 Hello and welcome to all in the room and to all online. Happy New Year. Thank you very much for joining us for the first event of the JRC this year. My name is Fabio Gighi. I'm the chair of the Japanese Research Center here at SOS, and it is my great pleasure to welcome today's guest, the writer and literary translator, Polly Barton. So I'll quickly introduce her and then we'll move to reading and conversation, and of course the floor will be opened for all your questions. But before we do that, I'll change to a bit more dramatic mood setting. Much better. So Polly Barton, many of you know her work. She was awarded the Fitzgerald essay price for her essay on the Japanese language called 50 Sounds in 2019. She won the prize in the category non-fiction debut, but she also is a translator of Japanese literature and her recent translations include There's no such thing as an easy job by Kikuko Tsumura. It appeared from Bloomsbury 2020. And so we look to the sky by Mizumi Kubo by Arcade 2021. She also won in 2021 the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection for her translation of Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, which appeared with a tilted axis press in 2020. So it's a great pleasure to have you. I read this book last year during the pandemic, and it was a very interesting experience because like half of the time I thought, ah, this is exactly it. This is exactly what you experience. And the other half I think, and why didn't I write something like that? Why did I write so dreadful, dreary and dry academic lucribrations, you know, instead of something that is much more personal, but really also in many ways, much more accessible. And it really is an amazing piece of work. And we are very happy to have you here. And we'll start with the reading from the beginning of the essay. Thanks very much for that introduction, Fabio. It's a joy to be here. Back in my alma mater, I was in, so as myself in 2011. So yeah, it's really nice to be back. I'm actually going to read not from the essay itself. I'm going to begin by reading the chapter titles of the book, just to give those who haven't read it or encountered it some kind of sense of what it is. I'll just say to begin. So it's called 50 sounds. And it's kind of an essay in 50 essays. So the book has 50 chapters. Each of whose title is a subject, highly subjective or wrong or very personal definition of a particular Japanese word, specifically an onomatopoeic word. So I think to kind of give you the best way of giving a bit of a flavor of the kind of the kind of book it is, I thought I'd read a list of the titles. So 50 sounds. The sound of eyes riveting deep into holes in your self-belief or vicariously visiting the Nocturama or every party where you have to introduce yourself. The sound of seeing what you thought was yours through the lens of an alternative system or of having your cock incomprehensibly sucked. The sound of the rough ground. The sound of insects being forced from your body or laughing as you vocalize an unthinkable situation or being steamed alive. The sound of the air screaming or being saturated in sound. The sound of a mind unblemished by understanding. The sound of space. The sound of electric hair. The sound of tottering at last. The sound of always and never having been like this. The sound of a truly mixed tool bag. The sound of the mighty loner and the caress of 10,000 onalist looks. The sound of being touched for the very first time. The sound of red dripping onto asphalt. The sound of writing your obsession on a steamy tile or the miracle becoming transparent. The sound of nights with a dictionary and the thrill of drawing close to someone's real feelings. The sound of recalling your past misdemeanours. The sound of having lots of sex of jubitable quality. The sound of being so invested in something that it leaks into everything you do or abandoning hope of appearing cool or insidious paranoia. Pick up the sound of my flaws and your trainers and our graveyards. The sound of a flash of metal in the blood. The sound your teeny little identity makes as it goes spinning across the floor. The sound of being struck sharply and repeatedly by a stick-like object or infrequently of branches breaking. The sound of being a small town movie star. The sound of the desert heat in the heart or the desert heart in the heat. The sound of a ship leaving shore. The sound of a hashtag magic life or embracing your shining future. The sound of persistent drizzle on a 13th century Scottish castle. The sound of kicking against the pricks or the ugliness of learning a language as a native English speaker or the manner of stabbing repeatedly with a sharp pointed instrument. Giddy giddy. The sound of just about getting by or being weighed on a moment by moment basis. Poka poka. The sound of stepping into a warm obliviousness that is probably not what a higher self would want or need. Giddy giddy. The sound of the small sharp dark piercing feeling or not loving anime as much as you should. Gada gada. The rattling sound the inexplicable makes as it becomes manifest. Giddy giddy. The sound of fitting where you don't fit. He's sorry. The sound of being a masochist or having an unrealizable dream of which you can't let go or subconsciously aspiring to a form of life governed by discipline, quietude and an absence of sticky emotions. Peta. The sound of very sticky fingers. Peda peda. The sound of spouting forth or a bullish market. Ua. The sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken. Basari. The sound of nevermore and how it comes when you least expect it. Nuru nuru. The slippery sound of knowing the lingo. Udo da. The sound of the wild boar. Tom. The sound of the sexy, lovely, violent hand slamming the wall. Tom. The sound of big drums, bombs and the good bad dream. Ukoka. The sound of always being slightly wrong. Boroboro. The important sound of things falling apart. Sarasara. The sound of a very smooth fluid taking you by surprise and being the most acceptable part of you. Hot. The sound of the xenophobe returning home or being restored to magical normality by your friends or tolerating yourself in photographs. Good. The sound of your words having more power than you thought or unexpectedly saying what you mean. The sound of being hot to a degree that stands just on the verge of acceptability. The sound of the jubilant gorilla and the foolish builder done good. Thank you. Thank you so much. So let's start in the obvious place. Obviously the first question always is what inspired you to write the essay. But it really is not just an essay. It is an essay about the Japanese language. It is about Wittgenstein's philosophy of language. There are wonderful riffs about different meditations about the emotionality and how it is expressed in language. It is also a kind of a building's roman of you that sort of recapitulates your time in Japan. Yeah. How did it come about? Yes. So I came back from Japan about five years ago and it was my second stint living there and I kind of had the sense that I was probably back for good. I might go back to Japan but I was sort of done with living there, at least as I imagined my life. And yet, you know, ostensibly I was back quote unquote home and yet I was having massive problems kind of readjusting to life in Britain, life lived in English. You know, I would go into shops and sort of weirdly be unable to converse in what was ostensibly my, you know, mother tongue. And yet, you know, I was also aware that I was not a perfectly fluent Japanese speaker