 Last night was the unofficial welcome and this morning is the official one. So I had to change the timbre of my voice. My name is Russell Valentino. On behalf of my colleagues on Alta's executive board, the conference organizing committee, our local hosts in Tucson, and the many sponsors of this event, I would like to welcome you all to Tucson and to Alta 38th, the 38th annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association. Hooray. We have a number of acknowledgments listed in the beautiful program book that I hope you've all picked up. If you haven't registered, please go register and pick up your program book and your badge and your handy tote bag, which has other things in it. No candy, I'm afraid, but some candy for the soul. And you'll find all of the sponsors listed in the program. I want to highlight a few of them. Here, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Center for the Art of Translation, Amazon Crossing, Phoneme Media, and many departments and offices at the University of Arizona, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. Please give a round of applause to our sponsors. I also have one announcement to make. Those of you who've taken part in the bilingual readings in the past will know that Alexis Leviton often serves as the emcee for all of the ones he can get to, which is usually almost all of them. He's been delayed in getting here. He's had some problems with his flight. So rather than have other people go and try to fill in for him, which would be impossible, we're going to ask somebody from each of the bilingual reading panels to take a semi-leadership role and serve as the timer and maybe introduce the other people as well rather than having them just walk up and introduce themselves. We'd like volunteers. You don't have to confer with us. Just talk amongst yourselves and arrange that just before each session. Then we assume that you can all handle that on your own. Some of the board members will be at your sessions anyway and we can help, but I don't think you need help for this. Just introducing each other and keeping the time. Finally, a word about ALTA. Last night I encouraged you all to register, obviously, and to become members, those of you who haven't become members already. I'll repeat the news that we have a new category, membership category, for non-translators. We're calling it friends of translation. If you are not a literary translator or if you're simply a supporter or you know somebody who's a supporter and would be interested in becoming a member, there is a category for that and we hope that you'll take advantage of it. There's one other thing you can do, of course, to support the organization. You can join it, that's really good. You can join as a translator, you can join as a friend, and then, of course, if you want to do one more step, you can donate and contribute some actual money to the organization beyond your membership dues, and right on the same page, literarytranslators.org, we make it very easy. You press the button, it says donate, and then we've got your categories come up and you can figure out what you want to do. We do depend on your support to stay the vibrant organization that we are. It is my pleasure to introduce our first keynote speaker for this conference, and I'm looking for my notes. Hold on just a second. Stephen Snyder, I believe, last year came to Alta for the first time because I remember seeing him in the first-timers orientation session that took place, actually, the mirror image of that session just took place before this session at 8 o'clock, 7.30 in the morning, on the first day of the conference, and so it's especially nice to see him back two years in a row. Of course, it helped that we invited him to be a keynote speaker. We won't hold that against him. And I want to read the bio that we've printed in the program for you. Stephen Snyder is Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies and Dean of Language Schools at Middlebury College. He has translated works by Ogawa Yoko, Kirino Natsu, Yu Miri Murakami Ryu, Oya Kenzaburo, and Nagai Kahu, among others. He's currently studying the publishing industry and its effect on the translation of globalization of Japanese fiction. It's a topic that I find extremely interesting and I'm hoping he's going to come back next year. This will be the real test. He comes back next year to talk about the results of that study. And also those of you who were, who just announced yourselves as emerging translators, beginning translators, maybe not even started translators in that session just before this one, look what can happen in a year. Stephen is going to talk about the topic that's listed up here on the screen, the book of changes Murakami Kafka Mizumura Bronte. Please welcome Stephen Snyder. So good morning. Thank you to Russell and to the executive board and the organizing committee, all the other people Russell thanked. I'm most grateful to be here. I was debating whether or not I would, louder, I was debating whether or not I would confess what Russell outed me as a second time attendee in 38 years. But I have to say that it was not necessary to invite me to give a keynote to get me back. I would have come anyway, probably. It's an enormous pleasure and honor to be here. And what I would say, however, is that it's also an ironic moment for me to be coming to talk about translation because it's the first time in 25 years of being a literary translator that I actually have no time whatsoever to translate. This is the great tragedy of my current life. Russell mentioned that I've taken over the job of dean of the language schools at Middlebury and that is more than a full-time job and I have a translation due next April that will probably be very late and I may never sign another contract after that. So this is a great tragedy to be speaking to you today when actually my long career as a translator seems to be coming to a sad end. There is another sort of strange irony in this job I've taken on and some of you who know the Middlebury language schools may already have guessed it and that is that I'm in charge of a place where translation is firmly and completely prohibited. If you know the schools, you'll know that we actually have a registered trademark. I only realized this when I became dean but we actually have a registered trademark on the words language pledge, corporatization of the institution and that means that in the 11 sort of monolingual silos that we create every summer in Vermont and Mills College in Oakland, people cannot translate. No one has ever translated. I will say in my own defense that as an iconoclastic translator I am going to gently introduce translation and interpretation into the Middlebury language schools and next summer for the... my 11 directors are not applauding but at any rate. Next summer there will be training in translation and conference interpretation for the advanced graduate students in Middlebury done by the Middlebury Institute in Monterey faculty which used to be the Monterey Institute faculty where some of the best translation and interpreting training in the world is done so that's kind of a nice institutional serendipity. While I'm plugging Middlebury programs I would be remiss if I didn't do one more and that I hope is one that some of you are already familiar