Literature in Translation, or: The Culture Barrier: Not Just for International Travel Anymore!

[cimorene]

Learn something about Japanese culture and/or Japanese story-telling before you attempt to apply your culture-centric Western aesthetic to a Japanese narrative (yes, this means anime and manga and dramas).  This applies perhaps more so to Japan than to somewhere closer like Sweden or Spain, but it applies there, too.

The fact that you are reading a work of literature in translation should never allow you to forget that you are looking through a window into an alien worldview. All those little threads that lead off into associations in English (and, in fact, in much European) literature not only don't lead there in literature in translation, they lead to somewhere completely different , somewhere that you could never anticipate.

Comments

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Hee. I'm curious what brought this on?

[mirabella]

Dude, me too. Context!

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I didn't want to include the context because I felt like I was being a bit bitchy and I didn't want to bother clearly articulating all the points specifically, but... what the hell. http://cimorene111.livejournal.com/2285206.html?thread=6480790#t6480790

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Some specific remarks about Hikaru no Go which I overheard - er, over-read? - about the end of the manga and the characters (here (http://dorrie6.livejournal.com/529474.html)), which has already been answered by bookshop elsewhere. I've heard several of the sentiments about the end from other people before, but there was even more to baffle me in that post.

Of course, that's only the immediate cause. You see more minor offenses frequently if you read much anime-based fic.

[mirabella]

Enh. I'm inclined to cut her some slack, because I felt the same way about the end of it right after I read it, and to some extent I still do. It doesn't mean that I didn't understand that Japan is not America; it means I'm American, and intellectual understanding of a work is different from emotional reaction to it. To borrow an example that someone used below, if I can't get into a book because the main character strikes me as an egregious asshole, it's fine to say that he's only acting in a way that's appropriate to his culture, and I'll understand that because I'm not retarded; but it's not going to make me go "Oh, okay, I see all now. Clearly the fact that he's acting in accordance with his culture means that I have to react positively to him no matter what." If I don't like the guy, I don't like him. Whether it's because of my Western cultural sensibilities or because he really is an asshole, my emotional reaction is what it is. Tout comprendre, ce n'est pas tout pardonner.

[mirabella]

Also, I'm a little iffy on the argument that I have to study Japan and its culture before I can read manga. If I had to do an in-depth study of every culture before I read a book written by someone in that culture, I would have to confine myself to authors from the American Southwest, because life is too short to take a Japanese culture course just so I can understand the depth and complexity of Dragonball Z.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Just the experience that the more you know of a culture, the more sense its stories make, is enough to make me cautious in my reading of foreign stories, of all sorts. Of course it's impossible to avoid taking some sort of meaning from a text, and you can get that from it regardless of your contextual knowledge. But then you accept that you can't know exactly what was intended to be said or what was heard by the intended audience, and you don't pronounce judgment on the writer's craft and call her to task for the unrealism of widespread horse-carts in the 1930s when they are perfectly realistic for her setting or for an ending that wasn't what your Western-conditioned story aesthetic had been conditioned to expect. You say "Is this the kind of ending that makes some kind of narrative sense for this story in this culture? (I wonder why?)" and save it up for some day when you have more information about it.

The point about the guy is that if your knee-jerk reaction is that he's being an asshole, that is culturally contextual because your conclusion that he is one is based on your judgement of how he is behaving specifically in relation to expectations and codes of which the two of you must be mutually aware. If he is not aware of your expectations but is in fact operating in relation to an entirely different set of codes, that judgement is as meaningless as a child sticking up its middle finger without knowledge that that is a hand-gesture with any meaning for anyone else. It is not meaningless to say that his behaviour would qualify as "asshole" by the standards of your culture if he had been operating within it; that is perfectly true; but it's meaningless to him and it's meaningless to understanding him, particularly since he is likely as not ignorant of your culture's expectations. The far more salient judgment is how he is acting in relation to his own culture's expectations and codes of conduct.

