nnozomi | Entries tagged with miura translation

First draft of pseudo-romance-novel translation finished! (I've posted about it before but I really should make a tag for it, let's do that.) This is translation for fun rather than for work, it's a book by Miura Shion called The Seven-Day Romance Novel which I'm very fond of.

The book is narrated by Akari, a translator who has a seven-day deadline to turn out the Japanese version of a very standard, boring pseudo-medieval romance novel. She starts off dutifully rendering it into suitable cod-medieval Japanese, but then her own personal life starts interfering, including her happy-go-lucky boyfriend Kanna and his sudden off-the-wall life decisions, pretty Masami, a neighborhood friend who seems extremely fond of Kanna, and Akari's father, who has inconsiderately broken his arm and is demanding household help. Akari's translation starts veering further and further away from the original in response, and the deadline keeps getting closer.... The text alternates chapters of the "romance novel" with chapters from Akari's point of view, and it's way too much fun both to read her salty narrative voice and to watch her (or rather Miura) playing with tropes in both contexts.

Surprisingly short; my rough draft amounts to just over 51K, does that even count as a novel in formal terms? (For fun I did the math on the rough character count of the romance-novel chapters, and concluded that the seven-day deadline is not actually especially unreasonable as a professional assignment, assuming they're not expecting deathless prose.) I feel a little guilty for a) taking MUCH longer than seven days to translate the whole thing lol, and b) for having done my best to translate it faithfully, I feel like it would only be in the spirit of the book for me to mess with the plot/characters in turn. On the other hand, Miura is unquestionably a better author than the fictional one she's spoofing, so less messing with is needed.

Next step, to revise it, ugh, I hate revision whether it's translation or original writing. (My immediate instinct is: there are lots of other books I want to translate, why can't I just move on instantly to one of those?) The medieval parts do need to be more Medieval in tone, though (although authenticity not required), and there are various minor inconsistencies and infelicities throughout that definitely need dealing with.

If it ever does get revised properly, I guess the next step would be to figure out how to get it published, oh dear oh dear.

Re current events

Same like before, I’d like this (my particular corner of DW, not complaining about other people’s) to be a place I can think about other things than US politics etc. etc. I’m trying not to be an ostrich, I don’t want to know everything that’s going on but I do want to do what I can; if you think there’s something I should be doing, let me know about it. Otherwise, to quote Tove Jansson, “…if rocket-propelled missiles are eventually going to blow us to smithereens along with everything we’ve done, I want to be as calm and happy as I can now and work in peace.” (Kenahora I don’t think the immediate issue is rocket-propelled missiles, but mutatis mutandis.)

I’m sorry about all the posts I haven’t managed to comment on; like I said, if you’ve posted I’ve read it and thought of you, for what it’s worth. Will try to be better from here on.

Visited my mother last month for a week or two; stressful for reasons that are no one’s fault, but could have been worse. Apart from seeing my mom and eating (way too many) delicious things, some of the good moments included buying a couple pairs of reasonably priced jeans in a great hurry without trying them on, guessing wildly at the size (I don’t understand US sizes any more, if I ever did), and finding that they fit almost perfectly; getting to meet a DW friend in person and hang out for a leisurely chat, a rare and lucky coincidence of travel timing; hearing a performance of the spectacular Bartók piano quintet, one of those where-has-this-piece-been-all-my-life moments (the program said it’s an early piece influenced by Brahms, no wonder I liked it so much); and on the way to the airport to go home, finding out that the cab driver hailed from Shanghai and getting to chat in Chinese for an hour (he was very patient with my terrible pronunciation, and apart from some regional words like the Chinese transcription of the local Chinatown neighborhood, I actually understood him okay).

Latest farmboy Chinese vocabulary:
薰衣草: lavender (as in the plant)
美滋滋: delighted, thrilled, on cloud nine
如释重负: relieved at having set down a burden or fulfilled a responsibility
有难度吗: what, like it’s hard?
私吞: to embezzle (literally, to swallow privately)
饭撒: This word delights me. It’s made up of 饭, food, and 撒, to scatter/discharge/distribute, so it literally means “scattering food” (think feeding birds, etc.); the two characters are pronounced fànsā, so that in both content and sound they approximate their English meaning: fanservice.

