I think that Seidensticker and his idea of translators being counterfeiters makes a lot of sense. No matter how close you get to the original, you won’t be able to recreate it, and translators leave a unique mark on the work. In addition, I think that what he says about translators and attempts to ‘improve’ the original work and hence making it a bad translation are interesting ideas as well. It reminds a bit of when we read the multiple Murakami translations, and how certain additions made the story read more fluent and natural, but they arguably brought the work farther from the original. Tying that back to Hirano’s philosophy of translators needing a level of humility, I can’t help but think that the balance between sacrificing clarity for accuracy or vice versa is incredibly difficult to maintain.
The fact that Seidensticker barely communicates with the authors is another interesting idea. Murakami and his translators seemed to have a pretty collaborative relationship, so the idea that authors like Tanizaki and Kawabata were reluctant to discuss their work is sort of unusual to me. After all, they run the risk of the translator’s interpretation of their work overshadowing their own. It somewhat reminds me of how in websites that translate song lyrics, there’s usually a huge difference in what Japanese and English audiences interpret the song as being about– whether due to translators choosing different subjects in sentences or naturalizing wordplay incompletely. The essay as a whole definitely gave me more to think about when doing our next translation and Seidensticker’s view is truly interesting (although I wholeheartedly disagree with his assessment of Yoshimoto Banana.)
--Reshma
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