南向き翻訳事務所 岩渕デボラ ブログ

I have the day to myself. I can work flat out from dawn till the middle of the night (OK, maybe 6:30). Everything will get done, and it will be done well and quickly!

Not.

Ideally, a long work day will be broken up by a walk to the bank or the mall to buy things we actually need, or even a trip to the gym!

Unideally, I will be unable to unglue myself from my computer and will need computer-related breaks. I have some favorites that I’d like to share–presented in order of “apparent intellectual worth.” (I made up this term after many long days decoding books on psychiatry that use a lot of similar sorts of terms.)

No. 1 “Abstract City” by Christoph Niemann. Intellectual by virtue of being from the New York Times. You can learn a lot from this guy, be totally entertained and never feel you are wasting time.  After going through his pieces (and you will), it becomes apparent that Niemann is a househusband of sorts, and gets a lot of inspiration from his three sons–all of whom have first initials corresponding to the New York subway system.

No. 2 Free Rice, a blog-cum-game that makes you learn hard words and somehow convinces you you are doing something good. To date I have never used any of the words I have picked up on this game. It is low on the fun factor, but high on addictiveness–and you feel kind of guilty if you give up too soon.

No. 3 Awkward Family Photos.com  OK, this takes a really big dive in terms of intellectual index, but the headings are very clever, and sometimes you just need to laugh until you cry.

No. 4 I Can Has  Cheeseburger Intellectual value: -5. Got an hour before dinner, it’s too dark to take a walk, your brain is too fried to work? Enter this site and sample some of the many, many categories that will keep you in cyberspace for eternity. I personally like FAIL Blog because you just can’t watch too many car wrecks or see too many kids riding their bicycles into things.When you’re done with all the categories on the top of the page, scroll all the way down to the bottom for many, many more. (Wedinator, a good choice!)

There are a few blogs I enjoy reading, but lately I feel like I’m missing out because I’m being invited to “follow me on Twitter,” which is apparently something else. So there are blogs and twitters and there must be some other things, too, because blogs have all kinds of other icons suggesting other dimensions of cyberspace. But somehow “following” suggests more energy than I have to spend, and I have so far declined the kind invitations.

Back to work!

There are lots of Japanese words I just plain don’t like. Many of them are related to children and learning and schools, so I haven’t had as much contact with them workwise as mothering-wise. The end result being that I don’t think about them so much as rebel against (and complain about) them.

I recently had work-related contact with one of my least favorite phrases: 集団生活 shuudan seikatsu, literally “life in a group.”  Many mothers use it as a reason for putting their children into preschool as soon as they are eligible–they want the kids to get used to shuudan seikatsu early on.  (My daughters went to preschool the instant they were old enough, but it was because I wanted someone else to play with them for part of the day!)

Anyway, shuudan seikatsu has been stuck in my craw for years–and I never understood exactly why until a few days ago when the word came up in an editing job. The translator had written about the notion of a five-year-old being “adapted for communal life.” I checked the original Japanese, and sure enough, there it was–”able to deal with shuudan seikatsu.”  This was the aha moment!

I grew up in the 60s and 70s–during the glory days of, well, communal life in the United States. Although I never lived in a commune, I was on the fringes for several years and saw many people I loved and respected heading in that direction. Somehow, though, the notion of being unable to personally own anything was more than I could deal with. I had a good bike, a nice flute, the typewriter my dad took to college, and a few hundred dollars in the bank. The possibility of signing away even those was just too depressing.

So that was it!  My brain read shuudan seikatsu as “communal life,” and I was  terrified of the notion that my children, my only blood relatives on this side of the Pacific, would be ripped from my arms, and I would never see them except for short vacations in the summer or maybe at New Years. They would belong to someone else.

After years of living in the shadow of this menacing image, I could finally kill it off–and in plenty of time to apply it to any possible grandchildren. I carefully crossed out  “adapted for communal life” and wrote in “capable of participating fully in group activities.”

Done!

The Onion, a daily online newspaper, recently published an article entitled, “New Six Flags Ride Based on Relationship with Deborah.”

I think the 75% of baby-boomer women who share my name will agree–The Onion (which is well known for playing fast and loose with the facts anyway) needs to change the name in that article to one more suitable to the thirty-ish picture on that New Six Flags Ride photo. I’m thinking Tiffany or Heather.

Nobuko Takagi has won the 36th Kawabata Yasunari Literature Award for Short Stories. The winning story was “Tomosui,” a tale set in the Philippines, written as a part of her Soaked In Asia project, and first published in Shincho magazine, April 2009.

Read the English version (by Deborah Iwabuchi) on Ms. Takagi’s blog.

My husband was delighted (perhaps for my sake) to hear that “Bones” substituted “translation” for “murder” (see previous posting).  He said the Japanese sub-titles used the word henkan, which means a kind of transformation. And that makes much more sense, of course.

Pamela,  a fount of knowledge and intuition, has declared that the original script had certainly called for Booth to ask Brennan not to use the word “murder” at the funeral and replace it with the word “transition.” BUT during rehearsals, one of the actors–most likely David Boreanaz, who plays FBI Agent Seeley Booth, MUST have said “translation” instead of “transition,” at which point the entire cast collapsed in laughter and they decided to leave it in.

If this is the case, my philosophical questions have gone to waste. It’s a dark day for my honorable profession, but definitely a brighter one for script writers.

Here in the hinterlands, we do get US and British shows on cable TV although there is no telling when they were made. We enjoy sorting out the time lines of actors who seemingly star in a number of series all at once. Which came first, “LA Law” or “Law and Order?” At the worst, we just sit and try to figure out what program we’re actually watching.

