuromancer would be easier to translate than Finnegan's Wake. That doesn't
mean that Snow Crash is part of some homogeneous morass or any less worthy
than those other two novels. Though I suppose many literary critics would
prize the Joyce over the Stephenson, there are no absolutes in art. There is
just what people like.

~~~
needle0
I felt the author was pretty careful in emphasizing that he's not declaring
neither Mizumura nor Murakami is superior over the other, just that
translatability can be a factor in how works spread.

BTW, all three works you mention has been translated into Japanese (including
Finnegans Wake!) The translation for Neuromancer is also something to behold;
Hisashi Kuroma, the translator, invented a literary "cyberpunk style" which
can only be done with an Asian language. Words in Kanji are sprinkled with
ruby text [1] which, instead of annotating the pronunciation of the word,
fills in the romanized equivalent English neologism, eg. "接続" would be
annotated not as "せつぞく" but as "ジャック・イン" (jack in).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character)

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bglusman
I still haven't finished reading it end-to-end, but I love the form and shape
of Hofstadter's "Le Ton beau de Marot"[0] which is sort of an extended
dialogue on the difficulty, beauty and/or impossibility of translation. It's
not just about language translation of course, being Hofstadter, but that's
the entry point.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot)

