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 Asian 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.

“There can ever be a one-to-one correspondence between the Japanese and the English”. When a foreign text is brought into another culture, it has to be adapted in many ways to make sense to local readers. For instance, the subtle levels of intimacy expressed by Japanese terms like “-san” and “-kun” can be lost when they are simply translated into “Ms.” or “Mr.”. Gabriel also highlights that Stoicism in Japanese culture causes certain climaxes to be very low-key, and he had to underscore scenes for an American audience. Although the purpose of translation is to help people understand another culture, that culture can also be altered in the process.

I also had rarely thought about how book covers and publication order can shape our understanding of a writer. Emmerich mentions the series of covers Chip Kidd designed for Murakami’s books, as well as the different publication timing of Norwegian Wood in Japan and the United States. I found this detail especially interesting because it shows that our image of a writer does not come only from the words themselves. We encounter a writer through a larger cultural and commercial environment: what the book looks like, when it is published, which book is translated first, and who translates it can all shape the “author” we eventually see.

This also made me reflect more deeply on why I study foreign languages. As someone who has studied English for many years and has been learning Japanese in recent years, I am increasingly realizing that learning the original language is not only about “understanding the author more accurately”. It is also about discovering what translation changes. Sometimes the tone, distance, or cultural associations of a word in Japanese cannot be fully carried into Chinese or English. If I only read translations, I might think that what I am reading is the author’s original voice. Learning the original language makes me more aware of how that voice has been extracted, filtered, and transformed before it reaches me. Realizing that my understanding of an author is shaped and guided by these processes is valuable.

So what is real? Maybe we can never reach an author without any form of mediation. The Murakami we see might be Murakami in Japanese, Murakami in an English translation, or Murakami shaped by book covers, the publishing market, and reader culture. Each version is not necessarily false, but no single version can completely represent the author. Perhaps that is what makes literary translation so interesting.