Back to the topic at hand, the episode of Bones we personally watched last night made a teeny tiny step in my territory. The whole Jeffersonian crew was at a funeral when Temperance Brennan (who has an Asperger-ish knack for speaking her mind without regard for the situation) announces that the deceased did not have a heart attack, but has indeed been murdered. Booth encourages her not to use the word “murder” at a funeral because it would upset everyone. He suggests using a code word–”translation” in its place.

Then, of course, the conversation takes off with emotional expressions of, “We’ve got to do something!  This is definitely a translation!”  and “How are we going to tell the widow that her husband has been translated?”  And so on.

It gave me time to think about my occupation. In this episode, is “translation” a synonym for “murder,” or perhaps an antonym? Previous to writing the script, had there been a discussion of a book that had been murdered in translation? Or was it the most benign verb they could think of to take the place and thus make the script funny?  These are questions I want answers to.

Probably questions only a translator would have.

I’m on my eleventh book since I bought my Kindle in October 2009. That makes, let me see, eleven more books than I would have read otherwise. To show the advantage, I’ll sort them out by “motivation.”Back in pre-Kindle days, I never would have considered buying so many even if they were so inexpensive–just trying to figure out where I would put them! This way I get immediate gratification and the only fuss is my credit card statement.

Books I bought immediately after I read the review in the newspaper:

Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife by Francine Prose

Fly By Wire by WIlliam Langewiesche

Books I bought because my sister recommended them:

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler

The Writer as Migrant by Ha jin

A book I bought right after seeing the movie on which it was partially based:

My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’Homme

Books I’ve been wanting to read anyway, and there they were:

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

Garlic and Sapphires: the Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

A book I bought because it was only about $3:

The Non-Fiction Works of  Mark Twain

A number of years ago I read Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. It was a fascinating read, describing all the details of climbing Mt. Everest. It was so descriptive, in fact, that I felt out of breath the entire time I was reading it. I still think about it almost compulsively–the life-threatening, not to mention, incredibly uncomfortable experience that is commonly referred to as “conquering Everest.” Krakauer provided me with a sufficient Everest experience. I’m happy both to have read it and also to never go there myself.

Eat Sleep Sit had much the same effect on me.  The Japanese title is “Eat Sleep Sit: The Story of Training at Eiheiji.” Presumably, the Japanese reader knows the implications of Eiheiji as a temple where Buddhist monks are trained. I appreciate how the Kodansha International editor made it clear in the title that (1) it wouldn’t be an idyllic year of sitting on wooden verandahs gazing out at moss gardens, and (2) it only lasted a year. The latter comes as a relief early on, although by that time the inclusion of “Sleep” in the title begins to raise questions.

Author Kaoru Nonomura decides to quit his job, leave his girlfriend, and set off for a year of training at Eiheiji. When he arrives, he stands at the door to the temple, in the snow, and ends up having to shout himself hoarse before he is allowed in–and the experience (from this reader’s eyes) goes downhill from there as the trainee leaves every last ounce of freewill outside the temple. Every single act of a trainee, each individual motion of that act, is set down by Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of Eiheiji. As an example, the section “Lavatory” is nine pages long. And this is where the “Into Thin Air” effect begins to take hold. The rules are so complete and invasive that, on the one hand one wants to scream “waaaay too much information,” but on the other it is fascinating and one wants to read every word of it. The monks learn how to live as Zen automatons, although the author concedes that that may be what Zen is all about–emptying the mind by not having to make a single decision, no matter how minor.

I give veteran translator  Juliet Winters Carpenter a great deal of credit for making a large amount of ancient instruction accessible in English to the modern non-Japanese reader. In fact, I looked through the Japanese version at one point and was overwhelmed with the  passages written by Dogen so many centuries ago and even the modern re-rendering of them as the author puts them into practice. I understand that Buddhist scholars were consulted in the translation work, and the results are clearly evidenced by how easy it is to read.

As with Into Thin Air and Mt. Everest, however, Eat Sleep Fit completely cured me of any desire to actually experience spending even a night at Eiheiji. The life of the new monks is a living hell. They get perhaps two or three hours of sleep a night, come close to malnutrition, and are bullied and abused by their senior monks (most who have arrived only a few months ahead of them) in ways that would be considered criminal in any other setting. Looking at the book from this point of view, the clarity of the prose leaves nothing to the imagination, and the reader begins to feel groggy from pain and exhaustion. Here I give Nonomura credit for being able to remember in such detail the sort of trauma that usually wipes clean the memories of its victims.

The final word? I couldn’t put it down! Eat Sleep Sit, for a disconcerting but fascinating read!

I wrote earlier this fall about assisting in the translation of Mayumi’s Kitchen, a book on macrobiotic cooking written by Mayumi Nishimura, formerly Madonna’s personal chef.

The book arrived in the mail today, and it looks fantastic!  The recipes are beautifully presented and more “approachable” than one (me) might imagine when it came to macrobiotics. In fact that is Ms. Nishimura’s whole idea: to make macrobiotics appealing and available.

Since I wasn’t an “official” translator and joined the project close to deadline, I was delighted to find my name in the acknowledgments– just 6 lines from Madonna!

How many layers of separation does that cut out? We translators live with a very dubious proximity to fame, but it’s fun and gives us something to talk about when we come out of our caves.

Mayumi’s Kitchen is available from amazon.co.jp as of next week, and will be on sale in the US in June.