with and it's the Breadloaf Translators Conference. The Breadloaf Writers Conference which is one of the oldest Writers Conferences in the country last year spun off a Translators Conference much to my delight. Actually when the vice president who called me to offer me the deanship of the language schools called me and I was desperately hoping he was going to offer me the Translators Conference but that didn't work out. But at any rate we have a one week Translators Conference at our Breadloaf campus in the Green Mountains which brings together translators, writers, people in the book industry to discuss some of their in seminars, week long seminars that are genre based translation and you can apply. There are fellowships and I would urge you Jennifer Grotz is the coordinator of that and she was here last year to speak about it. She couldn't be with us today but I know she'd be delighted if you got in touch with her to find out more about that. So what I'm going to do today and I apologize I am going to read but please feel free to stop me if it's confusing. When I accepted the assignment to talk today about translation traffic I decided to address the topic fairly literally and when I wrote the organizers to ask for a fuller description of what they had in mind I was sent David Gramling's paragraph that appears in the program. I like it very much and it helped shape my thinking about what I'm going to be saying today so I'll read it for you again. Translators traffic in words, sounds, meaning, styles, perception, politics, images, information and voices. Our traffic as translators whether literary, poetic or otherwise shapes larger scale flows of people, resources and culture across time, space and thought. Our translations traverse borders, silences, regions and ages often unaccompanied by those of us who made them. To paraphrase Mary Louise Pratt by translating we become part of the traffic in meaning, though that becoming doesn't always mean we can control the traffic too. What I'd like to do this morning is think with you about the implications of this notion of translation traffic, the flow of text across cultural, spatial and temporal boundaries in the context of examples from my own field contemporary Japanese fiction and I will actually, Russell alluded to this study that I'm doing, I will be talking about the results of that primarily. And particularly I'm going to be talking about the way this works as exemplified by the two of the most interesting practitioners of contemporary Japanese fiction. I also want to look at the unintended consequences, our lack of control as translators when it comes to the way our texts move or fail to move across borders. One of the two writers perhaps obviously is Haruki Murakami who is no doubt known to nearly all of you, a fact in itself worth noting when it comes to writers read largely in translation and the other is Minai Mizumura, a writer who may be known to far fewer of you but one who has staked out a fascinating position both in her fiction and her critical work precisely on the question of literary traffic and a position that stands in sharp contrast to Murakami's fiction, the reputation it has engendered and the position he has come to occupy in the global literary market and imagination. Before I look closely at Murakami and Mizumura I want to suggest a slight addition to or an expansion of the definition of traffic I've just read. A quick look in the dictionary confirms the meanings underlying our conference theme, flows and border crossings but adds a couple of others that broaden the range of the term traffic. One is the notion that traffic is the business of bartering or buying or selling something, a thing that can be tangible or intangible but is always in the process a thing that has been commodified and that's actually one of the things that I look most closely at is translations as commodities. Then in addition to bartering, buying or selling, traffic can also be used as a noun with the common meaning of congestion of vehicles and presumably by extension the metaphorical congestion of things like texts or concepts that prevents the smooth circulation implied exactly by the other meaning of flows and border crossings. So with the proviso that what flows can also become congested what crosses borders and broadens our cultural knowledge can also become an impediment to free communication between individuals and cultures. I want to look at Murakami and Mizumura and particularly two remarkable texts, one by each, that both inscribe and comment on translation as a thematic and a practice and thereby I hope illuminate some fundamental contradictions in our work as translators that serves we think to build cultural bridges. The two works in question are a Murakami short story, Samsa in Love first published in Japanese as part of a 2013 collection entitled Koishikute, Ten Selected Love Stories and in English in the New Yorker magazine in October 2013 in Ted Goosen's excellent translation. And the other is Minai Mizumura's very long 2002 fiction entitled Hongkaku Shousetsu in Japanese and a true novel in English when it too was published in 2013 in Juliet Winter's Carpenters equally good English translation. My context for this discussion which will be necessarily brief is a larger study I have been working on for a decade or more that is essentially an ethnography of the publishing industry primarily in Tokyo and New York and the way the intersection and often the collision of aesthetic and economic considerations influences what gets translated how it is translated and how it is marketed and consumed in another literary context that is ultimately how the larger economic concerns of the publishing industry shape a canon of literature and translation that may have little resemblance to that in the source literature and culture but that comes to play an important role in the way that culture or nation is perceived in the national imagination of the target culture. So for example, reducing the argument to its simplest terms in the 1950s and 1960s Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata were translated, marketed and read in the United States as representatives of a newly docile aestheticized Zen-like Japanese culture that was explicitly meant by translators and publishers and perhaps by policy experts to replace the bellicose wartime image of Japan and that this replacement was one piece of a general rehabilitation strategy for Japan in concert with the country's new role as a reliable ally in the U.S. Cold War calculus and furthermore that this image bore little resemblance at times to the positions Kawabata and Mishima occupied in the domestic Japanese literary canon or marketplace. In more recent years, as I've argued elsewhere Murakami has been similarly though quite distinctly marketed as the foremost literary representative of what Douglas McCrae has called Japan's emergent gross national cool. That is, at some point after the bursting of its economic bubble at the end of the 1980s Japan began a transition from being a producer and exporter of industrial and technological products, Honda Civics and Sony Walkman to being a producer and exporter of cultural capital. As its hold on industrial domination receded, it succeeded more or less in reinventing itself as a possessor and wielder of