Writing and translation: I think I was right to let my Yuletide assignment percolate quietly away in the back of my brain for a while; today I discovered I have a plot outline which feels like it should be writable in…maybe 3-4K? Very self-indulgent indeed but also in line with my recipient’s requests, so knock wood it should work out.
Original thing also proceeding, very very slowly but still on the rails, and I’m more pleased with the most recent part when I read it over than I was when I was writing it. I don’t know why I’m still having so much trouble giving AGENCY to A, though. Maybe because she doesn’t know exactly what she wants to do either? I’m doing my level best right now to help her figure it out…
Still playing with bits of Chinese translation and working on the Japanese pseudo-romance novel: I’m surprised at how short it is, I don’t think it’s going to come out to more than 50K-odd in rough draft. It’s so fun to do, though. I could get addicted to this sort of thing.

Reading: A new YA novel in Japanese by Hamano Kyoko, whose work I generally enjoy—airy and sweet, with a sad edge but hopeful endings, and more or less avoiding the pestilential Japan Sentimental tendencies which so many writers are prone to. This one is basically Feminism 101, Japanese context, for middle schoolers, through the medium of three ninth-grade girls and their respective single mothers; it gets quite didactic at points (I am not the intended reader, on account of I already know what power harassment and mansplaining are, among other things), but manages to hang on to the realness of the characters enough to be a good read. Would really like to know what actual teenage readers make of it.
Rereading, for the first time in quite a few years, Marilyn Hacker’s novel-in-sonnets Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, about finding and losing a new love; I’m an unthoughtful and uneducated poetry reader, I read everything like it was prose, but there are so many delicious lines. “I can’t say, ‘When you coming over?’ yet./Until we get at where we’re going to,/I need as much hugging as I can get.” “It’s what in this bright world I would like best:/Your mind on my mind; your breasts on my breasts.” “’Mom, how come things never are/as good as I could make them up to be?’/’There’s still ice cream on the Île Saint-Louis!’” “Baby, the rain must, April rain must fall/--and I would just as soon stay home and wait/the storm out, wait for you to get to me/your way.” “What’s happened to your letters? Is the mail/clerk in love with you and hoarding them/to read, herself, in bed at 5 AM?”

Photos: A cat on watch over its colleagues’ naptime (do they take it in turns?), a very old ad uncovered by construction, a tipsy drunk-hibiscus, some berry things, some turtles and reflections, a shrine (between the building, the camphor tree, and the kimono lady this photo turned out almost stereotypically Japanesque, but I just like the windows), another view of the camphor tree plus the edge of a torii, and a full moon with bonus train station.

Be safe and well.

I didn’t sign up for the Guardian Wishlist this year, but I did have a lot of fun with the many lovely things in the collection, and also wrote four short fics because I couldn’t resist; many thanks to trobadora and china_shop and everyone else for making it happen.

Latest Chinese vocabulary from the farmboys:

一筹莫展 at wits’ end, hitting a wall, up a creek without a paddle
个鬼 stuck onto words, verbs in particular, to indicate “my ass,” “the hell I will,” etc. (I’m glad this one snuck under the wire of the cursing allowed on the show, on account of it’s fun)
么么哒 mwah!, onomatopoeia for a kiss
社恐 short for 社会恐惧症, social phobia/social anxiety, but used colloquially to refer to general shyness/social awkwardness
呼噜 to snore (also to purr, if you’re a cat)
冰溜子 an icicle

