Confessions of a Manga Translator – The Comics Journal
Translation discourse online always leaves me a little nervous because anyone can and usually does say anything, and it’s nigh impossible to check credentials. I keep thinking back to this article from 2016.
I also did follow up with Jay Rubin sensei about the introductory quote in this article. (Rubin sensei is an American Japanologist and translator most noted for bringing the works of Haruki Murakami 村上春樹 into English. Also if you’ve never has the opportunity to try translating Murakami, let me attest that it ranked #3 on my college struggle bus after Genji monogatari and the kanbun bits of my capstone project.) The closest he was able to track down was a passage from a “Critic’s Notebook” piece he did for the magazine AMERICAN THEATRE in February 2006 (p. 36). Sensei attests the 99% figure comes from someone at the theater, not himself.
Sitting in the darkened hall and listening to the lines of Steppenwolf Theater Company’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short-story collection after the quake, I had a thrill unavailable to anyone else in the audience–even to Murakami himself, had he been there (which may never happen)–because I was the one who wrote those very lines the actors were speaking. True, Murakami was author of the original work I had translated, but those were my words. When, in the well-attended post-performance discussion, a member of the staff assured the audience of the fidelity of the adaptation by noting that “99% of the words you heard were Murakami’s,” I sat in the back of the theatre, violently shaking my head. Okay, translator’s tantrum aside, it really was a thrill to hear those familiar words being spoken by a live cast, to rediscover the dramatic force of the original, and to see the audience’s openly emotional response to one of Murakami’s most affecting works. It was a wonderful night of theater.