soft power and cultural capital that could rival U.S. global hygienomy in the popular culture imaginary. In effect, Hondas and Sony's were replaced by Pokemon and Anime and Sushi and furthermore, and this was the core of my argument, Murakami Haruki was identified at this juncture more or less consciously as the most likely literary equivalent of this phenomenon. His slacker narrators and magical realist plots were key to his selection for translation and export as another form of the Japanese cultural cool at a moment when the world was increasingly receptive to the notion that Japanese film, fashion and food carried with them a kind of global cultural cachet. My focus in this study was on the ways literary traffic is affected by the process and practices of translation but also on the ways that the translation process and practice are affected and in some cases deeply altered by the economic considerations being introduced by all other actors other that is than the translator herself in what I came to call the translation discourse. That is the tacit conversation among in no particular order literary agents, domestic and foreign editors, publishers, copy editors, jacket designers, marketing managers, sales representatives, book reviewers and others who in one way or another have a say in what gets chosen for translation who was chosen to translate it, how it gets translated, how it gets edited, how it gets marketed and who ultimately will be likely to read it. In doing this study I looked initially of course at Murakami himself since in the Japanese instance his international success had helped make the outlines of the translation discourse remarkably clear. I analyzed the development of his global reputation in a variety of registers that contributed to the way he was translated and marketed abroad including such factors as the origin of his career in an act of auto back translation that is as some of you may know he actually wrote the opening passages of his first novel Kazeno Uto Kikei, Hear the Wind Sing in English in order to do away with traditional Japanese literary prose and then translated himself back into Japanese and published that. In addition there was Murakami's own experience as a highly prolific translator of American fiction and the knowledge that lent him of how books fare in translation and what needs to happen often to make them intelligible and attractive to a wide readership in a target culture and I was talking with someone beforehand Murakami has translated over 60 core titles of American fiction into Japanese and when I interviewed him he told me that he works on his own work in the morning and in the afternoons he translates and it's so easy. He was taking his life in his hands at that moment. Also the fact that Murakami took conscious control of his global career and some say that it's actually Yoko Murakami who took conscious control of his global career switching after his initial success translators for instance from a talented interventionist freelancer to a Harvard Don and I should stop here for a moment and say that as I was writing this and have given versions of this talk many times I've usually been sort of confident that no one in the audience was truly familiar with what I was talking about but realizing where we are today is Phil Gabriel here? Oh good I can go on thank you it's suddenly I had a panic that Phil would be here and tell us the real story of course Phil Gabriel teaches at University of Arizona so it's possible that he would be He switched to a Harvard Don for his translator and later to Phil Gabriel another academic switching his representation from a small Japanese foreign rights agency to Amanda Urban at ICM switching publishers from Kodansha International the English language arm of a large Japanese house that brought out his first three novels in English to the prestige imprint Kanap and the accompanying switch from little known Tokyo based editors to Gary Fiske John one of the most influential literary editors of his generation and perhaps most importantly what I see as Murakami's fairly self-conscious assault on the fortress of America's most important literary reputation maker The New Yorker Magazine where he was acquired and edited by another literary titan of the 1990s by Robert Gottlieb and here I don't know if any of you remember having seen this was a six page spread in the New Yorker in the mid 1990s of portraits that Richard Avedon did of many of the key New Yorker writers the people who had appeared over and over and again in the New Yorker and here you see Haruki split on the page between Bobby Ann Mason and Ann Beatty two writers who at that moment were sort of avatars of the what was known as the new minimalist fiction in America in many ways I think Haruki was consciously placed there I've also argued in this context that Murakami studied the work of New Yorker writer Raymond Carver and ultimately translated every word Carver ever wrote into Japanese in part with an eye to create a Japanese version of the New Yorker house style in Japanese that allowed him when translated back into English to embody a naturalized Japanese New Yorker writer more New Yorker in many ways than any other but incidentally the case that he has had more stories in the New Yorker in the last 25 years than virtually any other writer I've worried at times and particularly when I realized Phil Gabriel might be in the room that this account of Murakami's career is too cynical and that it fails to take into consideration the role his literary talent played in his success there is no doubt some truth to that criticism but I've also felt that it was important to understand these largely economic and political mechanisms in order to see the effects they've had on the aesthetic process but in the interest of full disclosure my fascination with the mechanisms of Murakami's literary celebrity was also fueled by the fact that his career has had a direct influence on my own work as a translator much of which would have been unimaginable where it not for his success and his shaping of western and particularly American expectations for what Japanese contemporary fiction looks like and the role that success has played in encouraging American publishers to go on a decades long hunt for what is invariably called the next Murakami I've taken to calling this the are there any more like you at home factor I actually have another talk called that in reference to the almost constant questioning by agents and editors about the next Murakami and my own experience in translating a half dozen writers such as Natsu Okidino and Yoko Ogawa who have been identified often explicitly on jacket copy as Murakami like in one way or another and often in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary I've also been able to observe and actually participate in an analogous if far less successful process of commodification of these writers and of my translations that is involved in some cases the same players and the same moves as the Murakami narrative Kidino for example after the success of her novel Out in English translation made an identical change of representation from the same Japanese agency to Amanda Binky Urban and an analogous change of publishers and just as Robert Gottlieb discovered Murakami when he was literary editor of the New