Other Chinese-related bits and pieces. Dumb joke (actually doesn’t work in Chinese) for the day: so if someone made a version of the farmboy show that was just the same except in a xianxia setting, would they be cultivators practicing cultivation?
Today’s Chinese/Japanese confusion: me staring at 床の上 and thinking blankly “on the floor? on the bed? ???”. Solution: as long as the の is there it’s probably “on the floor,” if it’s just 床上 it’s probably “on the bed.” Goddamn 假朋友.
Serious question. In English (or in Chinese, for that matter), is there a simple way to refer to “people who sing in Sinophone languages/dialects” that isn’t linguistically/geopolitically difficult? I mean, if I’m talking about Zhou Shen I will say “a Chinese singer” without demur, but what happens when I add in, for instance, A-Mei, Wu Qingfeng, Stefanie Sun, Li Hao, Jike Junyi, Ayanga, Karen Mok…who cover a range of ethnicities/language groups/nationalities for which “Chinese” alone doesn’t seem sufficient, but what’s the alternative? “C-pop” seems awfully vague. Per a-Pei, “Chinese singers” would work when talking to mainlanders but wouldn’t fly with people from Taiwan or Singapore. “Sinophone singers” is kind of awkward (also elen pointed out that “Sinophone band” sounds like somebody invented a new instrument, as in “oh, cool, you played the sinophone in high school too?”). Ideas?

Japanese translation headaches: do I let these characters say “jeez”? I wouldn’t have them say “Jesus Christ” or “oh my God” (interestingly, I might feel okay about using “oh my God” for a text originally in Chinese/a fic for a cdrama, etc., having literally heard people say 我的老天爷 more than once, but the same does not apply in Japanese), but then again “gee” is also (I think?) derived from the same place and it certainly wouldn’t bother me. Where does the line fall?
Chinese translation headaches: in a word, or three, fucking sibling words! 哥 and 姐 in particular are so often used and so flexible that trying to come up with alternatives that do the same job and sound natural is a pain in the ass.
Original stuff: I’ve just hit 30K, which is about right for where I am in my outline; progress has been very slow because I keep putting off writing until the very last thing at night when I’m already sleepy, so I just want to hit my minimum and go to bed. I do not need to do that! I have time in my day I could use for it! but somehow I don’t. Currently I am listening to A asking all the people in her life weird questions and waiting to see what she’s going to do with the answers she gets, since I don’t know either.

I love academics with a sense of humor. Encountered for a work thing, the English-language website of a Peking University|北大 professor whose pocket bio reads “Ruixuan Chen is a man from Middle Earth. He seems to have received some education, and claims to have discovered something – but the details remain obscure and suspect. Little is known of his early life, even the last character of his given name is an issue of dispute. He is now working in Beijing as a translator of Buddhist texts from arcane languages. When he procrastinates, he considers himself a gourmet (de gustibus non est disputandum).”

Rereading Gregory Rabassa’s memoir of a career in literary translation from Spanish and Portuguese, which is very funny and occasionally thought-provoking.

“Then there are those people…who assert that God’s name is, in fact, Howard, as in ‘Our Father which art in Heaven, Howard be thy name.’ I can’t see how anyone could be an atheist with a God named Howard and it also might explain why the universe is such a mixed-up place.”
“There were two types of parlance that I encountered in the army. The first was official military-speak, which to my still-civilian ear seemed backwards and silly, as in ‘gloves wool olive-drab.’ The second was soldier-speak, much more colorful and inventive… I remember the posted outcome of some court-martial proceedings that combined the two aspects into a delightful linguistic merger. It seems that a soldier had been brought up on charges of insubordination and the specific charge said in part ‘…and upon being reprimanded by Sgt. [So-and-So] did call Sgt. [So-and-So] a mother-fucking son-of-a-bitch or words to that effect.’ The intriguing problem is trying to ascertain what other words might have had that same effect.”
“I’ve tried to figure out if [knowing an author personally] is of any help for a translator beyond direct questions, whether a sense of nearness lets me hear the voice of these particular people as I interpret their words. If I am the translator I am supposed to be, it really shouldn’t make any difference and yet I do hear their voices along with their personal pronunciations and intonations. This is that misty world of translation that is hard to describe.”
(Also Rabassa employs the neologism “tauroscatic” (referring to a particular manner of speech) which I find delightful.)

Photos: Bad smartphone photo of the full moon celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival dramatically; more morning-glories (no, my chili pepper plant is not actually blooming with morning glories, it just looks like it; more crepe myrtle and something else pink; a summer maple; a dinosaur in a company window; and the weirdest vending machine I’ve seen yet, which promises to squeeze you a glass of fresh orange juice on the spot.