[mirabella]

Well, yes and no. That's true if you're talking about a real person with whom I absolutely have to deal, and even then I may understand him but I am still not, even if I do nothing else forever but study his culture like some sort of amateur Margaret Mead, going to like him. Someone in a manga? No. He pisses me off. That's all I have to know, game over. I set the book down and go on to something that doesn't piss me off. That's not me not understanding that other cultures exist. That's me recognizing that other books exist, and I'm under no obligation to enjoy any given one just because I'm supposed to enjoy it or forever bear the scarlet I of cultural insensitivity.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I don't think I would have thought to put that in a cultural context at all. It just reads to me like people were heavily invested in the shippiness and disappointed that the story follow through the way they would have liked it to do.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I don't really see a reduction in shippiness at the end of Hikaru no Go. Even assuming - as I do - that that shippiness is not intended by the authors to be romantic, the relationship between Hikaru and Akira, which is complex, and, we are shown, passionate, compassionate, and everlasting, remains essentially the central theme of the story, while the relationship between Hikaru and Sai is sort of the B-plot/mirror/etc. I don't think the final arc is unsatisfying in any of the ways she points out. I don't think it's necessary to look through a Japanese cultural perspective to appreciate the way the future was left wide open, or the subtle hints which were sometimes the only resolution given. But even from my limited experience of Japanese art and Japanese stories (even entirely in translation), these things sort of make sense to me as Japanese; they seem to very much like a certain kind of poeticness, tradition, subtlety, natural imagery, etc.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

It's been so long since I read it and I sold my manga, so I don't have it to look up, but I don't remember being dissatisfied with the ending (other than not wanting it to end at all because it was a favorite). But I didn't have any attachment to Hikaru/Akira (either as a pairing or platonic) and like open-ended stuff, regardless of whether it's Japanese or western, so... ^_^;;

I think the only manga I've been really disappointed with was Shaman King, in which the author wrote himself into a corner and then just sort of quit. >_<

[pixxers.livejournal.com]

I had an argument recently over a japanese novel that I read. Someone I know had just read it and kept remarking about what a jerk the main character was. She said she might have enjoyed it more if the main character hadn't been such a prick. I tried explaining that he really wasn't a jerk - he was merely written by a Japanese woman with very different attitudes toward gender roles, social interactions, and insight into relationships.

She continued to disagree with me and refused to get what I was saying. I hate it when people are intentionally obtuse.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

She probably has no concept at all of different cultures. I think for people who haven't directly encountered a foreign country on its own terms - that is, not by watching some foreign movies and knowing a few foreigners who live near them or whatever - it's easy for culture to be invisible. That is what culture is designed to do fundamentally, after all, is make you take its assumptions for granted. People who haven't been confronted with another culture up close are prone to actually taking them for granted so much that they don't even realise they are doing it. Which isn't to excuse them, though, at least not after the point when someone introduces them to the idea. And certainly not if they're trying to analyse the art of another culture.

[anatsuno.livejournal.com]

yes! Which is something that TRANSLATORS have to stay on top of, as well - this is why translations that smooth everything up to serve something palatable to the culture they are translating FOR offend me a lot; and why the doctrine of "transparency" is so off-putting and, well, like treachery and treason and ethnocentrism all rolled into one, urg (that's transparency as in, 'it should read like it's been originally written in the target language!' - and no as in "the translation should be transparent enough to let the reader see through it to the original version and culture", sadly, which is what I - and others thank god - advocate instead).

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I definitely agree! Although I did not know specifically about that debate in the field. In anime and manga fandoms, so much relies on patchy poor-quality fan translations that I can hardly critique the philosophical standpoint of people who probably aren't even conscious of any of those issues, whose English (or Japanese) often isn't really competent enough to make it relevant. But especially with anime, you just have the subtitles, so fans start to learn bits of Japanese, which results in either fangirl Japanese in the fiction (something I hate although not as passionately as Grace does, I think!) or else attempts to make something sound like it was originally written in English, in composing the dialogue. Of course, a lot of times that just happens because the people writing only know a few words of Japanese. But it can be hard to find a balance!