either. And I felt very much sort of suspended in this place between two languages, neither of which I really felt I had mastery of. And I started kind of from that place of emotional turmoil, I suppose, just kind of making some notes about my time in Japan and about language. And the more that I did that, the more I felt like, okay, this isn't just an emotional release, there's actually some sort of intellectual grit here, like there's something that feels like it wants to come out. And it actually around that time I read another translation memoir by Kate Briggs, also published by Fitzgerald, called This Little Art, where she talks about translation in a very in depth way. She's a French to English translator and she talks primarily about translating Roland Barth. And I think what was really revelatory to me about reading that was like she went into so much detail. And yet it felt like the more she, more detail she went into, the more interesting it got. And that kind of, I think really gave me a sense of permission in a way, that potentially I could write about this stuff that I was fascinated by, in which I previously thought no one else would care about apart from, you know, real sort of linguistics academics, in a way that potentially could engage people who didn't know anything about Japan or Japanese. So that was sort of increasingly what I tried to do at that time, a friend forwarded me the call out for Fitzgerald's essay prize. And for anyone who doesn't know that it's kind of a strange essay, it's a strange title in that it's actually not given for an essay per se, you apply with a proposal for a book length essay and a writing sample. And they say sort of explicitly in the call out that they reward ambitious writing. And it was in kind of writing that proposal that I started to formulate this idea of, you know, the 50 chapter structure and calling it 50 sounds and sort of this overarching concept, I suppose. That's, I mean, it's really quite incidental, but I also read Kate Briggs actually the year before that. And I can, I mean, you know, you should definitely read it. It's nothing to do with Japan. But it is about translation. And for me, the most amazing scene was when she describes the gym that she goes to to do aerobics has nothing to do with translation. But there's something about the attention to detail the attention to the small worlds that are somehow slightly different, depending on what language you look at them in. And I thought that was really, and this is really what what you capture so well in the book as well. And what was it that attracted you to Japan in the first place? That's always a difficult question. Everybody in the room, I think, knows that question. Sure. I mean, it is a really difficult question. And in some sense, I feel like you could define this book as like my attempt to kind of answer that because I feel that there was there were so many different things that drew me to Japan. But none of them felt like the main thing. And actually what led me to go there in the first place, I think, was really sort of seeing my boyfriend at the time, showed me a advert for the JET program. And we decided to apply to that together. But really, I wanted to go to Italy. That was I had my site set on going to Bologna. And he was like, come on, let's just apply to this. And I was reading a lot of Japanese literature at the time, but it, you know, I'm definitely not. I think there are some people who sort of know from the age of people not living in Japan who know from the age of seven, eight, nine, 10 that, you know, all they want to do is to go to Japan. And I'm definitely not one of those people. And I think that's, you know, in a way that really is a big part of the impetus for this book, because I get to this point now. And, you know, I'm in my late 30s. And my life really is Japan. You know, I spent all of my time reading Japanese books. But I even speaking to people like far, you know, in my, who I was on an on undergrad with, like back then, I read a lot of Japanese books, but I didn't, you know, that that direction that I've taken is totally difficult for them to understand. And it's sometimes quite difficult for me to understand. And yet it also feels a part of me. So I, a very important part of me. So I suppose that, yeah, the 50 sounds is kind of an attempt to wrestle with that in some, in some way. Well, the mind boggles to imagine what it would have been if it had been about Italian. Yeah, it wouldn't have been at all, I think. So maybe for the people are not familiar with the linguistics of Japanese, we could say something about the Onomatopoeia and what sort of, you know, how, because it's structured around them. And I thought that was such a brilliant idea. And they're all rendered, as we've heard, in very creative ways that really make you think about the relationship between a sound. And also the fact that you can recognize sometimes what it is, even if you don't know what the word means. Right. Exactly. Sometimes you can recognize them. And sometimes you can't recognize them. But nonetheless, they're so sort of evocative sounding that they really like stick into you. And I think when I started these sort of random writings about Japanese that I was doing after I came back to Bristol, I found that increasingly these Onomatopoeia kept popping up again and again. And I, it wasn't at first, it wasn't a tool, a conscious choice. It was just a kind of reflection of the fact that those were some of my earliest memories. You know, and I should say that that part of this and part of I think this whole book where this whole book comes from is that when I, so I was first placed on Saddle Island, which is a very rural remote islands with quite a small population. People don't speak a huge amount of English there. I spoke no Japanese at all. Really, I could say, and that was it. And so it was like really very much kind of learning from the ground up and picking up things, you know, and just sort of, and I think in that state, your ears are really tuned. And, and, you know, you sort of rather than thinking with your brain, you're, you're, it's much more a kind of, I don't know, you're thinking with your body, you're thinking with your ears. And it often was the Onomatopoeia words that would really stick with me. Why did they say that? What was that? You know, a very kind of distinctive structure. Okay, for people who aren't familiar with Japanese Onomatopoeia. So it's still a little bit of a rough science because how Onomatopoeia is defined linguistically varies from language to language. And so, you know, in English, there's a lot of debate about whether certain words are Onomatopoeic or not. But it's commonly thought that Japanese has the second largest body of Onomatopoeic language of any language other than Korean. So Korean has the most and Japanese is second to that. And unlike English, where the boundary between Onomatopoeia and non-Onomatopoeia is quite blurry and sometimes not at all clear to even native speakers of English. In Japanese, it's much, much more clear cut. And some linguists classify Onomatopoeic language as one of the four kind of specific types of words that make up the entirety of the language. And so one very common kind of form that Onomatopoeia in Japanese takes is words like gizagizap, which is like a reduplicating thing. So it's the same two syllable word repeated. But that's not the only kind. Yeah, it's a variety. But they do sort of follow quite set templates. Right. I thought actually one that when I started reading, I thought there must be a chapter on Shin, the sound of silence. