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]

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. >_<