9/14: Readings Are We Really Reading the Writer Himself?
After this week’s reading, I started to rethink a question I had never seriously considered before: when we read the work of a foreign writer, are we really reading the writer himself? I used to think of translation quite simply as changing one language into another. Though the words translators use might vary , I assumed the core of the work would remain the same. However, Emmerich finds “the Murakami who appears in English to be a totally different writer from Murakami in Japanese” . East Asia n students see Murakami as “lonely” and “healing,” while Americans describe his work as “realistic” or even “ difficult to read ” . This made me realize that there may not be one fixed version of the “Murakami world” . Readers from different languages and cultures are actually creating their own Murakamis. I started to wonder what creates these parallel worlds of Murakami. “T here can ever be a one-to-one correspondence between the Japanese and the English ” . When a foreign text is br...