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

The other reason I don't really read or write a lot of animanga fic, besides the fan Japanese, is that it just never feels right. It would be different if I were reading the canon in English, too, but as it is, it's like we don't even have the same source material, because most of the rest of fandom is getting theirs filtered through someone else's translation, which may be oddly Americanised if it's official, or may be poor quality if it's fansubs/scanlations.

[aeslis]

To butt in on a related tangent, that's one reason I feel really weird every time I read Rurouni Kenshin fiction. I'm not sure if you've read or watched it, but the anime is almost like a different universe from the manga, and there are two original characters in the anime that keep popping up in fic that make me twitch. They don't exist! They're not real! Stop bringing them into this!

...Is what I want to say.

And on another mostly off-topic note but still kind of related: the filter thing is why I really have issues with people double translating. By which I mean taking things that have been translated from, say, Japanese into Chinese and then translating the Chinese into English. I translate, sometimes, and I know just how hard it can be to wrangle meaning properly into a target language, and the idea that someone might take a translation I've done and put it into like, Spanish or Korean or hell, Arabic, makes me wince.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, the anime/manga differences are yet a third reason why I stay away from animanga fic. I never watch anime, yet western fandom is a lot more likely to be anime-focused rather than manga-focused (though that is changing). With stuff like Fullmetal Alchemist where the anime and manga are completely different that means I spend a lot of time being confused if I try to read fic. I might as well be reading for a completely unknown fandom it feels like.

Translating from a translation definitely sounds like a bad idea.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

There are a few chapters of the Hikaru no Go manga where the fan translations available are Japanese to Chinese to English and they're hilarious, yet barely comprehensible.

[kegom.livejournal.com]

I both agree and disagree with you on this topic.

It is true that there are very big differences in Western and Asian story-telling, differences that might make it hard for someone from one culture to understand a work of art from another culture. Even in countries as culturally close as England and Germany there are still cultural differences that, if an English text gets translated into German, might literally get lost in translation. (Best example is Terry Pratchett - you don't understand a quarter of the jokes he makes in "Going Postal" if you've never been in an old English post office.)

I also agree with you that there are dramatic differences in associations to something we read.

Yet, I do believe that you are not only allowed to "forget that you are looking through a window into an alien worldview", in some cases you are supposed to do exactly that.

As a reader, you not only receive a text, you actively recreate it by using your own background and experiences.
I believe that reading is, first of all, a way for you to understand your own world or life better. You can read an old story, know as much as there is to know about its historical context and therefore understand why the author wrote that story at that point in his life - but I think the thing that emotionally involved you first in the story, the reason that made you read it in the first place, is that you personally get something out of it.

I do believe that it is always helpful (and occasionally necessary) to know a story's cultural/historical/social background to fully appreciate it - but I also believe that it's everyone's right to get emotionally involved with a story, even if it means applying your own cultural preconceptions, because you cannot fully "get into" a story if you always have to remember that you're reading a text that was written in an alien culture and that you therefore shouldn't get any meaning out of unless you know the culture it comes from very well.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's possible to avoid subconsciously absorbing meanings based on your own cultural context from a text as you read; it's part of the process of processing anything. The only way to avoid it would be, I conjecture, to read aloud while paying attention to something entirely different. This automatic and ordinary mental process is not something to be discouraged, but then, no discouragement for it would be effective anyway. My comments about analysis are aimed, rather, at the tasks of reading comprehension and analysis.

[kegom.livejournal.com]

As a language/literature student I would agree that you have to consider the differences in culture in reading comprehension and analysis, but I'm not convinced that this always has to be true. Knowing that there is an alien culture behind a text, that our interpretation might either not make sense or head into a direction no reader familiar with that culture would ever have considered is extremely important, no doubt about that - but I believe it's important because it teaches us that our culture is not the only, or right one and that in interaction with other people (literature being a sort of "delayed interaction") we must be aware that they might think completely different from us.
Just looking at the point of text interpretation, I don't see any reason why someone should not analyse a text with nothing more but their own historical background. It might be not something I personally would enjoy listening to and it would certainly be something experts on that topic would reject right away - but regardless of my own preferences, I think it's a valid way to analyse something, especially if it's not meant to be a research paper, or something like that.