HARUKI MURAKAMI

 

Haruki Murakami has just been awarded the Spanish Princesa de Asturias premio a las Letras (€50,000). On one of her recent visits from San Francisco, my daughter Laura left behind for me to read, Murakami´s Norwegian Wood. I read and liked it but it left in me a funny feeling, a sensation that something was amiss, that something was faux. Jay Rubin, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities Emeritus at Harvard University, is Murakami´s main translator into English. Most of my readings in world literature are in translation because, except for three, I ignore all the other 6,500 languages spoken on Earth. I cannot compare Professor Rubin´s rendering from the Japanese and must accept his translation as good. His English is spotless, of course, and I could understand the novel well. No problems. Yet, there was something missing, something faux in his translation. The characters did not seem Japanese to me, they did not sound Japanese. I was given the impression that the young people in the narrative were Americans, Americans in New York, not Tokyo. Did Professor Rubin go too far in his translation? I feel he has Americanized the Japanese world of Murakami. If an American author had written the same novel, just as Jay Rubin presents it, we would understand. He would have been looking in from the outside. This translation is a looking out from the inside.