Egg salad
So when a Murakami character makes himself an egg salad sandwich, Japanese readers are going to feel something a little different from what American readers are going to feel about it […] The fact that the word “sandwich” is written in a phonetic script reserved for recording foreign terms, that the Japanese reader’s eye travels vertically down the page to take in that word and the other words of the sentence, that the Japanese word for “cut” has a tiny picture of a sword in it…
It went like this. Stanton sent me a link to this article that made me smile and that came via the wonderful wood’s lot, who I’m so glad to see is back to overwhelming us with information, and who in turn pointed me to this lovely discovery, which led me to this round table discussion on translating Murakami.
… the Japanese language is not processed in either hemisphere of the brain but in the left elbow, which makes for a certain calcification of style in literary works, but no translator has yet figured out how to convey this in a foreign language.
And to think some people still consider Ezra Pound a translator. Yeesh.
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