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

[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.