Wednesday, March 31, 1999
Translating Popular Fiction
Frequently we read in the Japanese press of puzzlement that the foreign market is not more interested in translation of some of the vast number of books being published in Japan every year—which includes million-sellers on the domestic market—as well as frustration with outdated and mistaken images of themselves continuing to circulate abroad. Writer Shinoda Setsuko, author of prize-winning fiction such as Onnatachi no jihad (Shūeisha, 1977), expressed these sentiments in an article published in the Asahi shimbun, January 17, 1999 (morning edition, p. 29). Here is a paraphrased translation of her article with commentary from six translators. A follow-up article, “Translating Popular Fiction 2,” by Peter Goodman of Stone Bridge Press, appeared in Newsletter No. 85, May 1999.
Shinoda Setsuko points out that the younger generation of Japanese authors has grown up immersed in translated literature, and that in the process they have absorbed by osmosis the importance of solid plot lines, convincing characters, and rich and extended descriptive passages. The successful among these writers are sometimes lauded by reviewers with exclamations that they “surpass King” or are the “Japanese Koontz,” and Shinoda believes they measure up perfectly well to—even surpassed long ago— writers in other countries; their only handicap is that their audience is limited by language to the Japanese market.
Japanese fiction is available in translation to a certain extent in neighboring parts of Asia, such as the Republic of Korea and Taiwan, but continues mainly to be represented by works by Ōe, Kawabata, Mishima, and some younger authors writing literary fiction, plus manga and a smattering of fiction for young people with manga-like covers. Shinoda laments the absence of any of the popular fiction now flourishing in Japan among its literature for export.
Japan’s literature trade balance, she says, is not so bad with Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, but vis-à-vis the West, it is overwhelmingly unfavorable. Publishers complain about the publishing recession, but they rarely try to sell their books overseas. Japan, Shinoda argues, has its own good storytellers and authors who deal with universal themes that would translate well.
Japanese goods, capital, and factories have done very well off-shore, but, in her view, the culture itself has been less successful; the only things that appear to have caught on overseas are animation and manga.
There was much ado in the press a few years ago about distorted images of Japan in textbooks overseas, but Shinoda doesn’t think that understanding has improved much in the interim. Japan is still the faceless, somewhat sinister country known for its exports of goods, money, and manufacturers. The inscrutability stereotype persists.
At the other extreme, Shinoda observes, are the great efforts being made to introduce Japan’s traditional culture—tea ceremony, Noh, ceramics, and so on—overseas, and the executives of multinational corporations often serve as assiduous ambassadors of this sort of high culture. Ordinary Japanese today, however, don’t know, or care, much about such arts and traditions. She feels that presentations of traditional Japanese culture don’t put real faces on the Japanese either.
Shinoda is convinced that there are many works of fiction by Japanese authors that could capture a readership overseas if they were translated and made available in paperback. She thinks what should be sent abroad are neither the violent, sexually explicit animated series (which became controversial in France) nor traditional high culture, but the sort of books that ordinary, educated adults read all the time: crime novels, business fiction, SF, mythic fantasies, all treating contemporary themes and concerns. They are fiction, but almost without exception they give a true picture of Japanese society and of Japanese as they are today.
Since Japanese themselves form their images of other peoples to a great extent through exposure to films and literature from those countries and less so from the goods they produce, Japanese literature in translation ought to be a crucial medium for communicating an accurate image of Japanese overseas. She points out the widespread lack of knowledge or understanding in Japan regarding the peoples of India, China, the Middle East, and elsewhere. People are somewhat informed through the news about the government, religion, and history of these countries, but they lack recognizable human faces introduced through literature and other aspects of contemporary culture.
In closing, Shinoda expresses her conviction that if the kind of fiction that ordinary Japanese are reading—when they relax at home or ride the trains to work—were translated and published outside Japan, people of other countries would surely begin to see something of the real faces of Japanese people. She believes it would help to tear down the stereotypes and remove the suspicion people overseas seem to have of Japanese.
Certainly many SWET members share Shinoda’s sentiments; many translators and editors in our ranks have struggled with the nitty-gritty of reforging Japanese writing for publication in English. SWET asked a number of experienced wordsmiths to respond to Shinoda’s article.
Commentary
Janet Ashby (J-E translator and critic)
I also often deplore the one-sided flood of translations into Japanese and the trickle of translations out, but see several intractable barriers to any great change in the situation, at least as far as the United States is concerned.