Be safe and well.

I’m in one of those Brahms things where I went and listened to the Second Symphony and now I have to keep listening to it over and over again because nothing else will do. It’s one of my all-time top five symphonies anyway, the happy-ending one as opposed to Brahms Four (also in my top five), the first and fourth movements are so joyous and the second movement is so painful and lovely, how am I supposed to move on to anything else?
(But I do listen to non-Brahms things occasionally. I’ve posted this one before, a double feature of “Meditação” and “Barato Total,” two totally different but both fabulous Brazilian songs; this version is a chorus of college kids recording (maybe during the pandemic) at home, so you can enjoy their faces and one girl’s cat into the bargain.)

Y and I went to a fancy cake shop the other day, partly for the cakes and partly because it’s in a beautiful old building (see photos below). Instead of giving you a menu, they bring you a tray of delicious cakes to select from, maybe twenty varieties, very hard to choose. The young man sitting alone at the table next to us had made it easier for himself by ordering FIVE cakes instead of one, and was eating his way peacefully through them, unhurried. I mean, there are obviously health-type reasons for not doing that on the regular, but damn would I like to have the nerve to say “I”ll have that one AND that one AND…”. I think the next time I’m afraid of what people might think, I’ll tell myself to remember the five-cakes guy.

Chinese: this week’s farmboy vocabulary (one is actually from a fic I was reading instead, but I suspect the farmboys use it too at some point):
夸人 to praise someone (potentially over and above the facts)
嘎嘎香 slang for “delicious”
晦气 unlucky, suffering from bad luck
插队 to cut in line
书签 a bookmark
~归～ similar to ~是~ (same word front and back in both cases), something like “for all ~ is the case…” (this one is so much easier to express in Japanese)

I saw somewhere—it must have been in one of the blessed Wenella’s interview videos, but I don’t remember which one—that the alien language in Zhu Yilong’s new film was made by modifying Chaozhouhua|Teochew|潮州话, on account of there were a bunch of Teochew speakers among the production staff? Somebody please find out more about this—I want to know what they did!

If you remember I posted a while back about the Miura Shion novel I’m translating, very slowly, for my own amusement, and boy am I amused; I’d forgotten what a fun book it is. Under a tight deadline, Akari keeps messing with the pseudo-medieval romance novel she’s translating into Japanese, giving the minor character she’s fallen for more to do and making the heroine less passive; meanwhile she’s dealing in real life with her grumpy father and laid-back boyfriend and…
Here's a scene (very rough draft) where her boyfriend is reading her translation-in-progress. Not really NSFW but kind of? ( Read more... ) And a paragraph from Akari’s visit to the local baths after Kanna demonstrates his prowess as romance hero. ( Read more... ) In which I find myself doing to Akari (just a little) what she’s doing to her romance novel; she just says “thinking about that kind of thing,” but I couldn’t resist making it “mind full of vocabulary and breasts.”

I have actually gotten a (perhaps temporary) position with a local amateur orchestra playing the bassoon; given that I’ve been practicing a couple years now, I am just amazingly terrible at it, but they’re very patient. It’s fun! My mouth gets tired and also my left wrist gets tired because playing sitting down is hard, and the number of wrong notes and not-there-at-all notes and fortissimo pianos and God knows what I’ve produced is appalling, but the view from the woodwind section is neat. The thing with the bassoon, unlike the string section, is that you’re either playing your own part with nobody else doing it or you’re in unison with one other person, both of which, as a bit of a closet exhibitionist, I find an interesting challenge. Let’s see if I can tame these damn C-sharps and pianissimo low notes by October.

Photos: assorted sarusuberi, assorted elegant old stairwells, some flowers that made me think of a grapefruit assortment, a hibiscus tree (?), and some sheet music created by power lines and an out-of-season weeping cherry.

Be safe and well.