Yorker his successor Deborah Treisman I suspect acquired Yoko Ogawa's stories in a sense to develop her own Japanese writer so again my study was and is an attempt to identify the non-literary largely extra textual and mainly economic factors that influence the nature and volume of literary traffic flowing between Japan and the English speaking world and to describe the ways these factors influence the practice of translation I actually don't have time today to go into the nature of that influence and what actually happens in the economics though I'd be happy to discuss that later but this morning I want to turn back to an argument about the text themselves and suggest that the flow of traffic is also influenced by factors inherent in the way literary works are conceived and executed their themes and their techniques their structure and language specifically what I want to do in the time remaining is look at the ways these two texts Murakami's Somsa in Love and Mizumura's a true novel inscribed within themselves an attitude toward translatability in the case of Murakami's story I want to argue the text is born in and insists on translation in effect it thematizes and demonstrates its own translatability while Mizumura's novel like much of the rest of her work just as insistently resists translation or its possibility first it might be helpful to describe the two works and something of the conditions of their publication and translation Murakami's story is a rewriting or inversion in fact of Franz Kafka's metamorphosis in which in Murakami's version the protagonist a bug wakes up to find out that he has been transformed into a human being named Gregor Somsa the story much briefer than Kafka's follows a similar arc of discovery of the new body and its limitations the reversed of course from the metamorphosis but in Murakami's telling instead of replacing the devolution and death of the misunderstood bug we have the newly human Gregor escaping from his room and falling in love with a young woman who comes to repair locks in the house Murakami's story ends not with the protagonist's death and the relief felt by his family but with a smitten Gregor wondering when he'll see the young woman again the final line of Somsa and love reads the world was waiting for him to learn from this brief description alone I'll probably clear some of the ways in which the story insists on transformation and translation Kafka's original which was itself already a transformation narrative indebted to or transposed from of its metamorphosis has been further translated by Murakami in the plot inversion at the same time the creation of the story implies that Murakami was reading a translation of Kafka either in English or Japanese since he doesn't read German so his translation version of Kafka is already based on several pre-existing translations from multiple originals then in the next stage of translation traffic when the story moves from the already translated Japanese original into English for publication in the New Yorker we can detect several additional layers of translation and translatability Ted Goosen performs the obvious act of transforming Japanese to English but he has also transformed Murakami's plain contemporary Japanese into something resembling the mid-20th century English translations of Kafka those by the Muir's perhaps in effect Goosen re-invents Murakami's story in a parallax view of Japanese and the previous English translations of Kafka a process I would argue that is consistent with Murakami's intention in the story to insist on translation and transformation Murakami's own career is a translator his creation of a literary voice in an act of auto-reverse translation and the pursuit of a global literary reputation in translation are all of a piece with the intent and practice of Samsa in love that is the story is and means to be immediately and readily translatable a text that by its nature enters into the flow of translation traffic and in that sense it can be seen as emblematic of Murakami's career as a whole his work succeeds in translation and finds a global audience exactly because it is intended for translation from the original place to translation there is perhaps obviously a central irony here and one that is most likely intentional I would think in that Murakami's simple love story and plain prose style are in direct contrast to Kafka's method and intention in the metamorphosis as Adorno has pointed out each sentence of Kafka invites us to interpret it to understand and yet at the same time effectively for stalls any such effort leaving us puzzled as to the meaning of the text and no text more so than the metamorphosis which poses incomprehensibility as a basic condition of the reading experience what is the point what has happened how do we make sense of Samsa's transformation as Susan Sontag would put it the text merely exists and nothing more it resists all attempt at interpretation and thus translation Murakami however in inverting the story has also inverted this dynamic his story is about a return to consciousness and life Gregor once again human with comprehensible feelings and desires falls in love and sets out to make sense of his world Murakami inverts more than just Kafka's plot he substitutes meaning for meaninglessness comprehensibility for incomprehensibility insisting on the importance of storytelling and sense making that has always characterized his work and which he himself has argued makes his work readily translatable what is apparent then from this translatable and multiple translated short story is that as I've suggested Murakami's work begins and ends in translation he creates fictions that are both translatable and embody translation in their themes and method his work moves between languages and cultures or at least into and out of English and this is perhaps an important distinction with relative ease and fluidity with few textual and stylistic cultural context but rather various mechanisms and textual markers that seem to invite and insist on translation as both theme and practice. I would argue conversely however that Minaya Mizumura's literary career and texts have offered an almost Kafka like resistance to translation in both form and content but before turning to her novels it's worth noting that these opposing stances stem from a biographical irony relative to the two writers that I'd like to briefly mention that is Murakami was born and raised in western Japan as someone was just mentioning who had read his biography before we started his parents were teachers of traditional Japanese literature and he never traveled abroad until he was an adult yet he became interested in and some would say obsessed by western and in particular American literature and culture from an early age his touchstones are well known jazz and classical western music the works of Fitzgerald and Carver spaghetti and cats all of which become light motifs that underpin his work so seamlessly that many readers have wondered about what makes his fiction Japanese. Mizumura by contrast moved with her family to Long Island when she was a teenager and spent two decades in the US going to high school doing undergraduate and graduate work at Yale University and ultimately teaching Japanese literature at Princeton but she has written poignantly of her constant