On the American side, the major problems are the nature of the U.S. market and the availability of translators. The market is characterized by readers who are resistant to translated works (just as Americans are resistant to foreign movies) and by publishers rapidly moving from being independent, family-owned businesses to being cogs in impersonal conglomerates stressing the bottom line. Even university presses are coming under pressure to make a profit. Similarly, smaller and medium-sized independent bookstores are being forced out of business by large chains focusing on sure sellers.
There is a limited supply of native English speakers capable of translation from Japanese to English, and unfortunately there is no money in book translation at the present time. Only academics can afford the time to translate books, and they, of course, are more interested in literary fiction than in popular fiction.
On the Japanese side, the main problems are the nature of the domestic market and lack of knowledge of the American market. The large market for short fiction in magazines, popularity of magazine and newspaper serials, and acceptance of two-volume novels leads to many works of fiction that are too long or too short for the American market. Quite often I read a review for a novel that sounds interesting only to find when I go to the bookstore that it is in two volumes of over 400 pages each! It is true that a blockbuster author like Tom Clancy or Stephen King can publish novels of that length, but 250–300 pages is a much more commercially feasible length for an author unknown to foreign readers.
The novella format of 60–80 pages that most promising young novelists write in for literary magazines (and the Akutagawa prize) is also an awkward length for book publication.
Other peculiarities of the Japanese domestic market are the popularity of the shi-shōetsu tradition (leading to works simultaneously lacking the honesty of memoir and the shaping of fiction), the pressure to write too fast and too much for successful authors, and a brain drain to manga.
Lack of familiarity with the American market leads to an inappropriate choice of works to be translated and the choice of an inappropriate publisher. The ideal is to have a mystery published by a publisher of mysteries and so on, to get proper reviewing and distribution.
That said, the situation is not completely hopeless. As Shinoda points out, there are many interesting younger Japanese writers, especially outsiders or semi-outsiders like Korean-Japanese authors (Yu Miri, Yan Sogiru), and women mystery writers (Miyabe Miyuki, Takamura Kaoru). There is also a somewhat larger pool of non-academic translators. The success of translations from Japanese in France suggests that a smaller, more centralized market like Britain might be easier to break into than the United States, but even in the U.S. the growth of niche publishing (gay books, women’s presses, young-adult books, etc.) and the development of the trade paperback format suggest new possibilities.
Juliet Carpenter (professor of English literature, translator)
Shinoda Setsuko’s article touches on what is a very tender subject for me, as translator of Shiba Ryōtarō’s The Life of Tokugawa Yoshinobu (Kodansha America, 1998). I believe this is the kind of work people commonly read here, but after the investment of untold time and money, it did not exactly become a best-seller and I am not sure how much it will contribute to more accurate images of contemporary Japanese people.
Of course, it was not exactly a best-seller in Japan, either, and the purpose of the novel (or biography, rather, as it is being marketed in the U.S.) is not to introduce contemporary Japan but to shed light on a man who played a pivotal role at a crucial time in modern Japanese history.
Now I am engaged in translating a genuine blockbuster: Shitsurakuen, by Watanabe Jun’ichi (tentative English title: A Lost Paradise; tentative publication date: spring 2000). It is doing well in Korean and Chinese translation; it will be interesting to see what happens with the English version. Besides sex scenes and love suicide, it features a detailed account of the sensational Abe Sada case (a true story of passion, murder, and mutilation on which the movie Ai no Corrida was based), and a mixture of modern and traditional Japanese sensibilities united by an emphasis on the aware-sa of the human condition. Then again, it is quite a long novel (two volumes in Japanese), and there are other potential barriers. Interestingly, however, there have been strong indications of pre-publication interest in the U.S.: a favorable write-up in the Washington Post, and a request for advance copy from the producers of the popular TV news magazine show Sixty Minutes.
At a conference at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California in January there was a presentation on the translation of the classic Chinese novel Shui He Zhuan, one of the greatest works of Chinese literature. The first English translation, done by Nobel-Prize-winning American novelist Pearl S. Buck, was published in 1933 as All Men Are Brothers. In his presentation, Dr. Kang Liao, of AT&T Services in New York, said Buck had a good understanding of the novel and was willing to use freedom in interpreting the written word. But her translation is hardly known. What could have gone wrong?