Recent good things:
· My morning glories got carried away today and produced two dozen blooms all at once, a few lavender and the rest purple-spotted (see photos). I have no idea what their standard of timing is, but it was a nice thing to wake up to.
· Reading fic in Chinese and getting so absorbed in it I almost missed the train (not going into detail about the fic for reasons, but man, that was one of the best hugs I’ve come across in fiction in a while)
· Semi-homemade Thai green curry (curry paste etc. from a kit, plus chicken and shiitake and bamboo shoots and baby corn and a whole lot of eggplant) with a homegrown habanero thrown in for mellow high heat
· Actually getting to like most of Sibelius 3. The second movement is still dead boring, but after six months of rehearsal I now find the first and third movements exciting both to play and to listen to, who would’ve thought.
· The farmboys singing their theme song—half a dozen of them are genuine tenors with solid upper ranges, and the clear high note at the end of the chorus rings like a bell.

Writing and translation: Original thing still proceeding in company with the snails. Amused to see a novel I was reading use the same little coded “f/f is happening here” gesture I put in between two characters—clearly it works!
· JA-EN translation for fun, still working slowly on the romance-novel-deconstruction-novel. Tricky switching between the pseudo-Harlequin-medieval tone and the narrator’s whimsical/world-weary one. Also struggling with the names in the pseudo-romance-novel, which are all spelled out phonetically; Warwick and Alienor are okay, but I’m pretty sure the lady-in-waiting is Marie and not Marié, and I’ve guessed at Chandos (as in the Handel anthems) for シャンドス, which is no name I ever heard of. As for the place name ノザンプール, your guess is as good as mine, I’m not even sure if it’s supposed to be pseudo-French or pseudo-English—Nozampoule? Northern Poole?
· ZH-EN translation: I got through a short fic (not for publication), which was a fun effort if trying. Chengyu are everywhere; the fics I’m reading are mostly in modern settings and not featuring, like, especially poetic or literary characters, but they’re still overflowing with assorted chengyu. Other assorted issues: Can I translate 撒娇 as “flirting”? How about “acting like a girl” as “acting prissy”? Can I use “I wish…” for 后悔, given its contrafactual implications? Chinese sentences tend to go on for ages, with commas between clauses; is that an excuse for me to indulge my semicolon habit? (Er, self-referential much)
· EN-ZH translation: I chose my shortest Guardian fic (about 250 words) and tried to render it into Chinese, which is very difficult. With a dictionary, I can pretty much express the meaning (I think. I hope), but forget tone or nuance, and I’m sure there are sixty zillion grammatical mistakes. Still, again, a fun effort. This one I might actually post just for the hell of it once I polish it a little more, then anyone who cares to can point out the errors.

Music lately: Revisiting the Brahms first piano concerto, one of my all-time favorite pieces even among Brahms. I’m sure I’ve linked it before, but the slow movement’s long piano solo passage over a pedal point in the orchestra (from about 31:00 here, although you really need to listen to the whole thing) is just…anybody would believe in God. One of the fullest expressions of that Brahmsian sense that life can be painful and terrible and irrational and tragic, but it’s still and always worth it. And the reviving energy in the third movement coda (around 46:36) is a joy. (Linked performance is the great Arthur Rubinstein; Seong-Jin Cho recording when, he would do a better job with that second movement passage than any pianist I can imagine).
On another note entirely, a couple of my favorite Dreams Come True songs, いつもいつでも and サンキュー, Yoshida Miwa’s high energy and beautiful voice enough to make anyone’s day.

Some stuff (re)read on openlibrary.org, bless it.
·

Chao Yuen Ren

A collection of essays by my 偶像 Chao Yuen Ren, some largely of interest to linguistics scholars but all full of his brilliance and irreverent good cheer. Some of the lighter quotations: “Sometimes, to be sure, I overdo it and create such fancy words as 胜利八菜汁, which is the favorite juice for breakfast at our house, if you know what I refer to. I had not realized until long after it became established in our household that the V in V-8 did not stand for 胜利 but simply the V in vegetable!” / “Chinese students who have studied some English have made up potential forms for English verbs and say things like ‘quali-de-fy’ and ‘quali-bu-fy.’” / At one stage, when Little Aunt had been correcting Canta [CYR’s toddler granddaughter]’s geng for deng ‘light’ by making her say de-de-deng, she began to call a light dededen. Then, passing the Bay Bridge one night with its many lights along the way, she said, ‘De-de-de-de-de-de-…den!’”

