Writing
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Japanese Children’s Books in English
Published and aspiring translators of Japanese children’s literature into English have e-networked for several years through the SCBWI Tokyo Translation listserv, an email list open to members and non-members of SCBWI.
Several members of this list have now begun a group blog about publishing Japanese children's lit in English translation. The blog also highlights the children’s literature and culture of Tohoku in the wake of the March 2011 disasters.
The latest post on the blog is an interview with SWET member Cathy Hirano about her translation of the fantasy novel Mirror Sword and Shadow Prince by Noriko Ogiwara (VIZ Media, May 2011)—the sequel to Dragon Sword and Wind Child (VIZ Media, 2010), which Hirano discussed in an interview for SWET Newsletter No. 122.
Several SWETers participate in both the SCBWI Tokyo Translation listserv and the group blog. To learn more, please visit the blog or email the organizers.
Books • General • Writing • Fiction • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Hitotoki: A Narrative Map of Tokyo or ...
Hitotoki is a “narrative map of Tokyo” (?? New York London Paris Shanghai) that may intrigue you if you want to write a little something to warm up your creative day, or just read imaginative narratives about a city you love. The site managers urge: “By the by—we will be adding new stories on a weekly or biweekly basis, so don’t be shy—please contribute!” Write away!!
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Murakami Haruki on translation, writing
Last month the Mainichi Shimbun published a series of articles based on a lengthy interview with Murakami Haruki. In addition to being a famed writer, the man is an accomplished literary translator, with Japanese versions of works from Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and J. D. Salinger to his name. (See the end of this post for links to all five articles, in both Japanese and English.)
One thing I found interesting was his statement in the first article that old translations have an expiry date. The changing nature of the Japanese language means that classic foreign books benefit from retranslation every half-century or so:
Murakami says the “use-by” date on translations means they have a “50-year limit” of effectiveness because of changing writing styles in Japanese. Murakami says that the flood of works translated into Japanese during a literature boom here in the 1960s are now reaching their “use-by” dates.
On my shelves I have a number of translations of ???? [Hyakunin Isshu], the 100 poems compiled by Fujiwara no Teika around eight centuries ago. Murakami’s words ring true when you compare a relatively modern translation from Steven Carter or Joshua Mostow with H. H. Honda’s 1957 One Hundred Poems from One Hundred Poets, which turns the 31 syllables of each Japanese poem into not-so-elegant rhyming quatrains in English. (Of course it’s possible to go back to Clay MacCauley’s 1917 Hyakunin-Isshu (Single Songs of a Hundred Poets), available online, and see that traveling still farther back in time doesn’t necessarily mean a journey deeper into the world of English poetic devices inappropriately applied to Japanese verse.)
Genji Monogatari is one work that’s been translated numerous times over the years. Maybe there are other Japanese books out there whose English translations are nearing their read-by dates, and translators should start preparing updated versions of them for a twenty-first-century readership. Well, at least translators who have the financial luxury of wrestling with words and phrases for hours on end, rather than maximizing their output per unit of time. As Murakami points out in the second article:
“Translating from English into Japanese is like solving a math problem,” he says. “Just like there are some math problems that people can spend an entire day trying to work out, it’s possible to spend a long time thinking about why particular words are used the way they are. Some people are suited to this and others aren’t. But I like that kind of thing.”
Murakami’s interview, written up in five parts:
- ????????????????????????????????????????????????? (translated as Haruki Murakami opens up about translating America’s literary giants)
- ???????????????????????????????????????????? (translated as Murakami says American contemporary classics ‘really significant’ for his writing)
- ??????????????????????????? (translated as Murakami’s next epic poised to become his biggest ever)
- ???????????????? ?????????????????????????????????? (translated as ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ helped inspire Murakami to write for his daily bread)
- ????????????????????????????????????????? (translated as Murakami aims to find harmonious balance between globalism and regionalism)
Translation • Writing • Fiction • (1) Comments • Permalink
Friday, May 23, 2008
A Golden Age for Young-Adult Books
Newsweek recently published an article “Generation R (R is for Reader)” about the current boom in book sales for readers age 12-18 in the U.S. In it Jamie Remo writes that sales are “up more than 25 percent in the past few years, according to a Children’s Book Council sales survey. Virtually every major publishing house now has a teen imprint, many bookstores and libraries have created teen reading groups and an infusion of talented new authors has energized the genre.” This echoes what I have been hearing at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conferences for the past few years. In North America and other English-language countries, the young-adult (YA) market has taken off; we are now in a golden age.