retreat throughout this period into the written Japanese word and specifically into the great works of Japanese fiction that she read obsessively from the time she left Japan in 1990 she returned to her native country with the express intention of becoming an important literary figure and ambition that she has more than realized Mizumura is bilingual in many ways bicultural and yet she is as devoted to Japanese literary tradition as Murakami is to American fiction and for Mizumura what this is meant is the creation of a body of work that in various and creative ways resists attempts at translation and participation in the cultural flow she was thrust she was thrust into at an early age herself. Each of her works for different reasons is in effect untranslatable on one or more levels not overtly or explicitly but philosophically and contextually her 1990 debut novel Zoku Mayan is a tour de force in which she wrote a very plausible stylistically pitch perfect ending to Mayan or light and darkness the last unfinished masterpiece by Natsume Soseki Japan's most important modern novelist. It was an audacious debut for Mizumura on one level yet on another it was a logical project for someone who had made a long study of Soseki's work and who as an outsider to the Japanese literary establishment was not abashed in the face of the great master the way a writer raised in Japan might have been what is clear about the project however is that while it can be translated on the level of sentence and plot it is a work that is by definition fundamentally untranslatable to the extent that it is deeply embedded in its context and dependent for meaning on the literary and cultural knowledge of Soseki's original. To understand Zoku Mayan the reader must know the plot, textual history, reception and role in Japanese literary history of its source text Mayan as a fragmentary dependent work standing in relation to a well-known classic text that is largely unknown to all but a handful of foreign readers it is in effect impossible to render into English or for that matter any other language which made it to say the least appointed debut statement for a bilingual or trilingual international returnee seeking to reincorporate herself into Japanese literary life. Mizumura's next novel if anything was even more resistant to translation. In 1995 she published Watakshi Shousetsu from left to right a hybrid work that combines in its title as well as on each page the traditional Japanese confessional form known as the I novel Watakshi Shousetsu with passages in English that remain untranslated in the Japanese text. Moreover the novel was printed horizontally that is left to right rather than the traditional vertical and right to left print in most Japanese books. In other words the novel exists between languages forcing the reader depending on her linguistic abilities either back and forth between linguistic and cultural worlds that is Mizumura's own privileged bilingual authority or between comprehension and relative incomprehension the experiences of readers who have one language or the other or one of them in perfectly. What is clear of course is that the work can only be fully experienced by those who read both Japanese and English with equal facility and that for the rest and by far the majority of readers translating the foreign passages to make them comprehensible would irrevocably flatten the text, rob it of its interlingual intention and power and in no way constitute a real literary translation. In effect by creating a novel in translation Mizumura has eliminated the possibility of it ever being adequately translated. Tellingly neither Zoku Mayan nor Watashi Shousetsu from left to right has in fact been translated. Which brings us to Mizumura's acclaimed 2002 novel entitled Hongkaku Shousetsu which is a reworking of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights said in post-war Japan but encased in a complex set of narrative frames including an outermost one in which a writer named Minae whose biography maps Mizumura's own is introducing the reader to the main narrative. At first glance this work which is more plot driven and compulsively readable than Mizumura's earlier fiction is also more readily translatable and in fact as I said it did appear in 2013 in English to considerable acclaim. Still a closer look reveals a number of ways that the text presents challenges or puzzles to the translator and insist on its immersion in a Japanese cultural context that cannot be readily brought over into the target language or culture. The title for example was rendered as a true novel in the English translation no doubt for the ambiguous and possibly oxymoronic contention that a fiction or a novel could also be true but Hongkaku has a wide range of meanings in Japanese and the book could plausibly be called a genuine novel or an orthodox novel as the phrase has generally been translated meaning to Japanese readers and critics a fully realized novel with an ambitious complex plot which certainly this book has other possible titles with different nuances would include a real novel a serious novel or even a full fledged novel. The original title itself then for a writer such as Mizumura who is fully conscious of the differences between Japanese and English is a kind of intentional difficulty for or challenged to the translator a fact that is especially interesting perhaps since Mizumura initially wanted to translate the novel herself. The book too repeats this challenge on the level of plot Mizumura provides a richly and finely wrought story a genuine novel that comes across successfully in English but on the sentence level particularly in the dialogue the text is a study and nuances that remain largely lost in translation. The story like Brontes investigates class relations between a poor young man who falls in love with a wealthy girl and seeks to woo her after he is made his fortune but the social milieu Mizumura creates replete with a cast of peers and magnates maids and parvenues worthy of Jane Austen and genders a text proliferating with finely graded linguistic markers of privilege and subservience in which Japanese as a language is particularly rich and by necessity these nuances go largely untranslated or receive only vague approximations in English a language much poor in explicit markers of class. On Mizumura's website she labels herself tellingly I think as a novelist writing modern Japanese literature in the Japanese language implying no doubt that other writers and perhaps explicitly the most notable of all contemporary Japanese writers are writing in something other than Japanese at least not in the nuanced literary Japanese in which Mizumura casts her own work. I'd like to conclude by positioning Murakami and Mizumura in a larger debate about the state of global fiction the stuff in which many of us traffic the terms of which I think have been particularly well framed by Tim Parks in a brief but often quoted New York review of books essay entitled the dull new global novel. In the essay Parks laments what he sees as the beginning of a sea change away from the national literatures that arose from the 14th to the 16th centuries in Europe as writers abandoned Latin and wrote in vernacular languages. He notes that now in contrast to that moment of pluralizing democratization