南向き翻訳事務所 岩渕デボラ ブログ

今までは英訳のみで仕事をすすみましたが、今回は南向き翻訳事務所が初めての「和訳」を無事提出ができました。

出版はまだ先ですが、出版社に送っただけでほっとしています！今年の春から星和書店の仕事を受けて、これからも続くことを期待しています。

今回は「新人」翻訳家の本多篤と岩渕愛でした。小川由香さんと武井真一さんの忍耐強いご協力を感謝しています。

写真は英語版。日本語版はどんな感じになるかな。楽しみです！

Yesterday I got my first copy of NOON: Journal of the Short Poem published by Philip Rowland right here in Japan.

It’s difficult to see in this photo, but the cover is hand bound (click on the photo for a slightly closer look) and the title is indicated in a hand-applied stamp too delicate to get on my camera. It features poems by my two good friends, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa and Margaret Stawowy.

For someone like me with limited time to read, picking up this beautifully designed book and opening it to read one of the gems of poetry is a true luxury.

Anyone looking for a copy can send $10 or 1000 yen to Philip Rowland, Minami Motomachi 4-49-506, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-0012

Having moaned and groaned about WaMu (see below) I would now like to say a word about an up-and-coming translation. The book will be a combination of the two above titles, English title yet to be decided. They were both written by Tadahiko Ito, who is also my latest hero. Ito worked for Sumitomo Bank for many years before being assigned president of Kansai Bank , a small local bank on the brink of closure due to the many loans it made during the “bubble” economy years to people making a living off of buying up real estate and then selling it again for a quick profit. (Sound familiar?)

Within seven years, Ito had turned the bank completely around, and it is now one of the top regional banks in Japan. As you may guess, the books tell the story of his amazing work getting the bank back up on its feet. Following the collapse of so many banks in Japan and in the US due to unstable real estate markets, you may not be surprised to hear that he completely revamped his lending process. Instead of putting the emphasis on collateral (what the bank gets if a borrower defaults on its loan), he began to take a good look at the businesses he was financing. In a nutshell, Ito saved a bank based on altruistic business practices. The idea was to save the bank, take care of the employees, take care of the customers and benefit society as a whole.

Amazing but true. Look forward to a book that lets you know how Ito succeeded and his advice on how anyone can succeed. This book isn’t The Secret and it is certainly no get-rich-quick scheme–be prepared to have your notions of “success” turned upside down!

The Four Stories website now has MP3 downloads and photographs from the June 15 Four Stories event in Osaka at Portugalia. I’m the one with her bangs in her eyes and too nervous to sit down and read. I read from Translucent Tree by Nobuko Takagi.  It wasn’t exactly in keeping with the theme, but the other three stories certainly were and they are definitely worth a listen to!

高樹のぶ子先生の“Soaked in Asia” ブログに新作短編の「投」の英訳が載っています。今回の英訳を高樹先生に頼まれて、私のウェブ上英訳が初めてです。高樹先生はアジアの国々を旅して、各国で短編を書いて、雑誌にご出版後、ブログで英訳を乗せています。今回は上海についての話です。是非見て下さい。話の中に石庫門について書かれています。私はこの短編を読む前まで聞いたことがなかったですが、昔からの上海の特徴的な住宅です。最近では次々と取り壊されて、高層ビルがたてられているそうです。

See Nobuko Takagi’s blog, “Soaked in Asia,” and read the English version of her latest short story “Casting Out,” which I translated. Ms. Takagi visits different Asian countries, writing a short story at each location. The story is first printed in the original Japanese in a magazine, and then in English and Japanese on her blog.

The story, set in Shanghai, focuses on a character who lives in a traditional type of dwelling called shikumen. Here is an article on it from The Standard. I’d never heard of shikumen before doing this story. Most are (apparently) made of brick; multi-family dwellings with courtyards. They sound cozy to me, but, according to this and other recent articles, including one in the New Yorker, shikumen are being torn down in droves to make way for skyscrapers.

For some reason I cannot fathom, I announced this new book on my website, but forgot to do it up big here!

Beyond the Blossoming Fields by well-known author Jun’ichi Watanabe, and translated by Anna Isozaki and myself–with the kind assistance of Deborah Davidson and Manna Iwabuchi, not to mention all of the kind folk at the Japan Literature PublishingProject (JLPP) ,was published by a fine British publisher, Alma Books, and released this spring.

Watanabe is better known for somewhat racier novels, but this was his first as a doctor-turned-author, the story of Ginko Ogino, the first licensed female doctor in Japan. She was born less than an hour away from where Anna and I live, in Menuma, a small town on the Saitama side of the Gunma border. Of equal interest to me was that she was a Christian. In fact she was baptized by Danjo Ebina, a follower of Niijima Jo (another big Gunma name!) and the first pastor of Maebashi Church, where I am currently a member.

Personally, I love books in the non-fiction genre (truth is always stranger–and often more interesting–than fiction. Ginko led a remarkable and colorful life in Menuma, Tokyo and in Hokkaido. And her persistence in pursuing a career that was specifically and systematically denied to women will keep you spellbound. In addition to the details of the main theme, learn how she struggled throughout most of her life from a serious and chronic disease, how she led a crew of bone smugglers into a graveyard at night, how she ran her practice–the Ogino Clinic, protected prostitutes from the local thugs, her marriage to a man who took her to the wilds of Hokkaido–and much, much more.