If you are interested in reading some of the North American award-winning books, Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association has “Best Book” lists going back to 1997 and a number of book awards. For a list of links to U.S. and Canadian awards for children’s and YA literature, go to Author Cynthia Leitich Smith’s website and visit her Children’s and YA Literature Resources section. And the Database of Award-Winning Children’s Literature (DAWCL) allows you to search books via a set of particular criteria such as genre, ethnicity or historical period; the instructions section has a list of the many awards included in the database, and there is an Explanation of the Awards section with links to award sites in various countries.
More than half of my reading is now YA or middle-grade fiction because I, too, am jumping on the bandwagon and trying to write for teens—a middle-grade novel and a YA novel-in-verse. Without doubt, the best way to learn how to break into a particular market is to read contemporary books published in that genre or age group. In writers’ circles it is often suggested that you read 100 recently published books in the age-group and genre you aim to write for. My lament is that I can’t read fast enough—there are so many phenomenal books for teens coming out each year.
I would love to know more about the YA book scene in Japan and whether there is any such parallel sales boom occurring in Japan. Or does manga always prevail?
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Intro and Mini-NaNo
I’m Holly Thompson and over the next six months I’ll be contributing to the SWET Weblog. I’m one of the Ws in SWET, a writer of fiction and occasionally poetry. My novel Ash was published by Stone Bridge Press and my picture book The Wakame Gatherers was recently published by Shen’s Books. I am currently at work on a second novel for adults, a short story collection, two middle-grade/YA novels and various picture books for children. I teach creative writing at Yokohama City University and am the Regional Advisor of the Tokyo chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, so I aim to post on all sorts of topics related to writing for adults, young adults and children, as well as teaching writing.
For starters, I thought I’d share my recent experiences with a mini-NaNo—that’s short for NaNoWriMo, and that’s short for National Novel Writing Month, which officially runs from November 1 to November 30. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000-word novel in a single month. Begun in 1999 by a group of just 21 writers in San Francisco, NaNoWriMo had over 100,000 participants in 2007. Now with a full website, fundraising arms and a Young Writers Program, NaNoWriMo is becoming a global phenomenon. NaNoWriMo has spawned related events such as NaNoEdMo (goal of 50 hours of novel editing in one month); NaNoMangO (goal of 30 pages of sequential art in one month); NaPlWriMo (goal of writing a play in one month). Recently in Japan a writers group I belong to decided to try a mini-NaNo. Since most of us have jobs, families and myriad other obligations, we couldn’t commit to 50,000 words, but instead decided to challenge each other to write 10,000 words of new fiction in the month of April. Some of us set specific goals such as 10,000 words of a novel-in-progress; others opted for 10,000 words of short stories; a poet set a goal of 4 new poems in the month; and a translator jumped in with a higher word-count goal.
This was my first experience attempting to sustain an approach of quantity over quality. My usual plodding method of writing fiction is to write new material, then edit, write more new material, then edit. When I am able to write daily (i.e. when on break from university), I might write new pages one day and spend the next day or two revising before writing more new material. But with a NaNo the emphasis is on output, on generating new material only and NOT editing. At first I struggled with this approach and kept to my usual methods, which of course meant I had to put in far more time to come up with the required number of words per week. As I became busier with the start of university classes, however, I gave up my self-editing, and followed the NaNoWriMo doctrine of “no deleting.”
Participants in the mini-NaNo posted word counts weekly and gave a general accounting of the work that had been completed. The lonely business of writing fiction was suddenly a team effort; we cheered each other on via e-mail group messages. This encouragement and the healthy spark of competition served to motivate me to tackle my novel even at the end of exhausting teaching days. And because I was concerned more with output than with quality, I censored myself less and experimented more. The result was surprising to me. By the end of the month I was pleased to have nearly reached the 10,000 word-count goal and had written through a particularly difficult part of my novel-in-progress, solving a plot complication that had dogged me for months.
I’ve always been interested in NaNoWriMo and have long wanted to take part, but anyone who teaches in a Japanese university knows that November is a busy, often grueling, month. The mini-NaNo was perfect for me. My writers group has opted to take the month of May off then try another mini-NaNo in June. I aim to edit April’s writing during May, then write full speed ahead again in June. And who knows…maybe by November I’ll be ready for the full NaNoWriMo. Or JaNoWriMo in January. Or JulNoWriMo. Or AugNoWriMo…