in a rapidly globalizing world and in an environment of instant electronic textual dissemination a writer must be recognized as international rather than simply national in order to be considered great. Similarly Parks notes the growing dominance of English has come to mean that European African Asian and Latin American writers are considered to have failed if they are unable to reach an international audience. Symptomatic of this problem is the rise of global writers of enormous influence and marketability who have presumably intentionally stripped their work of cultural markers that would impede translation and comprehension by that is marketability to readers in literary markets around the world. And in this context Parks explicitly mentions Murakami whose attraction he feels is enhanced by the readers knowledge that the same work is being read all over the world and that he or she is part of an international community of readers. By contrast Parks says what seems doomed to disappear or at least to risk neglect is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pims or Natalia Ginsbergs. Shakespeare would have to ease off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel. End quote. And so we might add can Minaya Mizumura whose work swims in the sea of Japanese culture and linguistic nuance in ways that almost intentionally prevents it from fully entering the global literary market. I would add that Mizumura herself has weighed into this argument in a chroniclastic fashion in her 2008 book entitled Nihongo ga hirubiru toki Eigo no seiki no nakade or in the English translation the fall of language in the age of English. She argues much as Parks does that the genius of the Japanese language and in particular of Japanese literature is being lost in a time when writers no longer seek to activate that genius. But following Murakami stripped their prose in their plots of recognizable culturally bound markers of Japan in favor of what Parks calls the overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk or a Murakami we could add. In a world and global literary market where Mizumura's brand of culture specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity are impediments to global publication, Murakami and his literary ilk stand to inherit the increasingly smaller available slices of the readership Pi. I find myself agreeing with Parks and Mizumura and lamenting on one level the flattening and homogenizing effect on the global literary markets that I've been studying for some years now and which are the underpinning of Murakami's remarkable success. But I would also conclude by suggesting that we would benefit from a nuanced view of this debate like most other truths the reality is one that is more gray than black and white and we would do well to understand the merits of both schools of fictional thought and hope that both continue to exist and flourish and nourish one another going forward. As I've said, in my own career as a translator I've seen the influence that Murakami's success has had on the fortunes of Japanese literature as a whole. Certainly without his ascent to the pantheon of global writers the careers in translation of every other Japanese writer including the Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe but also Yoko Ogawa and Natsu Kirino would be unimaginable and the fact that Mizumura's a true novel and her polemic against Murakami's brand of fiction gained attention outside of Japan is itself a function of publishers and readers and critics caring about the state of Japanese fiction a concern that itself would be unimaginable without Murakami. When Svetlana Alekseyevich won the Nobel Prize for Literature earlier this month a friend of mine who is also one of the most astute and accomplished critics of modern Japanese literature posted a congratulatory message on Facebook that pronounced the award good news for Alekseyevich for the anti-nuclear movement and good news for those of us who loathe Murakami. I didn't click where I like immediately but at any rate the sentiment is understandable in a field where the Murakami narrative has dominated the discourse for most of our careers but I'd like to suggest that as translators we should be celebrating and seeking to promote both writers such as Haruki Murakami who accelerate the flow of our traffic and those such as Minai Mizumura who create provocative and stimulating congestions and blockages to the flow which are more often than not made visible exactly because they exist in relation to the dull new global fiction. Thanks. I'd be happy to. Please. Mishima was like Kawabata and Tanizaki and obviously it seems very strange and this is why I said that it often doesn't seem to relate to the reality of the text themselves but if you look at the way Mishima even though it was often very bellicose artistic content although he has other kinds of fiction as well he was marketed of a piece with Kawabata's much softer fiction and if you look at the covers for instance the way those jackets were designed in the 1960s he was basically part of this attempt to reconfigure Japan as a new trustworthy ally in the Pacific and a Zen nation rather than a war like nation. As I say it didn't matter. Please. Not very well but I'd be delighted if anyone else would speak to that. There is an obvious kind of incestuous relationship between Murakami and English because and in a longer sort of Murakami centric version of this talk I think there really is very good evidence that his literary style was formed in a kind of translation between English and Japanese and I tested briefly in what I was saying that I think it was designed for the New Yorker magazine and therefore it translates into English in that kind of idiom quite readily. In other languages since I've read French translations of him periodically but I'm not sure that I can judge exactly how they fit into French literary prose so the answer is no. All I can say is that it is true that he is enormously popular in many other literary markets in China for instance. There are pirated translations that appear before the Japanese comes out. He has enormous followings in Korea. He has interestingly I think that he is less loved in some European countries than other Japanese writers so for a long time Murakami Ryu Murakami the other Murakami was more popular than Haruki Murakami. I think that's changed now in France at least. Please. Yes go ahead. On the same subject the Spanish version of his Murakami's novel seemed to come out months before the English version so can you comment on that? I started in Madrid many months before I was out in English. I can't. I don't know how quickly translators work in other markets. I do know the three Murakami translators quite well and they often get the manuscripts before they're published in Japanese in some cases and the love story that I mentioned appeared in a Japanese volume almost the same month that it came out in the New Yorker so Ted Goosen had it before it was published in Japan but why they come out more quickly they certainly do in Asia as well a novel will appear much more rapidly. I don't really want to speak to publishing practices in other book cultures but I think that Knopf anyway is enormously careful and they edit very very heavily both the original and the translation Chip Kidd a lot