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think I did toy with the idea of doing one on Shin, but that's the one, you know, in sort of Guardian articles that reference Onomatopoeia, that's the one they always bring up. Right. Japanese even has a word for silence. Yes, I think we're all familiar with that that kind of Guardian BBC occasionally also dabbled in, oh, how isn't this funny or strange or interesting? Untranslatable. Yes. Which of course, I mean, yes, that's a whole other barrel of questions there. But actually, yes, maybe we should transition to the second reading. Second reading. And then we'll talk a little bit about translation. And yes, I'll transition myself to the letter. Let me just have a quick look. There's some, I always panic when there's a question at this stage may sometimes means there is no. Oh, hello. Good evening to New York. So I thought maybe somebody said that the voice of the sound wasn't working. Great. Okay, so I'm going to read from the chapter Korokoro, which is arguably the chapter that's kind of most squarely about translation, or at least one of them. It's one of the longer chapters, so I'm not going to read the whole thing. I'll just read the first bit. Korokoro. The sound your teeny little identity makes as it goes spinning across the floor. Sometimes when I'm talking about what I do for a living with non translator friends or acquaintances, typically those who speak only one language, I start to build up a picture of the practice of translation as they conceptualize it. It's pale contours coalesce gradually like a Polaroid forming. In this representation of it, translation is akin to an elaborate auto correct function, and it works like this. I am a good Japanese speaker. This must be true as I am a translator. And therefore my brain houses the correct English translation for each Japanese word. To move a text between two languages, all I have to do is switch the Japanese words over to their relevant English correlates, and then maybe fiddle about with the order a little in order to yield the correct translation at the sentence level. Often in these kinds of conversations, this exact phrase, the correct translation will be used multiple times. And each time I will feel a sort of pang, which I don't quite know how to interpret. At times I wonder if it is a yearning for the days when I could still place trust in the meaning of those words, and use them with no critical awareness, no sense of suspicion towards the assumptions on which they rest. Or maybe it's closer to an imagined nostalgia for the world, if it really were, as my interlocutor believed. If there really were a singular, correct translation for each word. And translation operated on the word level, and the task of the translator were to reproduce the exact number of words that appeared in the original, and so on. I wouldn't want a world like that, but it would make things a lot more straightforward. In any case, even when people tell me that the profession I've chosen is mechanical, or more a science than an art, I don't resent them. It makes me wonder what preconceptions I'm carrying about jobs I know nothing about. What I find less easy to laugh off is other polyglots, even other Japanese translators, who still have a very firm idea of what the correct translation is, who go around liberally sewing definite articles as they speak of their craft. These people are not thick on the ground, but they do exist, and I end up praying for them that this is either just an entrenched speech pattern, or else a rhetorical front, an act of bravado to protect their egos. In other words, I pray that this is not what they really think. Surely, I reason, they must have had the experience of looking down at two alternative translations of roughly equal merit, which respectively draw out different aspects of the source text that seem important, but cannot be incorporated at the same time. What happens to singular correctness in that moment? And what about the tension that exists between the requirements of a sentence in the source language, and that in the target one? Surely, they must have taken on board that the definition of what constitutes translational perfection is always going to vary, depending on whom you ask, so that to declare a translation not just good, but uniquely correct, seems tantamount to legitimising the demands of one culture over another. What I find the most extraordinary, though, is reflecting that, as translators and therefore, to some extent, surely also speakers, these people have most likely had to express themselves in multiple languages, which raises a point that feels even more fundamental. Have they not wrestled with the brain-warping activity of having to translate themselves across different languages? Have these people not, as I have, watched their identity contort into rainbow fractals, vanish entirely, and then return as a pink-spotted dragon? I know that it's unreasonable to expect everyone to have gone through existential crises over this, although part of me does really think that if they were sufficiently invested and sufficiently sensitive, then they would have experienced at least minor ones. But surely, at some point down the line, they must have stared into the face of this difficulty and watched the possibility of a definite article fizzle up and vanish. And if they have, then what prevents them from connecting this experience with what they do from a profession? I'm aware that this picture of adversity in self-translation does not conform with the received picture of multilingualism. The conventional monoglot sense of what it means to be bilingual, trilingual and beyond does not permit of difficulties in self-rendering, let alone existential crises or identity trauma. We prefer to believe unthinkingly that what it means to be yourself across different cultural linguistic contexts is clear cut. You say the same things translated across your various languages. That the reality is often hugely different is something to which the majority of those who speak another language with some fluency will testify. A survey of over a thousand bilinguals found that two-thirds are tested to feeling like a different person when speaking different languages. To imagine a language means to imagine a life form. To assume that you would be the same person in different languages were not only the norms and rules but most likely also your social status and domains of experience and proficiencies within those languages are likely to be at least slightly if not fundamentally different seams when examined plainly bizarre. I should confess that growing up monolingual this flawed picture was mine for a long time. I never waded deep enough into the French and German I studied at school to a disabuse myself of the notion that translation was switching one utterance for a roughly parallel one. Speaking a language was knowing what I wanted to say in English and saying or trying to say something that to my mind meant that in French despite the desires for rebirth that propelled me to Japan it didn't occur to me that acquiring the language spoken in a culture very different from mine would mean developing a new persona and the revelation draw the revelation dawned only very gradually. I suppose that part of the reason that this revelation takes so long to hit is that for a long time speaking a foreign language feels just that foreign which is to say new and transitory and very hard to link up with