I was lucky enough to not only read the new book, A Man, by Keiichiro Hirano, but also to get a chance to do one of those things I love to do, talk to the translator. William is not just a translator, but, as shines in his writing, a writer of a number of really interesting works, such as Cash Crash Jubilee, pictured above. Below is the gracious answers of Mr. Eli KP William.
1) This was your first translation of a book, and also Hirano's first book to be translated into English. How did you become involved in this project? Had you read Hirano before?
To answer this question, I have to tell you about a collective I'm a member of called Humans in Literary Translation (HILT). The group is composed of fellow literary translators, Alison Watts, Louise Heal-Kawai, Matt Trevaud, and yours truly.
During one of our translation workshops in 2018, I mentioned in passing that I wanted to translate fiction similar to the fiction that I write. As soon as I said this, Alison, who had read my first novel, Cash Crash Jubilee, immediately told me to go read Dawn by Keiichiro Hirano, about which she had written a synopsis for a publisher.
After the workshop, I went straight to a bookshop and fell in love with the novel on the first page. Dawn is indeed strangely similar to Cash Crash Jubilee in some ways, both in how it depicts personal relationships in the near future and in its focus on the politics of technology, but also heads in a slightly more postmodern direction that I found enthralling.
When I told Alison my impression of Dawn, she and Louise both kindly put me in touch with the author, Hirano-san. I arranged a meeting with him and his agent for a few months later and in the meantime decided to pick up his latest novel. Although Hirano-san's most recent novel to be published in book form at the time was Matinee (an English translation of which, done by Juliet Winters-Carpenter, will be available later this year), there was an even newer novel of his, then only available in the magazine, Bungagukai. It was called A Man (or Aruotoko in Japanese).
My intention at the meeting was to ask about the translation rights for Dawn, but it just so happened that they were looking for a translator for A Man, and I was in the serendipitous position of being able to tell them that I had just finished and loved it. The agency, Cork, then asked me for a sample translation of the prologue, and the publisher, Crossing, selected mine out of a list of other samples.
And that is how I ended up translating A Man.
2) Are there any plans for another translation, of Hirano, or something else?
Juliet’s translation of Matinee is coming out later this year, as I said. I would love to translate Dawn, if I’m given the opportunity. Like Dawn, Hirano-san’s current serialized novel, Honshin, is a work of near future science fiction, and I’m looking forward to reading it as soon as it’s published as a book.
3) Do you think sharing certain attributes with an author makes it easier to translate? Do you think that you translate certain types of books or authors better, or do you think you could translate things that you don't have personal experience with?
I absolutely believe that certain translators go better with certain authors than others. I just finished reading the Aosawa Murders by Onda Riku and translated by Alison Watts, and I think that the novel turned out beautifully in English, in part because the voice of the author and translator matches perfectly. I can think of other cases, though I won't name names, where a highly skilled translator produced a less than ideal translation because the text of the novel clashed with their style. If you view translation as a form of collaboration, between the author’s mind passively embodied in the text and the translator actively connecting to that mind through the text, then it’s obvious that chemistry will have a big impact on the quality of the finished product, as it does with any cooperative undertaking.
Since my literary translation experience to date is limited, I’m still in the process of discovering what sorts of stories and authors I translate best. One thing I can say for certain, though, is that I translate authors better with whom I feel an affinity as a writer. In general, I suspect that translators do a better job if they are in love with—or at least like—the story they are translating. This inspires them to put in the extra effort to make the original sing in its new language.
I know other translators will disagree, but I think it's much harder to write something that you have no personal experience with than to translate it. If the familiar bromide “write what you know,” is half true, then “translate what you know” is probably misleading more often than not. For example, the protagonist of A Man is a lawyer, but I never felt that my lack of initial knowledge about Japanese law or the family register (koseki) was an impediment to successfully translating the novel. If I didn’t know something, I just looked it up and maybe did a bit of studying where necessary.
Of course you might not want to translate a language you don’t know! (I would be hopeless with any kind of ancient Japanese for example.) Also, literary translation is a specialized sub-field within translation that requires certain kinds of knowledge and skills. For example, good literary translators generally read a lot of literature. This is important for building up our arsenal of expressions and familiarizing ourselves with different voices and narratives. But, except in rare cases, I don’t think lack of experience with the subject matter is likely to affect the quality of a translation if the translator keeps their craft well-honed.
4) Do you see yourself as a writer or a translator, or both? Does being one help the other?
My view on this changes now and then, but right now I see myself primarily as a novelist, and literary translation as a facet of my novel writing. My main reason for saying this is that I spend a much larger portion of my creative time on my own fiction, and I don’t expect that to change in the long run.
I definitely find that being a novelist helps with translation, and vice versa. For example, novel writing requires the cultivation of voice, prose style, and compelling dialog, all of which are applicable to translation. Knowing the mechanics of narrative and symbolism from the perspective of a writer can also help to contextualize individual words and phrases, so that you can better understand their purpose within the whole of the story and more easily work out how they ought to be expressed in the target language.
On the flip side, there’s also a kind of alchemical transformation that can happen when a translator meets the work of a particular author. The new literary gold born from such an encounter was neither to be found in the original text nor could the translator have created it on their own. But once the translator has taken part in catalyzing this reaction, that gold becomes a part of their text-creating repertoire.
In slightly more concrete terms, a writer who also translates can discover new voices in the act of rendering a text into a new language that could not have been discovered in any other way. A new way of writing in the target language emerges from the interaction between translator and original text that is reducible to neither. Unlocking such creative techniques can help an author/translator to expand their range.
To give a specific example, translating A Man showed me how a novel can be written with minimal descriptions. Cash Crash Jubilee and the other books in my series, The Jubilee Cycle, tend to be heavy on visual imagery, whereas the focus in A Man is almost entirely on dialog, plot, characterization, and internal monologue rather than on setting the scene. The novel I’m currently writing relies on such a barebones approach to the description of place, and having a prior model that I translated makes this stylistic transition much easier for me to realize.
5) Please let us know where we can follow you and if there are any future projects you'd like people to look out for.
To learn more about me and my work, please visit my homepage:
You can follow me on Twitter:
I’m also on Facebook, though I’m not as active here:
Comments
Post a Comment