of my interest is really in book jackets I don't care much about what's inside but book jackets I don't know if you know the jacket designer Chip Kidd in his work but he is kind of a culture hero among design folks and he has done every Murakami jacket since he moved over to Knopf and I suppose he probably wants a piece of time too to work on these things. I really can't speak about these things but I know that he is very carefully curated in this country. I will just make one comment I said I didn't have time to talk about the way that the economics impacted the nature of the translations themselves which is really where I started with this I'm most interested in the way translators are and I myself have had this experience are actually asked to do things or make changes or are altered and your translation is altered by these famous case of this and I'm sure many people in the audience know this story one of Murakami's greatest works maybe his best novel is a thing called in Japanese Nejimakidori Kuronekaru which is the wind up bird chronicle in English in Japanese it's an 1800 page 3 volume affair and in English it's a 700 page novel and Jay Rubin who is the translator has written quite openly in his book on Murakami of the fact that Knopf gave him a word limit so he could not translate all of it and that he felt that the original was repetitive and chaotic so he has cut about a third of the original out rearranged it and created a much more coherent cohesive version of the original in English the scandal really sort of came to light when the German translation was done not from the Japanese but from the new English original which creates all kinds of interesting dynamics May I add a little bit to the matter of the sequencing of translations because Murakami's as you mentioned Stephen Murakami's translators get together almost every year and over 20, 30 translators getting together and this is very well choreographed and in countries where English is a strong reading language his novels first come in those countries in Norwegian, in Finnish in Danish, in Spanish so as to capture some market in the native language before the English one hits. That's fascinating so they're actually done more quickly into Danish or Swedish and then I'll just add something on that I'm familiar with Murakami's translations in Taiwan and to sort of answer your question why they often appear more quickly in a foreign language some cultures, I mean a lot of cultures I don't think have the editorial culture that we do and as a result they're very, I mean they have not only a very tight deadline to turn it in let's say 60 days, 30 days, 60 days but they're virtually unedited so you can go almost immediately to print I mean I've read two Murakami novels Chinese and they're, you can tell I mean they really need a blue pencil and I think that's part of the reason but I wanted to go back to this I wanted to ask a question about or maybe not a question but have a comment maybe somewhat cynical about Mizor Murak's modus operandi that I'm looking at is it an attempt to resist translation or to ensure multiple translations over the long run in the way that let's say the early, the high modernist who was found in Eliot sort of in a calculated way made their work virtually uninterpretable which to ensure multiple interpretations and so it's an ever rich source for interpretive like exercise and I don't hate to be cynical about it but this is a woman whose training is, I mean she's familiar with all of these strategies the great winnowing she's going to be around Murakami and I figured I could only be cynical about one of the two in addition to which Minaya is something of a friend and she actually asked me to translate at one point asked me to translate what Takashi Shousetsu from left to right and I didn't know whether she was asking me to translate the English bits into Japanese and the Japanese bits into English to create a mirror image or to flatten the whole thing into English but I tried to explain that it didn't work either way and it's intentionally difficult and intentionally proliferating readings and as a student of Paul de Maan and other people at Yale she knows the advantages of that I'd like to ask you about a different Japanese genre entirely for a moment your distinction of between the sort of industrial preeminence of Japan and then the cultural cool I'm thinking back to the 1950s post World War 2 when the sort of big international form poetry became haiku and I routinely query my students and almost all of them were writing haiku in elementary school before they'd ever tasted sushi and most of them have been writing haiku before they ever rode in a toyota or a Nissan or a Subaru and it seems to me that there was a whole cultural cool that really came up in the 1950s really enshrined in a way in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums where the quest for the perfect haiku becomes the quest of western civilization and if you could maybe talk a little bit more about that export of Japanese cool and the changes between the industrial preeminence and the sort of cultural preeminence. An interesting topic and there are a number of studies of this and I'm no expert but certainly the West has been fascinated with Japan for a very long time and you can go back to the late 19th century, mid 19th century and find Japonisma in European art and you're absolutely right about the 1950s fascination with haiku but that goes back even earlier to Ezra Pound and The Blast when people were reading Japanese no-plays and reading Japanese poetry and Fenelosa's notes found their way into poetry at that point and children began writing haiku in the 30s actually before the 50s so it's not a new phenomenon all I was trying to suggest is that this was a very self-conscious and actually a government sponsored attempt to find an alternative as the economic, the industrial dominance began to cool. This was an attempt to find substitution so it wasn't a new thing, Japan has always known it has a kind of appeal to the West but it wasn't about cool before it was a kind of zen aestheticism and this was about then and again if any of you teach Japanese you know that after the economy dropped, the bottom dropped out of the economy in the 1990s students began to drift away and thankfully the Pokemon generation began going to college and so our classes have not been empty but at any rate no it's a new version of an old story you're absolutely right I have a question about a word that you use and a word that I've been seeing quite a bit recently in connection with publishing of translation and that word is curation and I wonder what you see as a parallel between the role of the curator especially the celebrity curator in the visual art world and now this role of the sort of celebrity or publishing curator who has the role of organizing the chaos of modern literature for us and ensuring that we're seeing the most important Japanese writer the one that we're supposed to be looking at can you talk about that a bit? Probably not very effectively but I hadn't ever thought about the parallel between the celebrity museum curator and the celebrity editor or the celebrity book agent but certainly someone like Amanda Urban who is both Murakami's agent and Natsu Okidino's agent is playing a very very central role