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]

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.