On Translating Mishima

Boris Akunin, delivering the annual Sebald Lecture:

You see, Mishima is not a clever author, most of his ideas about life and society would leave you uninterested. Neither is he an especially gifted builder of plots. The story isn’t his forte. With Mishima, the nuances are more important than the ideas he advances; Shade means so much more than Light. But his narration is so elegant, his style so powerful, that it makes up for the banalities and showing-off. There is plenty of shallowness in Mishima’s works, but strangely it only increases the impression of genuineness and beauty. It turns into a melody that I can always hear when I am reading Mishima.

In the English translation this melody was silent.

The saddest disappointments were the descriptions of nature. Mishima is famous for his “landscapes”. Everybody knows that describing skies, meadows and mountains is the hardest thing in modern fiction. It usually looks so unnecessary, so pretentious, so boring. I always miss out those bits when reading. When writing I keep to the golden rule: the shorter the better. “It was raining”, “the sky was cloudy” – and that’s it.

Not so with Mishima. You can actually see what he describes, and landscape is always an important part of his narration. His descriptions of nature can be quite long, but you are never bored.

How does he achieve this, I wondered. And how can I reproduce this effect in translation?

I remember how I tried to translate a fragment describing a sea view from “Kinkakuji”. I did it several times, each time differently, and still I was not satisfied. (There was no deadline, you remember). Then I understood that the secret lay in the sounds. The passage had to be read aloud. It was like a mantra, the combination of sounds and words – the trick was to capture this combination, not the meaning.

And when I translated the passage again, making it sound like a mantra in Russian too, I liked the result.

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. Yukio Mishima — William Vollmann After reading Vollmann’s The Royal Family, and being extremely impressed, I decided to check out some of his literary influences, one of which is Japanese...
2. 900 Pages on Yukio Mishima Stone Bridge Press has released Persona, billed as the first biography of Yukio Mishima in English by a Japanese biographer. There’s an excerpt on the...
3. Mishima–After the Head Came Off On my pile is Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatín (just published by City Lights). Definitely sounds like an interesting writer: In Mr. Bellatin’s most recent...
4. Translating the Bible Wow. A hugely interesting article on a new translation of the Hebrew Bible: Robert Alter’s ongoing translation of the Hebrew Bible into a new, more...
5. Heather Cleary on Translating Chejfec Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets is just out in Heather Cleary’s translation. Chejfec is a bit of a strange author to translate, since his prose is...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.