Kang pointed out that the original was not a “novel” so much as a text for oral performance and was not acclaimed as literature in China until the Ching dynasty, some two and a half centuries after it was written. It then became one of the most widely read and admired Chinese works of all time. Dr. Kang equates its importance with that of The Iliad in the Western tradition.
Apparently the American reading public rejected Buck’s translation for two reasons: first because it portrayed bandits and included scenes of drinking, killing, and cannibalism. It was thought to lack proper moral values. Second, they were put off by the unfamiliar literary form, adapted more for the ear than for the eye, with the names and epithets of hundreds of characters—all of roughly equal importance—posing a formidable challenge. A later translation by Sydney Shapiro (Men of the Marshes) is smoother and more accurate than Buck’s but has done no better, presumably for similar reasons.
Some works of Japanese literature (Black Rain, Kitchen) do seem to achieve a status in translation quite similar to that which they enjoy in Japanese. Others do better abroad: Mishima and Abe probably have more admirers overseas than here (just as Poe’s reputation seems to be higher in France than in his native United States). Still other works simply do not do as well in translation, and there are probably more in that category than in the other two. Why? That would be an excellent subject for a “case by case” study similar to Dr. Kang’s.
Geraldine Harcourt (translator)
I certainly share Ms. Shinoda’s desire to see more translations of what Japanese readers actually read, but there is a snag.
Japan, she says, is a country known overseas by its products, in a faceless sort of way. She compares France: no one pictures only the Chanel brand when they think of France; what comes to mind is an image of people.
“Where do we get our images of Americans from, and Britons, and Italians?” she asks. “Isn’t it largely from encountering them in films and literature…?” The Asahi’s readers would answer yes, but in the English-speaking parts of the world it’s less true of foreign literature. Compared to the Japanese, we just don’t read many translations.
Still, I’m sure more English speakers can put faces to France and Italy than they can to Japan, and so Ms. Shinoda’s frustration at the limited supply of translations from Japanese is very understandable. I get the feeling, though, that she’s assuming a hot demand for translations into English when in reality it’s not so hot. In 1997, books in translation published in the U.K. dropped from 3 percent to just over 2 percent of the market. But a good way to work on that end of the problem, too, is to provide more really enjoyable translated books.
Kurita Akiko (Japan Foreign Rights Centre; the text below is quoted from a letter to Shinoda, addressed January 21, 1999; translated with permission)
Until recently, in the case of the United States (and probably the U.K. as well) Japanese literature and fiction has been mainly translated by scholars (academics in the field of Japanese studies) or japanologists, not so much for money, but as part of their studies of particular authors. They often publish their research together with translations of certain works, in academic journals or through university presses, but the emphasis in these cases is their pursuit of scholarly credentials and contribution to their field of research. It is rare for a translator to appear at our office with a translation of a piece by an author they happened to like, for example, and for it to find its way into print from a commercial publisher.
As far as publishers in the U.S. and the U.K. are concerned, it seems to be the general consensus that if they are going to invest money in the translation, they would prefer to introduce Japan’s “pure literature,” and that regarding entertainment fiction, if the translation is already completed and the book seems to fit market trends, they will consider the idea.
Overseas publishers are not interested at all in Japanese fiction that is set anywhere outside Japan. (I wouldn’t want to mention specific names, but once a certain author wrote on the sales band of a book, “I’d like Americans to see this book, so I hope it will be translated soon.” When we compiled a synopsis of the book, however, it turned out that the setting is the West Coast of the United States and most of the characters are Americans; the response from publishers was: The kinds of books Americans expect from Japan are not stories about Americans.) Of course, there may be exceptions, but it may be very difficult to come up with such an exception.
Recently, there is an increasing number of good translators (Americans, British, and other native English speakers who were brought up in Japan, married Japanese, and/or have lived here for a long time, and/or pursued careers as professional translators) outside Japanese studies or other fields of academia. However, among those whose education was mainly in the English language, there are few who readily or knowledgeably read works of Japanese literature or popular fiction and can translate them (and you cannot make a living that way, either), and many of these translators work in commercial translation of the social sciences variety.
Some professional translators come to see me saying that they would like to be asked to do literary works sometimes, but when you ask them what authors or what works they would like to translate, most of them are hard put for an answer (they don’t really read Japanese literature widely). I usually recommend that since they probably can’t do good translation unless the work is something they like, they start out by searching for what they would like to translate. Sometimes translators bring in samples of work they’d like to pursue, but when I show the work to native-speaker editors who can judge the quality of the translation, in 90 percent of the cases they tell me it is “stiff.”
