Notes on Edward Seidensticker - Suis Burr

 I found Edward Seidensticker’s philosophy on translation conflicting, and perhaps an ideal more than something that reflects his own methods. He states that a translator must be like a counterfeiter, and “reproduce every detail of his original to the best of his ability, not changing anything” (22). However, he recognizes the difficulties of this, later stating that it is difficult to be “faithful” (23). He claims that a “conscientious translator seeks [...] to be faithful to the extent that he is capable of,” yet at times sacrifices that accuracy for “rhythm” (29). At other times, he sacrifices faithfulness in the name of “intuition”; something that “sound[s] better” instinctively (25). I find that this conflict encapsulates the challenges of translating from languages so different such as Japanese to English.

 As he mentions, sometimes Japanese sentences don’t have a subject and one has to read ahead to locate one, then add the subject to the previous sentence. It doesn’t work in English to leave the subject ambiguous like it does in the original Japanese. Seidensticker also encounters a dilemma with the internal rhyme in the second sentence of Snow Country, and it truly is a difficult choice to either remain faithful while sacrificing good prose or change it for the sake of flow. His discussion of “intuition” regarding his choice here is something that really resonated with me. As someone who grew up bilingual, I feel that when translating, or reading the original Japanese text, I sense a “feeling” that I can’t describe and have to recreate that feeling in the translated English. However, sometimes I wonder if the “feeling” that I take from a text is biased; something that I sense given my own upbringing and experiences of the world. Perhaps it is difficult to be objective with intuition.

 Lastly, I found the discussion on the visuals of text on paper fascinating. I think this touches on the untranslatable; one can’t recreate with English text the visual effects created with Japanese text. Perhaps this is reflective of translation as a whole, that one can never recreate the same experience that a text embodies when translating from one language to another and a translator can only strive (perpetually) for something that is as close as possible.