thoughts about our identity. Another I believe is because when learning a language in another country the developments we make are so heavily socially rewarded meaning we process our transformation as sheer success or at least I did I'm finally communicating I'm doing this I'm being approved following the crowd felt like something to be celebrated rather than ashamed of and I kept it up until one day I was confronted by the sudden yet now blinding the obvious awareness that this was conformity pure and simple. For the moment I was saved from total assimilation by the inaccuracy of my mirroring which was why I was still able to feel more or less myself but if I continued to get better I reasoned there might come a time where there was no longer room for the me I recognized to exist alongside this increasingly expert mimic in other words the extent of my skill in pretending to be like other people was exactly the extent to which I ceased to be myself was it really that simple the whole thing resembled a brain teaser and it made me think back to studying identity as an undergraduate for a while then it had been fun to muse on the various ways that philosophers had sought to address this issue over time until it had promptly become tedious either way though it had been an intellectual exercise that had little point of contact with my real life ultimately it didn't really matter how you conceptualized it because in the real world everyone just got on with it and was fine now I felt differently the conundrum still had that tricksy puzzle like quality to them but now the concern I felt was real I wanted a branch either emotional or cerebral onto which I could grip as I crossed this swamp of doubt but I could see none I had already set down the path of imitation and society rewarded my progress there on so I kept on tramping and at some point I found myself in the swell of a further wave of identity doubt where a symmetrical suspicion drifted in about my original self maybe this original me which figured in my thinking was more nebulous more tied to English than I realized wasn't a large part of being me simply the fact of having been very ordinarily talented at mimicking the people around to whom I'd grown up was it fair or valid to attach any kind of primacy to that form of mimicry just because I practiced it for so long it had become a thoroughly unconscious competence and the more I thought about it the more it did seem to me that there was nothing desperately inner or innate about this self that the relationship I had with it was constructed from the outside and structured by language even just thinking these thoughts felt intolerably teenage angsty to me and I wanted it over with perhaps the important thing was just a plow on through perhaps eventually I would get to the point where I shifted between different selves amongst which there was no hierarchy of primacy and barely paid their difference any mind and yet I couldn't stifle the doubts that I was doing this all wrong missing a trick in some way that I should be finding it easier managing the transition better this perception was reinforced by the comments people directed my way I didn't know if this was par for the course or not but each time it happened it felt like a stab in the back your voice is so much higher when you speak Japanese you know you're really different in the two languages how do you feel about that you're much softer and cuter in Japanese you're serious and scary when you speak English these are all things that have been said to me by different people and each time the presentation was that of simply stating a fact as if to disown any idea that the statement could be taken the wrong way as I felt a twinge of dread in my chest see I am a spineless person after all I would wonder to myself why it was exactly that I found it so hurtful did I actually believe that it was bad to change or did I just know that belaying the apparent innocence with which these comments were voiced changeability carried a negative social value thanks thank you that's a perfect moment to turn our attention towards translation towards translation as a practice not just as an intellectual exercise but really as as a profession and I wanted to ask you whether you could tell us something about what what did what it's like being a freelance translator how do you choose the things you translate is there sort of you have lots of things in the pipeline or is lots of it serendipitous the thing that I say about being a freelance Japanese translator and I I'm really aware as I say this that this is the case for me and and the case I think for Japanese but very much not for European languages but every product every product every project that I've that I've worked on so far has been really different in in in in all ways in terms of how it's come to me in terms of kind of the editing process you know when you're starting out as a translator and have hopes of being a literary translator everyone at least in my case would tell me that you know the way that it works is that with the quote unquote minority languages you find a book that you want to translate you check the rights you do a sample you do a synopsis and then you pitch this cold to people that you've never met and then they will give you if you if you get lucky um they will give you a translation contract in the real world um that is an extremely rare occurrence um but it has actually happened once to me um so that's that's one end of the spectrum but at the other end often people that are editors that I know will come to me and they will already have a project in mind sometimes they will have already bought the rights to a particular book and just be looking for a translator and sometimes you get asked to do what's called a beauty contest where you produce a sample um in the knowledge or or not in the knowledge but that other translators are also producing samples and then whoever style they like best they choose to go with um um and sometimes I would say the the middle the middle case is something um like a bit like what happened with where the world ladies are actually um so when Alco and I were both over in the UK from Japan um on a residency together we met with Debra Smith who was at the time head of tilted axis press and she said to Alco and I over dinner like I really like your stuff but you know and we would like we're interested in publishing you but we'd like to sort of hear a bit more and so I then worked together with Alco we produced samples and synopsis for a number of her books and discussed it with Debra and then they decided to go with where the world ladies are um because they felt like that had the most appeal um so yeah there's there's it's it's it's really a very kind of every case is different type thing I would say um these days I suppose now because I've added writing to my bow and I'm also currently translator in residence at Queens College Oxford for the year um I'm finding that I just don't have the time to do lots and lots of kind of scouting work which I ideally I would really like to do but you know it's so time consuming and I think also it's especially hard when you don't have access to Japanese bookshops you know I haven't been back in three years and it's it's so much quicker for me at least just to go around sort of physically and and sort of think oh that looks that looks tempting um so yeah I've been reduced to using Amazon and yeah so I would say that's interesting I'm Queens College translator translator in residence yes I'm actually not in