Jean Little

Rereading, for the first time in many years, some of Jean Little’s middle-grade? YA? novels. Listen for the Singing is still my favorite; I love watching Anna (of From Anna) come into her own, supported by her friends and teachers and family but doing the hard work herself. (Quibble: I wish there was one line to reassure us that Isobel finds friends at her new high school too! I always worry about her!) Anna’s changing relationship with her older brother Rudi is very moving, and I like the cameos by her other siblings too, especially Gretchen, and her new friends—in particular Paula Kirsch, with her sharp wit and indestructible good humor, is a delight. One thing I noticed about Jean Little this time around is that she makes the adults into real people too, not just background props—Anna’s parents have their own personalities and viewpoints, and one of my favorite parts about the book is the way we go, with Anna, from despising Mr. Lloyd, the merciless homeroom teacher, to empathizing with and even in a way admiring him. (It’s also a book about disability written by someone who has been there and knows, and it taught me about low vision the same way Tim Kennemore’s Wall of Words did about dyslexia, more effectively than anything I learned in education classes.)
Stand in the Wind is not really one of my favorites, the “going to camp” theme doesn’t interest me enough and I feel like Ellen, the forbearing older sister, deserves her own book, but I still chant to myself “stand in the wind and eat peanut brittle” once in a while, and it helps.
I’d forgotten how good the Look Through My Window and Kate duology is—Emily and Kate (and their poems) are wonderful, but reading the books as an adult, I almost find myself more interested in the grownups, Emily’s parents (who are, like Emily herself, conventional but not boring or unimaginative), and Kate’s parents, April and Jonathan, harried intellectuals who are clearly individuals before they’re husband-and-wife or mother-and-father, but who also love each other and Kate in their own distinctive ways). I wonder why Little, a gentile, chose to write a book focused not just on being Jewish but on living in that nebulous Jewish-but-culturally-estranged state of being where Kate’s family is (with which I empathize very much); I guess it was just the story she wanted to tell, and she pulls it off.

Dorothy Crayder

Am I the only one who’s ever read Dorothy Crayder’s Ishkabibble? I had completely forgotten about this middle-grade book, which is very good and VERY weird. Lucy is a bullied fifth-grader who accidentally acquires a guru, a middle-aged lady from Hackensack, New Jersey, who teaches her that bullying is all about alphabetical order (except maybe it’s not) and the word “ishkabibble” is the key to solving her problems (except it’s not always that simple). It’s one of those books written for younger kids that rewards adult rereading, as indicated below.
“When you say ishkabibble you gotta mean it, heart and soul. Them victimizers can tell a fake ishkabibbler from the genuine article.”
“Is [this little dog] the one who bites?” “Nah, Lawrence wouldn’t hurt a fly.” “Then, why does the sign say to beware of the dog?” “Wadda you want me to do, put up a sign that says BEWARE OF WOMAN?”
Her parents said to each other, “Our child is too young to feel frazzled.” But being happy-go-lucky parents, they quickly reminded each other that their child had also been an early teether, walker, and talker. So why not an early frazzler? And they let it go at that.
“But what made Three Ts suddenly pick on me anyway? What did I do?” …“Ooh, yes, I sort of remember. But—” “But what?” “It sounds so dumb now. It was the day you came to school wearing your hair tied in two bunches with different-colored ribbons. Wasn’t one red and one green?” Lucy was speechless. Then she groaned, “Ribbons! Ribbons! Gawd-amighty—victimizing is crazy! Kee-razy! Only, Maureen, they were not red and green. I wouldn’t be caught dead looking like a Christmas tree in September. They happened to be blue and green, which is a very beautiful combination.” “But Lucy, they didn’t match.” “They weren’t supposed to.”
That, Lucy thought, is what a real victim looks like. In the midst of her happiness, Lucy felt a big sadness for Ricky [whose drawing of a horse was just ruined by accident]. “Ricky,” she pleaded, “Ricky—say ‘ishkabibble’!” …Finally he shouted, “No! I won’t say it. It’s not supposed to work for dapples. In case you want to know something. Dapples are too—too--important!” …As [the art teacher] walked away, he said in his most casual manner, “I don’t know what this ishkabibble business is all about, but you kids were just taught a lesson about art.” And about something else, Lucy thought. About how you were lucky if you cared enough about something beside yourself to feel as hurt as Ricky did. Who would have known that Ricky was lucky? Now Lucy knew.