So even if there were plenty of translators who wanted to work on [the kinds of books you suggest], before a book can be sold to a publisher overseas, there are many difficulties and conditions that must be met, as suggested above, and it is necessary to make a prior investment of funds for translation.
If you find someone who can really translate well, they want to be well paid. In a recent example, the author paid out more than 1 million yen to have her [his] book translated into English by a translator living in the United States, and when it was completed, set out to find a publisher (we’re still searching). If the author happens to be of the generous type, this may be possible, but for agents like our Centre, it is difficult to ask for such money from the author before we know whether the translation and foreign publishing rights can be obtained. In the above case, publication was realized through the strong determination of the author. (If the translator lives in Japan, the translation costs will probably be even higher. One long work consumed some 6 million yen. We were able to find two corporations willing to provide a total of 3 million yen—the remaining 3 million was provided by the author—and a publisher has been found, but this is the rarest of exceptions.)
Above I have spoken mainly of translations into English, but these days it is France that is eager to translate Japanese literature. The Université de Paris III and IV have courses in contemporary Japanese literature, and a number of French women married to Japanese who subscribe to Japanese literary journals have been recommending the works of new writers to French publishers and translating them. Among French residents of Japan as well there are outstanding translators, and a number of French publishers have begun to contract for the translation rights based on fresh information at quite an early stage through these people. The situation is a little different for Germany, but compared to the not-so-distant past, quite a few new authors are being introduced. Publishing conditions and readers’ tastes differ from one country to the next, and it is difficult to make reliable generalizations, but this may give you a rough idea of the difficulties faced.
Gavin Frew (translator)
I find it a very difficult subject as I must admit that, personally, I do not agree with much in the article at all. I do not think that Japanese writers are nearly as good as their English language counterparts, they seem to tend to rely on tricks in the plot rather than good writing, well, in the books I have read anyway, although when I ask around among my Japanese friends, they all say the same, telling me that they prefer to read translations of overseas works.
Another factor is that since the collapse of the “Japanese miracle,” demand for Japanese fiction seems to have dried up completely. People overseas will read a book if it is well and interestingly written, but they are no longer willing to do so merely to deepen their understanding of Japanese culture.
Wayne Lammers (translator)
My own “search” (such as it is) for something more popular to translate—something that would actually sell enough copies to generate significant royaltie—goes back maybe as much as 15 years, but it has always had to be a back burner sort of thing because of other commitments. In recent years I had been noticing the kind of comments Shinoda refers to, about this or that writer or work being truly up to international standards, and I have a growing list of titles of interest, but unfortunately I’ve had even less time than before to actually read around, so most of these titles have gone unread.
I certainly agree with Shinoda on the need for more translations of popular fiction works/authors that have the potential to garner a global audience. Based on my own meager readings, though, I suspect the number of such works/authors remains quite small—contrary to Shinoda’s assertion.
I would like to be wrong about this suspicion, but the size of the group is moot in any case until more translators, and ways to support them, can be found—along with more efficient ways of getting the truly worthy works (whether they be pop fiction or more serious literature) into their hands. Translators have only so much time they can spend reading around, especially if they are also translating on spec and have to support themselves through other work, which is typically the case.
It’s a short article, and Shinoda really only addresses the issues of what needs to be done and why, not the practicalities of getting it done, but it’s ultimately the practicalities that will determine whether the status quo can change. That includes such things as a living wage for the translator and how to go about actually winning an audience among readers who seem quite allergic to translated literature—especially from a non-Western culture (this characterization of readers may not be as true for other English-speaking countries as it is for the United States, which is the perspective from which I speak). Having more translations won’t mean a thing if no one buys and reads them. Of course part of the idea of focusing on pop fiction is that it will have more mass appeal, but it’s still going to have to be marketed aggressively for it to break the resistance Americans have to translations—“We have plenty of perfectly good thrillers of our own, so why should we care about a thriller written by a foreigner about foreigners?”—which means publishers have to be willing to take some risks. At the same time, given the track record of translated literature, we can’t really blame American publishers for being a bit wary. Publishers, businesses, grant agencies, and literary agents on the Japan side, not to mention the Japanese authors themselves, need to think creatively about ways to offer support and share the risk that has typically fallen most heavily, or even entirely, on the individual translator.
Translation/paraphrase republished with permission of Shinoda Setsuko.
Commentary republished with permission of writers.
From Newsletter No. 84 (March 1999)