residence um but I'm going there several times a term kind of putting on various translation related events for various demographics so kind of in schools public facing events and also for students but the the the remit is um the visible translator so it's it's about kind of presenting a version of translation to people that is something broader than what most of us conceive of it as you know kind of turning something French into something English um so so translation as the kind of glue that really can connect so many different disciplines um it's been it's been really great so far I think that sounds very interesting the more practical questions because we are now all always you know impelled by our superiors to to ask well what can you do with that you know what can you do with an MA in translations that is I was uh that maybe it's like cheeky question can one live of it can one live off literary translation literary translation so there was a really interesting panel discussion put on recently by the national centre for writing about this called what's an all um and I think it might be still available online and they invited three literary translators to speak exactly on exactly this question and I think up until that point I I knew that this was slightly the case but until seeing this I hadn't really realised to what extent that question is language specific so they had an Arabic translator a German translator and a oh my god who was the third person um someone else who's whose language will come back to me in a second um and the German translator wasn't always doing full-on literature she does non-fiction but essentially she lives off right her translation solely literary translation and and that is possible it's not it's still you know it's it's still only a few lucky people who get to do that but within the infrastructure it is possible the third one was a Korean translator and um and the Korean person said I am managing it but I am one of only four people and there's only demand for those four the Arabic translator said no way no way is it possible um given the kind of the yeah the infrastructure that's that's there um so I feel like it's really important to to kind of stress that because I otherwise I think it can end up being you know a stick that people used to beat themselves with like I haven't managed to make it as a literary translator it really I mean it's really hard to begin with and it really depends on what funding essentially is available government sponsored usually but but you know all commercial funding is available the thing that I would say in response to this I mean this is always the question right can you make a living solely off literary translation is that potentially that's slightly the wrong question or or rather you know these days I'm doing writing and and and I'm doing this translation residence which is kind of slightly muddied the water but until three years ago I spent half of my time doing literary translation and the other half doing um well mostly translating um arts catalogs essays for art catalogs so you know quotes unquote commercial translation but kind of aligned with my interests much more lucrative than literary translation really enjoyable and actually like for me kind of being able to switch between the two kind of when I would return to my literary translation I'd feel really invigorated by it but it would also be really nice to have days not doing that and and and so I guess what I'm trying to say is I think it is possible for a certain number of people to make a living exclusively from literary translation but it's also a wonderful you know it's it's ideally suited to combining with other things that are aligned with your interests whether they be teaching whether they be different types of translation whether they be you know website building um whatever it is um and and actually a lot of the most eminent literary translators working today do do combine it with other things I guess I mean that's that's really interesting it also reflects a kind of hierarchy of legibility like you have certain uh maybe yeah minority languages uh you mentioned at the beginning but but of course then there's the big best sellers like Murakami and how are these there there's already established people usually that yeah some kind of literary mafia when imagined yeah I mean Murakami has had the same three translators who seems to kind of be on rotation for quite a while I think that's quite an impenetrable fortress yeah um but then you know I feel like there is a new what I always say to people when we're talking about translation is before convenience store women every editor that I pitched a translation to will not everyone but I would often be asked the question but is it is it the next Murakami and what's been really interesting is post convenience store women I mean for the first three years after that the question shifted to is it the next convenience store women and now I don't we've now we've got such you know with um Mirko Kawakami and her success and you know this kind of constant stream it feels like of literature predominantly by contemporary Japanese women writers I'm not even getting asked the convenience store woman question anymore it just seems like there is a market for it and people trust that and we don't need a kind of you know deity like figure who sort of stands at the the head of the market it's just sort of it's a much more I don't know diverse I suppose and right democratic or something but clearly also driven by the fact that there are really high quality translations available so so you that's what yeah what people used to say in the 19th century it is it is the readership that creates the author and the author creates the readership is not just a market and once you have that interest you can sort of go and see what whatever else yeah and I think that that's an interesting dynamic um but also I wanted to ask you about the really sort of day to day process as well because as you as we've just seen in in in the last um excerpt often translation really I mean it involves the whole self it is almost becomes a question of life and and death it sometimes feels how do you how do you deal with that in your everyday life um it's a really good question yeah I think that's that's also something that I wanted to really highlight in 50 sounds because I think you know there's a way of thinking about translation that it is sort of slightly mechanical and you know the the kind of stereotypical figure of the author is someone who's you know pouring out their blood and guts and sweat and tears and into writing these things and the translator is much more um professional let's say you know and sort of signs off for the day um and not only is it not like that but you know with with my experience of writing my own stuff at least you can kind of have that no sorry it doesn't matter right kind of feeling you know when it when it gets all too much whereas with translation you've got the added responsibility of it being someone else's work that you're presenting you know so there you kind of can't say if you say sod it I can't I can't do any I can't do any better than this this will have to do you're not only doing that for yourself but you're doing it on behalf of someone else which I think is is quite weighty um that said of course you are not you know you're not it is a different process to writing you're not coming up with the story and you know I would be lying if I said that my relationship to translation is totally diva like you know