How all occasions do inform against me

[flemmings]

I've been vaguely aware for the last six months or so of people saying WA4, oh where is the translation of WA4, does anyone have a translation of WA4? to which I respond FINGERS IN EARS LALALA I DON'T HEAR YOU. The trouble with WA4? It has this important untranslatable word I can't decide how to translate. The word might well be the 'kotodama' 言霊 that shows up on the third page of the story. The spirit/ soul of words and how saying a thing can make it real and a bunch of related animistic Japanese ideas. Except kotodama isn't the problem word. It's the 'tsumaranai' that also shows up on the third page and that I couldn't translate without a footnote so it's easier not to.

Equally I was desultorily translating a Yumemakura story but couldn't bring myself to go back to it. Partly a problem of how to phrase a longish quote from Konjaku Monogatari in middle English to parallel the medieval Japanese of the original and *not* sound idiotic when I translate Yumemakura's modern Japanese paraphrase right afterwards, and partly because translating = yuck boring and-besides-my-teeth-hurt. (They do. It does. Whichever. Ow ow ow.)

To digress a moment: so kickinpants gave me a manga for Christmas. Ze. 是. I wasn't quite sure why at first. Read the first few lines of the back cover blurb. Standard BL. Read half the first chapter. Fruits Basket on BL crack: innocent naif with domestic skills comes to live in a house of assorted males some of whom are related to each other, others of whom seem not to be, all of whom are paired up and making out publicly and is the one inflatable-doll type female really a female or is it a new half or something, cause screwable females are an oddity in BL. But anyway, FB plus m/m sex, OK, and the apparent head of the family even dresses like Shigure. I put it aside for later and went back to the mundanities of Second Taiki.

Today I read the second half of ch.1. I... really can't tell you about the second half. It's probably not safe anyway, cause who knows what further switches she'll pull in chs 2, 3 and 4. But what should happen to pop up in here but kotodama, followed a page or so later by onmyou. So OK. The Flow nudges me. I shall translate WA4. I shall finish translating that Yumemakura. They'll provide some relief for the really really WEIRD doings in Ze. There's nothing like thinking you're in an ordinary BL manga and then having a character's arm fly off and land in the chafing dish, and when his distressed lover flies to his side, have the character say 'Get it out of the pot before it burns.'

Comments

[franzeska]

That sounds like an... interesting manga.


What footnote would you put on 'tsumaranai' if you went the footnoting direction?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

The background: a little boy is asked what he dreams of being when he grows up. 'A section chief,' he says. 'Tsumaranai yume' his teacher replies. He feels her judgment has cursed him ever afterwards to be a tsumaranai ningen, and when a prostitute calls him tsumaranai hito (because he won't try a drug she's brought) he goes berserk.

The dialogue is all colloquial in tone so I can't make it 'commonplace' 'undistinguished' 'petty' 'trivial' or any of the other words that express the sentiment. 'Nothing much' is closest but I have to use the word as an adjective, so that's out. I suppose I have to translate it as 'dull' but I'd footnote to say there's these other meanings of smallness and ordinariness and triviality that aren't expressed by 'dull.'

[franzeska]

Yeah, I see the problem. You couldn't change the sentence structure?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Not really. It's straightforward 'tsumaranai yume nee' seguing into a repeated tsumaranai hito/otona etc. The word has to be repeated and repeatable to have the right force.

Also my translations are partly intended to help people learning Japanese puzzle out how the sentences work, so I don't rephrase the way I would if I were doing a polished translation. (The uselessness of polished translations was established to my satisfaction when I was trying to get some sense out of the highly colloquial Latin in Roman comedy. I couldn't, and the published translations seemed to have nothing to do with the text before my eyes.)

[shiny-monkey.livejournal.com]

Useless/pointless is how I usually translate it mentally; the implication being that there's no point to something tsumaranai. But you know my Japanese sucks.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

But you can't say That's a useless dream or You're a pointless man. A workaround might be possible, but the whole point of the story is the kotodama- the power of a single word to change reality- so one can't change it to fit context.

[shiny-monkey.livejournal.com]

Why can't you say it's a useless dream? A pointless man, you wouldn't say, I agree; but useless dreams?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Because useless has connotations of 'having no practical application' or even 'unattainable' ('it's useless to dream that.') But the point of the teacher's comment is that the dream (= ambition) is petty, mundane, dismissable. Told that his greatest ambition is tsumaranai, the boy turns into a tsumaranai adult- undistinguished, commonplace, limited, incapable of any largeness of spirit or action: a mediocrity. When taunted by the prostitute that he is indeed a tsumaranai hito, he reacts with violence, out of rage at what he feels is the destiny of mediocrity the teacher cursed him with. It's not his uselessness, it's his smallness, that's at point.

[shiny-monkey.livejournal.com]

Worthless, kana?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Still emphasizes the value as opposed to the smallness. This may be an immutable bias in current colloquial English. Useless, worthless, I'm not buying that- all reflections of a functionalist and consumer approach.

We approach ambitions in terms of how achievable they are and what the end product will get you. is this a relaistic ambition or not? The Japanese (or let's say, the world presented in Japanese manga) is back in the 19th century mindset with a focus on greatness of soul. The objective fact that greatness of soul is at odds with life in modern Japan, that there's no point in saying Boys be ambitious! though the Japanese love to say it, and that that old standby of karaoke My Way doesn't apply to the way society works there, is something that strikes only an outsider. (We have our own self-contradictions that seem natural to us, that don't get registered until you're an outsider. People still believe in The American Way. Alas.)

[shiny-monkey.livejournal.com]

Americans do. Being someone without genuine ambition, I can't speak for either way.

But English as a language has for a long time been function-centred. It's evolved from a combination of languages thrust upon various people by various invading people, whereas Japan had slightly fewer invasions (none, if you listen to the fundamentalist announcement trucks going by. According to them, Japan evolved in a bubble, separate from the rest of Earth, and was deposited whole in the sea right before evil America invaded); and even if current Western society wasn't focused on value, the English words themselves still point to function over greatness of soul. Would you have the same problem translating into French, I wonder?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Boring is the translation most people will give you for tsumaranai. This gets you into difficulty with the set gift-giving phrase 'Tsumaranai mono desu ga...' which does not mean 'This is just a boring thing.' It's a thing without much value, 'nothing much'.

Which is why I don't think the teacher was saying What a boring ambition to the kid: 'your dream fails to interest me'- and I don't think the sudden realization that he was an uninteresting person was what drove him to violence: Oh my god! I'm not interesting! I must kill this woman who's called me a bore!' Surely it's the realization of his life-long mediocrity and, well, failure to be anything much, that's the sore point?

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

Right off the top of my head . . . "Mundane" or "quotidian" or "pedestrian" or "unimaginative," I'd think. But I don't think these words are part of a normal vocabulary.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Pedestrian, mmhh... But no. A common problem in Japanese, I find- their commonplace is our high level and/or ridiculously Victorian.

[kickinpants.livejournal.com]

I personally would go with boring since it's a simple word that equals the meaning, and it's believable that both the teacher and Rika would use it. The mirroring the language is important since it sets off Shimada (I think that's his name) and his crazy belief that his teacher cursed him and thus, that's the reason why he is the way he is.

Ze is fun and very unexpected. I like a lot of Shimizu Yuki's works since she's really good at focusing on and developing different people and making them interesting, even if you didn't think they were before. (She does this a lot in Love Mode and in Ze. Asari, who gets more of the spotlight later in book 1, is a lot of fun.) I wasn't a big fan of her Recipe book, but mostly because the obsession part was pretty dark.