in what gets in front of our eyes what readers actually see when it comes not just to Japanese fiction but to lots of different national literatures but she has the ability to place these books with large commercial presses and she has the ability to select what it is she thinks coming out of Japanese fiction is important and who's going to translate it and how it's going to sound you're absolutely right I really like the way that you describe the dominant aesthetics that are informed by the political relationship between you know America and whatever language culture the source language culture nation and I like how you describe the Zen phase and now the cool phase is there like a third space for more like avant-garde like Murakami do for example where would you put him is he cool too is he edgy like is there a third space that's not going to feed the dominant and sort of violent relationship that is obtaining between these cultural systems that as you said is deleting and flattening literatures there isn't a great deal of space for another version of this and partly because as I was trying to suggest Murakami has sort of carried everything before him I mean the view of Japanese fiction outside of Japan particularly in this country is so dominated by Murakami that it's very hard to find there are other writers being published and there are presses like vertical that publish a range of things it's extraordinary the sales of vertical books are in the high three figures usually when you're talking about commercial presses and what actually reaches a readership Murakami has set the tone for the last 20 years and I went back to look at my own translations and I found six of them that actually had his name on the cover and I actually went to look at Minaya Mizumura's book and the jacket blurb on that actually says it's structured as carefully as Murakami's 1Q84 there is literally no resemblance in any way shape or form between these two novels of any sort but the publisher and it's a wonderful publisher who did her novel a true novel in English but they found it necessary to capture as many Murakami readers as they could simply by putting his name on the book jacket so there isn't really a third space I'm happy in a sense and what I was trying to suggest at the end is the New Yorker bought the Yoko Ogawa stories I translated very much because they wanted another Murakami Picador published going on five books by Yoko Ogawa because they're looking for that kind of success again I guess we can't look a gift horse in the mouth please there is in fact I hear people loathe him we'll put that on the jacket blurb for those who loathe Murakami hi I wanted I wanted to ask you I love the way you blend literary knowledge and economics so I wanted to ask you about your research method and tools do you do it all or do you go to an economist or marketing person how do you I am in no way actually tell I am married to an ethnographer an anthropologist and it was really her methodology that interested me so this project began as an ethnography of Japanese writers actually and because I've been a translator for many years I know many writers and have access to them so I went to Japan on a full bright 12 years ago now longer and with the idea of interviewing every writer I could get my hands on to ask how they felt what translation meant to them and how their works played in translation so I started and interviewed about eight of the most prominent writers and it was an incredibly boring project with the exception of Murakami Ryu actually none of them had anything interesting to say about including Haruki Murakami none of them had anything interesting to say about translation but when you go to meet a writer in Japan you're escorted there by his agent or his editor and those people were fascinating we talked books back and forth on the train in fact the interviews usually lasted a half an hour and I had two hours on the train with these folks so I began to realize that in fact it was the book industry that was shaping all of this and so I started doing interviews with agents and editors and then in New York as well when I returned I began interviewing people in New York as well who shape how translations flow and pick the translators and edit the translations they're outrageous editing practices around translation not just the one that I mentioned of cutting a novel by a third but the New Yorker is absolutely savage in editing things that have been published in originals for many many years they have no sort of respect for the original but I learned that only by interviewing people in the book business and not writers who know nothing Hi Listening to your talk it seems very much and given the historical context between Japan and America it seems like both of these writers are writing really against global English as an American thing and in this example with Bronte it's that could be a resistance in itself going back to English literature and so you mentioned that Mizumura is also tri-lingual and I was kind of curious about what alternate spaces exist as world literature outside of resistance to global English and what world literature looks like isn't like Mizumura who writes critically about it as well it's an excellent question and it's kind of beyond my thinking on this subject but for Mizumura herself she has spoken about the fact that when she went off to university she intentionally studied she had been reading Japanese fiction obsessively to sort of escape this world of America that she'd been brought to she felt very out of place and she read an enormous amount of Japanese fiction but when she went off to college she studied French literature and so that's why I say she's tri-lingual and I do think that her entire project in a way is as you say a resistance to the English fiction of the world interestingly though when she sits down to write her magnum opus she picks Wuthering Heights as a work to subvert in many ways but also to honor in very profound ways so it's undeniable that for a Japanese writer the relationship is immensely fraught it's a love hate thing to not to reduce it to anything quite that simple but you can't get away from it she can't get away from the power of this fiction that she has been reading the Japanese novel was formed in translation in the late 19th century there was no sort of modern novel until Japan reopened to the west and it was formed really the first works that created even the linguistic forms that were used when novelists began writing novels for translation and it really was a literature forged in translation and I think someone who is as smart and is incredibly erudite in modern Japanese literary studies as Mizumura would be in some ways unable to escape that her great hero is Natsume Soseki and in many ways that was the who wrote a wonderful book called Bungakuron which is basically a study of English literature and she felt this kind of weight of influence too how does one create a Japanese literature so late in the world vis-a-vis this overwhelming literary history so in many ways it is its resistance but it's a fraught one that is also deeply a product of admiration and reflection I'm not sure that answered your question but there you go we have unfortunately reached the end of our time let's all thank Stephen Snyder for a wonderful...