I I I have a certain number of words that I can I know I can get through in a week and I do that and I you know unless something goes really wrong I usually can predict relatively accurately right how how that's going to go there are things that I tussle with um but I think yeah I think after a time you just sort of learned to I don't know put it put put the put the life and death to one side and think about it tomorrow really um I think also what what's really helped me is you know when I first started translating I can remember you know when I was back at SOAS working on my my dissertation and I was doing an annotated translation for that and I was so so invested in it you know and it took me a while to realise that actually that as terrible as it sounds to say you know that that investment does not a good translation make ultimately you know and I would often see other people who would be so invested and that if anything that investment is is you know you often you need a bit of perspective right and you need a bit of I think a really key part of being a good translator is and possibly a good writer learning to see what you've done through someone else's eyes or at least you know a more objective perspective and there's various ways of doing that you know a really important one is putting it away and not looking at it for a few days and then returning it to it with fresh eyes um I suppose all I'm trying to say is I think passion is obviously really important but in order to kind of maintain a career not and not just a career professionally speaking but in order to have it as like a sustainable part of your existence so you're not tearing yourself to pieces you also need to kind of learn learn some kind of detachment or to put some kind of distance between yourself and it as well. I think yes I can very much imagine how that becomes life saving essentially and so as we're drawing to a close I wanted to finish off with essentially with how the essay starts because you write there's a brief introduction where the Duolingo is mentioned to many of you may be familiar it's this app that you can download to learn languages and I find I found it very interesting recently a friend a friend of mine went to Japan with their 12 year old son and they were quite worried in the lead up they didn't speak Japanese um but the 12 year old son had some kind of translation software that you could even point you could take a picture of something of a kanji and then it would give you the translation immediately and I I heard that I thought oh that's you know I felt slightly conflicted about it for obvious reasons and also I I went to Japan when I was 16 for the first time I lifted the host family and I'm still in contact with them and all my host brothers they now have children and I noticed that their children speak exactly the same degree of English than their parents which is almost nothing but they always say oh it's no problem because now we have all these technological devices that will do the work for us and so how do you see the future of translation in the face of this whole AI juggernaut that we are facing it's such a it's such a thorny question isn't it I recently saw this meme um which is a picture of like a translator costume you know the kind of that you buy in I don't know your costume shops and it contained a dictionary and I don't know a roll neck and a bald spot and then it said does not contain the patience to explain for the thousandth time why they're not worried about AI taking away their job and and I think that you know that is the standard translation literary translation line right this is we writers authors don't get asked that question and um composers don't get asked that question and artists don't get asked that question or at least not to the same degree so why why should translators be asked that question and I I really understand that line of thinking you know I mean at the same time I think we also are coming to a point and you know seeing all this kind of AI generated artwork we are coming to a point where um I think kind of general understanding is dawning that AI really is going to change our worlds drastically in in in kind of unthinkable ways I suppose my take on that is is just that literary translation will be affected by that but potentially not incomprehensibly more than other artistic disciplines um I from what I understand you know translation software DL and that kind of stuff really is making strides and I think there is already cause for you know people who translate contracts and things which operate really using kind of set patterns you know that's already sort of changing things radically where I am I'm not seeing that so far um but yeah I it's it's a really thorny thing and I you know hearing that about the the kids and sort of thinking of learning a language simply as work that you would rather have replaced by a robot seems to me to kind of overlook so much of like the joy that can be found in learning languages and translating and you know and and I think again one of the things that I wanted to sort of really make clear in 50 sounds of which kept kind of hitting me again and again as I was writing it is how that's how the difficulty and the joy are inseparable really they are the same you know different sides of the same coin I guess um so yeah yeah I mean the hearing that it does make me kind of curious to use these apps and see or to see someone using them and see what's what's actually going on um yeah well I think yes there's a terrible sense of impoverishment if you think about the the aspect of learning yeah um but if you think about you know like if the AI which has no kind of language intelligence at all which is just a big language model that sort of has access to 120 years of literary translation I can immediately sort of list okay these people translate this similar passage like this um yes it would sort of it would change the dynamics a little bit you would be ending up sort of more editing and curating what is already there um which I think is precisely it's very joyless if you think about yeah yeah it is and it's interesting you say that because you know when I'm translating um work by an author who's already been translated into English by someone else I deliberately don't look at those translations until after I'm done right and I know that that's an approach that other people think is you know scandalous and why firstly scandalous and secondly stupid like why wouldn't you look and and also you know it's your duty to kind of educate yourself on this before you do it but I think for me it really impedes that process of finding of the voice you know which is 70 percent of what translation is for me I suppose um I think I'm I'm already really bad with kind of internalizing and mimicking styles without even realizing it and so I think if I was if I were to read the work of someone else regardless of whether I liked it I would end up sort of mimicking it and I think that yeah that I mean that necessarily prevents the genesis of something new right whether or not that that you know I think new can be good or bad and you know the culture of originality is not always to be trusted but but nonetheless yeah yeah and I I suppose the more we rely on AI technology in translation the less chance there is for opening up those totally new ways of doing things or you know finding totally new voices and rights and so um yeah that said I don't want to come across as a technophobe um because I think you know I know from experience from