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

[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.