Edward Seidensticker thoughts

 

It’s interesting seeing the perspective of an older and veteran translator such as Seidensticker. As a beginner translator, I feel that the translation is good as long as the translation is understandable and sounds good. However, Seidensticker considers things in addition to clarity/understandability such as rhythm, which undoubtedly influences his choices as a translator.

In “Eight Ways to Say You” Cathy Hirano mentions adding passages into translations to work the meaning of Japanese words into the text, while Seidensticker says that explanation takes time, which slows down the rhythm of the passage and damages the original work. Adding explanations do help make the story more accessible to the American audience while staying true to the original meaning of the work but it does take away from the style of the original work. I don’t think I prefer either as of now and I agree with Seidensticker that translation is constantly making choices and sacrifices.

 

The part about the translation of Kawabata’s Snow Country was quite intriguing to read. The original sentence and it’s literal translation, “Yoru no soko ga shiroku natta/The bottom of the night turned white” is very poetic and beautiful, but I agree that the internal rhyme did throw me off a little when I first read it in English. Due to the pronunciation of the words “night” and “white”, the reader pauses on the words for a much longer time than it does in the Japanese which breaks up the sentence. While I like the abstractness of that sentence, I preferred how smooth Seidensticker’s original translation, “The earth lay white under the night sky” sounds. However, it does lose the imagery and mysteriousness.

 

It’s interesting that Seidensticker thinks “The bottom of the night turned white” is the better translation yet doesn’t like it. Sometimes the better translation is not one that the translator likes. 

 

A little aside not related to translations but regarding the “light” and “dark” on the printed page—from a graphic design and art perspective, I agree that it’s very beautiful seeing visual shifts between kanji, hiragana and katakana next to each other.  

-Lesley