talking to lots of translators that there are you know there's there's huge benefits to be gained from machine translation um and realistically if people are going to Japan and they can't speak they haven't beat Japanese them being able to have a conversation even if it's mediated by a phone is better than not being able to have a conversation at all I thought that's a very good that's a very good point right uh let's open to the floor I'll I'll switch on the lights so we can see you and also let's open to the people online so please put your questions into the oh let's uh oh hello any questions from the floor yes please hi thanks folly no I was really interested in what you said about how uh language acquisition uh consciously or not can be a chance to create new identity um and it struck me that also writing might have something of that to it creative writing especially given your essays and personal inspiration so I wanted to ask if you felt that it what kind of book would it have been if you'd written it in Japanese it's a really that's a really great question thank you um I don't this is something that I've spoken to my publisher about actually um because they had a little bit of interest in it being translated into Japanese um and I essentially said that I didn't want it to be um because I feel like it needs it needs to be in dialogue with with Japanese it's not that I don't want it to be translated but I sort of feel that there needs to be a language other than Japanese through which that experience of learning Japanese is going to be mediated all you know because otherwise it there's no kind of triangulation point there's no distance from it and maybe that is really um short-sighted and maybe actually a brilliant Japanese translator could do a great job um but so Shibata Motoyuki sensei translated a little bit um for a blog article that he did and you know obviously he's arguably the most translated most talented translator working from English to Japanese and he did a wonderful job and yet I I still had this feeling like this isn't quite yeah just as I'm not sure that I would want to read a book about a Japanese someone Japanese or someone French learning English in English you know I'm not sure how much it could give yeah yeah it is interesting and just speaking it through makes me think that maybe I should say to my publisher actually if someone wants to give it a try then they can go for it yeah thank you there's a question here from James Garza we have 36 participants online more than in the room I think for the first time thank you very much for joining us I'll read it out yeah your readings are marvelous thank you this is totally a translation nerd question that your koro koro chapter reminded me even in places where bilingualism is actively promoted as a social and intellectual good there's often the sense that the two languages should nevertheless remain apart uncontaminated by each other do you ever get the sense that translation reinforces this kind of distance between different language worlds is this necessary to promote respect for the distinctiveness of cultures or does it reinforce a kind of cultural essentialism I ask with no firm answers myself I know James hi James thank you for your incredibly difficult question um do you ever get the sense that translation yeah I think so just to repeat that part do you ever get the sense that translation reinforces this kind of distance between different language worlds yes I definitely have had that sense before and I think that what I'm not clear about is whether that's translation per se translation as an act praxis discipline or whether that's translation as it is presented in our culture I say our culture in in in most cultures that I am aware of and you know particularly in academia um something that has been interesting about doing this Oxford residency is is trying to present translation in a way that is accessible for people who don't who are monolingual who only have English as a language or or or going into a space and not really knowing who is going to be there um and and something that I've been working with is is both kind of intersemiotic translation so looking at the translation of you know one one form into one form into another so be that a film into a play or a book into a play or or whatever um and then also intra-linguistic translation so working translating a certain kind of English into another kind of English or or simply you know one modern English into another version of the same modern English um which is obviously that something that Japanese also does in a very interesting way like with the with the modern translations of tale of Genji and so on and so forth um and the reason that I'm talking about this is because I feel like within that context and particularly when you are working within the context where where everyone is kind of translating together I start to get a sense of translation that is not divisive in in in that way you know that that if we can kind of expand our definition our working definition of what translation can be then that then forms a good basis to kind of reapply it to translation when we're talking about inter-linguistic translation between two languages and and sort of approach it with with respect but without the kind of essentialism um but I don't really know how that can be transmitted in a kind of broader more more society-wide sense I guess um yeah and no apologies for the question that was it was great thank you I mean in in I think that in a sense that the translation as translation only really emerges when you when when you know you know you read the translation and it allows you access to this work but you're not aware of the translation because the translation is the medium through which you access the work but if you note the original text and you then read the translation then you suddenly realize the craft of translation and that's a it's a quite a different kind of reading yeah oh oh okay you know so it changes again the way you see the text yeah and and yeah the sort of visualizing it and and and it's this strange thing that we've done for so long in I think certainly English speaking countries of yeah kind of presenting translation as a sort of magic trick and not wanting to state it or state the name of the translator and you know all kind of hush hush but actually yes like you say and you know one of my favorite things is is parallel texts which I think a lot of translators find really intimidating as a prospect because it you know it immediately feels like people are going to be kind of picking holes but I think increasingly that's the direction that we need to move towards and and not not seeing them as you know the same thing or precise equivalents but but different versions right oh that's I think yes that's that's a really interesting I use as a child I used to love that I grew up in Switzerland and so we always add French German or English French or English German bilingual text and it was always the most amazing and they were many many footnotes so you could sort of check what expressions actually meant any more questions from the floor I think there's loads on there there's okay potentially I saw a big eight thing but then that might be oh no that's comments oh oh gosh yeah no no it's is anyone from the room I give you yes a bit more of a personal question I guess but in terms of um you're talking about identity and coming back to okay then it's written just kind of all of that was going to be who you are and who you are here in the