Sunday, October 23, 2022

Hibbett on Tanizaki - Connie

 It was interesting to see Hibbett's thoughts when translating Tanizaki's works and what difficulties he ran into with certain issues as well as going into the critical views that people have on Tanizaki. I'm not sure what I would have done on The Key but he mentions that the husband writes in square katakana to emphasize masculinity while the wife writes in flowing hiragana to represent feminity of sorts and he pondered whether italicizing the dialogue would convey the context Tanizaki wanted to convey. Maybe a different font for each of their diaries would suffice (like choosing a more angled font for the husband and a more cursive(?) or elegant font for the wife's diary) but I'm not sure how well it'd go with the publisher. 

He talks about the two virtues when it comes to translating works and that is naturalizing (improving) a work and failing to improve a work. I'm not sure it would really be improving a work if it's being altered to better fit the target audience because as he said, it could dilute the specialness that the original had and make it bland and dull if certain parts were to be removed to adjust to the target audience's context but I also feel like it wouldn't be perfectly understood well even if you try hard enough to convey the context.

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