Anne Ishii, expert on literature, manga, things Japanese, and prolific blogger (and there’s more…) has posted a fascinating interview with author Nobuko Takagi about her book, Translucent Tree, on the Bookslut site.

It is in my best interests to ask you to buy the book and THEN read the interview, but why wait? Not only do Anne and Ms. Takagi discuss the book, but also stranger-than-fiction aspects of the author’s life.

At some point after making the online acquaintance of Suzanne Kamata (editor of Love You to Pieces), I was invited to participate in an event called Four Stories, a “reading” event held regularly in Boston and Osaka.

Tracy Slater, a writer who goes back and forth between the two cities, is in charge of organizing the program and the venue. It is not often that translators get invited to “public” events, so I am looking forward to this one. Each of the four storytellers for the evening has fifteen minutes to read. I couldn’t decide between a hyper-edited piece of Devil’s Whisper (Miyabe Miyuki) or Translucent Tree (Nobuko Takagi), but finally opted for the latter for one simple reason–fewer characters for the listeners to have keep sorted out.

By all means, click on the link to find out more about Four Stories. I’ll leave you here with its motto:

“Four Stories: like a 19th-Century salon, only 150 years later–same socializing, same witty banter, corsets optional.”

近所の紀伊国屋に行ったら、『英語「なるほど」ライティング』はもう１冊の本と並んでありました。どう思いますか？

携帯の写真で分かりにくいでしょうが、異様に本のタイトルも色もデザインも似ています。（著者はもってのほか、出版社もちがう。） ここで態度を決めないといけない。「ぱくり！」と怒るか「Imitation is the highest form of flattery」と思って、開き直るか。どうしましょう？皆さんがどちらにしても、左の方を買ってね。よろしくお願いします！

Coming from and living in a family with at least its fair share of mental and physical “issues,” when I first read about this book in the Daily Yomiuri, the title, Love You to Pieces, leaped out at me like some secret code–oh my gosh, whoever wrote this MUST understand, and I wasted no time reserving a copy on amazon.

The book arrived and I jumped right in reading half of it before mental exhaustion forced me to put it down for another day. Editor and contributor Suzanne Kamata explains that when her own daughter was born with cerebral palsy she looked “for deep and sustaining stories to guide me on the long path ahead, and while I found many cheery volumes offering hope and inspiration, that wasn’t exactly what I wanted.” This reminded me of when my own children were born and I looked desperately but in vain for a book that would explain the matter of babies who cried most of the night. My suspicion was that there was no solution to the problem, but I wanted an author who would say, “The mother with such a child will find herself desperately sleep-deprived. Your baby may be in some discomfort from colic, but you yourself deserve a gold medal and peace and quiet for a good, long nap.”

In a word, this is what we get from Love You to Pieces. We find that parents of children with disabilities are not saints God has ordained for this particular role, but people struggling with what life has dealt them in the form of their own children–the little (and large) beings they love best in the world, but who have brought with them an entire array of emotions and dilemmas and obligations from which their parents will never be free. You might even go so far as to call this book a Pandora’s Box for parents of children with special needs. Just as the mother of a baby who will not sleep through the night must never find out that she actually deserves to sleep, once parents discover themselves in any of these stories, and find the self-doubt and struggle they face every day are shared by others (i.e they are normal), there’s going to be no shoving them back inside and slamming on the lid and going back to pretending that if they just focus a little harder they really can take care of all this on their own, everything is just fine, thank you.

The stories are arranged in order of the child of the main character. The early years produce prose that is almost too painful to read, and just getting past the first story, “Coming to Samsara” by Vicki Forman, who writes about the birth of twins born several months prematurely, requires an act of faith. Women very close to me have had similar tragedies. The agony the mother goes through is so raw, but I want to hold the pain and disbelief inside, so I can somehow come close to sharing it. “So this was what it was like…”

“”Severe Language Delay”: in the Kitchen with My Three-Year-Old” by Rebecca Balcarel is a very short poem that beautifully sums up memories of my nephew who was born with a cleft palate. At three he was quite the conversationalist, and my sister seemed to navigate it all so smoothly even though there was rarely a hint of a vowel to cling to for support. The process Balcarel uses to understand her child, and so succinctly describes, is complex, but I imagine it took place within a matter of a few seconds– and was repeated hundreds of times a day.
“Ordinary Time” fiction by Carol Zapata-Whelan is about a household in chaos. This story showed me someone who did not appear to be fully in control of her life or her family or even herself, but she was somehow muddling through and, in the process, providing a loving environment for her son who suffered from a progressive disease. Indeed, her own failures left gaping holes large enough for others to step in and lend a hand. (A must-read for anyone for whom pictures of the Duggar family, lined up and perfectly coiffed, brings on hives.)

Three of the final stories, “Rachel at Work: Enclosed a Mother’s Report,” a memoir by Jane Bernstein and “What About Meg?” fiction by Curtis Smith, and “Joyful Noise” fiction by Maggie Kast, about adult or almost-adult children, resonated with me, and I was satisfied that nothing was tied up with ribbons and bows. Although the unremitting self-doubt and questioning is beginning to settle down, problems and issues remain; the parent begins to accept and yet still reveals his or her humanity.