UK how do you feel that being back in the UK and British person has shaped your translation in any way that's a really great question thank you um I think talking to people in a sort of daily way um while being here does help you know it's it's it's still wavering but it has helped to give me a firmer sense of kind of the average what the average person knows about Japanese culture um in terms of sort of both like terminology and more kind of conceptually speaking I suppose um and then the question is how far to kind of ignore that when when you're translating um um there's a there's a an article um written by the Korean translator Anton her um who was one of the three in the watson all um conference about um it's called the mythical English reader um which I'm sure many of you are familiar with but you know sort of like it's talking about this this kind of uniform this this trope of the the English reader who is the particularly editors at publishers will invoke as this kind of spectre to to as a reason why you can't kind of foreignize your translations or sort of include things that you know include too many words that are from the Japanese language um and and his take and my take as well is that you know readers do often like to be challenged or are up for a challenge are up for learning things and when we read books by native English writers there are generally many words that we don't know and people you know constantly have their phones by them and they can google things at any point anyway so what difference does it make and I do kind of subscribe to that um sorry I feel like I've gone off on a tangent I have gone off on a tangent um so come back to your question I'm not sure if it changes my translation in any other way than that at least that I'm conscious of but it's something that I'd like to think about thank you thank you so there's two more questions three more questions in the chat Jason Dannelly asks thank you I loved 50 sounds and hope to see you when you're in Oxford next my question you vividly describe what it's like for a language to get under the skin would you say that a translator must not only speak right speak slash write Japanese but feel in Japanese is there such a thing as Japanese feelings at least as much as there is a Japanese language you would not thank you for the question um I would not like to make prescriptions about what a translator needs to do um and I nor would I like to say whether or not there are Japanese feelings I I mean I one of my great fascinations is how different experiences but particularly kind of bodily and emotive states are classified in different across different languages right and and the sort of overlapping um you know I'm kind of picturing it like this huge chaos that we feel and and and and trying to kind of put that into to to different you know that sorry like an enormously 3D Venn diagram and yet as I'm saying that I'm already feeling like Wittgenstein would be cursing me from from I was about to say from above from below from all directions um because of course the kind of feelings that we express are shaped up shaped by the context in which we we grow up right and and I think I think all of that stuff is is is hugely rich and hugely um fertile grounds for for thinking and certainly being in Japan and seeing how people identified emotions and feelings um made me think much more kind of concisely about it gave me a lot of clarity not only about what was going on for them but also what I was doing in English when I named a feeling or um tried to describe that um I I guess in summary it's massively massively massively complex and I've sort of would need to write another book about it and still then it would probably not be very coherent you'll look forward to that next book but also it reminds me of Quentin Christ who already said in you know in in the 50s in the naked civil servant that human beings rarely restrict themselves to the emotions that they're entitled to and it's sort of a nice sense in which yeah the normative aspect to that this is what you're allowed to feel but actually we feel all kinds of things that may may even remain nameless there's there's one more question um from from Ron Burt could probably speak to the nuance of translating regional Japanese dialect Ben many thanks yes um so the the old guard of translation theory I suppose was not theory but translational practice was that you know if you were dealing with a regional dialect in whatever language you're working from Japanese then you know naturally you should put it into a regional dialect in English and and so if you're translating Osaka Ben it should go into you know it should become Manchester um for example um and and you know and this has been done um this has been done the flaws with that approach are I would say relatively obvious that's you know Osaka is a very particular place with geographical peculiarities um and cultural peculiarities and so is Manchester and some of the you know there may be correlates that that exist and similarities but you know by implanting in the reader you know but by giving the reader kind of the vibe of Manchester you are potentially suggesting more far more of a correlation than if that exists there and which may be radically inappropriate in some way so the kind of prevailing translation nor or trend now is um not to do that um so then the question becomes right how you've got this incredibly flavourful nuance rich dialect how do you a translate all the informational content that is transmitted through that I'm not talking about in terms of what's being said specifically so much as like the particular context that will be immediately obvious to a Japanese reader reading that um and B how do you convey the um the the well everything the character the fun the the joy the the levity the sarcasm whatever it is in in you know that that's that's conveyed in that um in the Japanese and and I've heard various different translators talking about their method for doing that um Ginny Tappi Takumori who translated um convenience store woman often says that what she does is make make her own kind of English sounding in dialect in English that is not specifically tied to a place um so it's conveying some of the whatever she feels from the Japanese but doesn't have the problem of being clearly Yorkshire or Manchester or Scotland or whatever um it's something that I wrestle with a lot and it's something that comes up again and again there's a character from Osaka in um there's no such thing as an easy job and Alcomatzida uses a lot of different kinds of dialects um I can't reveal my personal secrets but I think I think what I would say is just the same thing that I always say is it's not actually that different from other kinds of translation in that you are finding a voice that works um and sometimes what it means is finding a voice that works and then adding in through other roots the additional information that this character is from Kansai or or whatever you know something that would be obvious to the Japanese readership um but yeah it it's a perpetually you know it's one of the the hardest aspects of being a translator I suppose right thank you very much any last questions if not please join me in thanking Polly Barton thank you very much for coming it's a really very animated and fun talk um all of you here please return next week um again no now suddenly we complained about the um the events page it should all the future events should come up and now 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