Lost Japan
Saturday, December 20th, 2008 10:33 amReading Alex Kerr's Lost Japan, a book someone gave me almost a decade ago. (Time works different after 50. It bothers me more than I can say.)
The book irks me less this time than it did when I first tried it. Then, I think, my problem was that it was *so* different from westerners' books about Japan that I couldn't deal with it. Kerr wrote it in Japanese and someone else translated it, and it read like translated-from-the-Japanese normally does, which is flat and a little... off. IME English and Japanese do different things, as languages per se, and stuff that we unthinkingly expect to find in English isn't there in Japanese. This is fine as long as one is reading in Japanese, because the resonance comes from other things, but put it into English and it's a little like having all the tenses missing, or the articles. Something very basic just isn't there.
( Read more... )
The book irks me less this time than it did when I first tried it. Then, I think, my problem was that it was *so* different from westerners' books about Japan that I couldn't deal with it. Kerr wrote it in Japanese and someone else translated it, and it read like translated-from-the-Japanese normally does, which is flat and a little... off. IME English and Japanese do different things, as languages per se, and stuff that we unthinkingly expect to find in English isn't there in Japanese. This is fine as long as one is reading in Japanese, because the resonance comes from other things, but put it into English and it's a little like having all the tenses missing, or the articles. Something very basic just isn't there.
( Read more... )
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