Those Who Write Imaginatively Must Be Prepared to Face a Firing Squad
Morgan Giles (U.K.)
Translators cannot be monogamous in a literary sense; we must have room in our hearts for many writers and many styles. I am always drawn to the wild children of literature, the ones who write unruly books that don’t fit neatly into a category.
So naturally I’ve translated Yu Miri, the rebel dropout who relishes her connection with the outcasts of society. Her work first grabbed me by chance, in a second-hand Japanese bookshop in London; the titles stood out on the shelves: Suicide, Men, Life. I bought a handful and started reading them on the bus home and knew instantly that I had to translate her work. In translating The End of August, her epic tour de force spanning almost a century of Korean and Japanese history, I saw the true breadth of her abilities—she does Joyce, Dostoyevsky, John Dos Passos, all at the same time in two languages, and she makes it look effortless. She is unafraid to bring herself and the other forms she’s worked with—namely, the theatre—into her fiction, and it is all the better for it. Along with her refusal to look away from those who don’t belong anywhere in this world, her dedication to literary experimentation has been nearly the only constant in her career.
And I’ve worked with Furukawa Hideo, that shamanistic magical realist who painstakingly carves his own path. Though much of his work is untranslated in English still, there’s some good reason: his recent novel, given the English title FFFForesTTTT, is one of few books I would say is dancing on the edge of being untranslatable. Furukawa plays against the limits of language in a way that is exhilarating; to read one of his books is to place yourself in the hands of a master who can bend language at his will. An example: one character in FFFForesTTTT is Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, sort of. He appears as a man who has forgotten everything, and “Marquez” is written as 丸消須 (“marukesu”) —“all has been erased”. How does a translator into English, our beautiful but textually-impoverished language, begin to replicate that effect? Answer: you can’t, so the task is to find your own way through the woods of linguistics to arrive at a new way of wordplay. Furukawa asks of a translator no less than he asks of himself.
Still, though we may try to treat all our loves equally, inevitably we find there is such a thing as primus inter pares, and since the moment I first read him, Takahashi Gen’ichiro has held that place in my affections.
Perhaps unlike the other two mentioned above, his novels are quite easy to read—though some might disagree. I once recommended his books to a class of British students studying the Japanese language. The professor was horrified. “Mr. Takahashi’s novels are too difficult for students,” she admonished me. I wonder where she got that idea. Because Takahashi in fact seems to share a philosophy of writing with one of my other long-time loves: Yamazaki Nao-cola. Yamazaki puts it beautifully: “I want to write something that no one else can write, in words that anyone can understand.”
It’s hard to imagine who else could have written Sayonara Gangsters, so far the only novel of his to be translated into English by Michael Emmerich. “Listen, are you a gangster or a poet?” The language is simple—it’s the ideas that are something else: a society where lovers name each other, where gangsters are celebrities who never die, where rivers run on the sixth floors of buildings, where we are warned upon entry to the Poetry School: “Those Who Write Imaginatively Must Be Prepared to Face a Firing Squad.”
Literature in translation pushes at the boundaries of our language and what we believe the novel can do. It teaches us new ways of seeing and thinking, of engaging with the world. For me, “telling a story” is too simple a goal for fiction; humanity has been doing that since before writing existed. I am not interested in stories for their own sake. It is what an author does with them—breaking the form, expanding the language, inventing new ways of layering meaning—that makes me love them. And this spirit is so alive and well in Japanese literature that when all the world looks dull and diminished, I know there are still new possibilities left in it. Here’s to the troublemakers, the disobedient ones who refuse to be cowed by what has gone before. Literature is dead; long live literature!
Glossary for translator:
- Those Who Write Imaginatively Must Be Prepared to Face a Firing Squad - 「想像でものを書くものは銃殺刑を覚悟せよ」
- Morgan Giles – モーガン・ジャイルズ
- Yu Miri – 柳美里
- Suicide, Men, Life - 『自殺』『男』『命』
- The End of August - 『８月の果て』
- Furukawa Hideo – 古川日出男
- FFFForesTTTT - 『おおきな森』
- Takahashi Gen’ichiro – 高橋源一郎
- Yamazaki Nao-cola – 山崎ナオコーラ
- I want to write something that no one else can write, in words that anyone can understand.” - 「誰にでもわかる言葉で、誰にも書けない文章を書く」
- Sayonara Gangsters - 『さようなら、ギャングたち』
- “Listen, are you a gangster or a poet?” -「あなた、ギャングなの？詩人なの？」
- The Poetry School - 詩の学校
(Literary Translator)