Photos: All morning glories today; the purple-spotted ones are mine, the fuchsia ones belong to a neighborhood lady (or rather to her grandson; the local elementary school sends its kids home with morning glory plants over summer vacation).

Be safe and well.

Music: An older (well, early 2000s?) J-pop song that’s always been a favorite of mine: here are two covers that I like a little better than the original singer. Speaking of J-pop, quite a while back I linked Kiroro’s 長い間 here; some time later, I linked Jiang Dunhao (one of my farmboys) singing 很爱很爱你 elsewhere, and then I took another listen and went WAIT a minute, and yup, the latter is in fact a Chinese cover of the former. Who knew. Nice in both versions. To keep up the cover theme, here’s the Debussy string quartet arranged for saxophones, which apart from the very last note works startlingly well.

Chinese: The latest from the farmboys, somewhat imperfectly absorbed.

· 眼不见心不烦, very literally “what the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve after”
· 发火, to lose your temper, literally to go on fire
· 贴心, intimate, close, thoughtful, literally “sticky heart” (?)
· 猴年马月 or 驴年马月, roughly “the twelfth of never,” literally “in the horse month in the year of the monkey/donkey”
· 玩意(儿)， colloquial word for thing, stuff, gadget, whatnot, literally a toy (?)
· 利索, agile/brisk/quick/effective

Reading: A Japanese biography of the Meiji-era Ainu linguist (I mean, linguist of the Ainu language, he wasn’t Ainu himself) Kindaichi Kyosuke (not to be confused with the fictional detective Kindaichi Kosuke, whose name he inspired). I’m not all the way finished yet, but so far the narrative has gone into detail on his friendship with Ishikawa Takuboku, who was unquestionably a wonderful poet but sounds like an absolute nightmare of a friend, implying in passing that Kyosuke and Takuboku slept together at least once. (There’s a very good mystery novel (I think someone made an anime of it?) in which Takuboku earns a little extra cash as a detective to supplement his income as a starving writer, with Kyosuke as his assistant; it’s so grounded in the Meiji setting that I always forget it didn’t actually happen.) Kyosuke married his wife Shizue in part because she was a native Tokyoite and he wanted a linguistic reference for Tokyo speech, as opposed to his own northern dialect.
The book is pretty good so far about indicating that Kyosuke had his own nationalist tendencies even while opposing the Japanese destruction of the Ainu way of life (see also, Ando Masatsugu and many other linguists of the prewar period). The part I’m reading right now has to do with the short, sad, incredible life of Chiri Yukie, the Ainu girl who wrote out the traditional yukar and other songs and poems, translated them into fluid and inspired Japanese, and died of heart disease at 19, while living with Kyosuke’s family in Tokyo; I always feel uneasily that he was in part responsible for her death (he probably wasn’t in any sense, and without him her talents and the oral literature she transcribed/translated would not have come to light at all, but it’s a troublesome framework). More to come.

It’s a very slow work period, so I’ve been messing with a translation of Miura Shion’s A Romance Novel in Seven Days, enjoyably meta because it’s about a translator rendering a romance novel into Japanese. I’m not very far into it (although it’s incredibly easy going and I should take it seriously and try to get it done, if not necessarily in seven days like the poor protagonist), but here are some excerpts from near the beginning of my rough draft.

The way this one started out, there was no question. I could even pin down roughly the page number where the sex scene would start. If that wasn’t fantasy, what was?
Sure, it was fun enough. I liked romances too. Even while I was making fun of the corny lines, I couldn’t stop reading. That was how come romance novels like this came out in paperback at the rate of ten or more every month.
But that didn’t mean I was prepared to translate the whole thing in a week.
I mean, all I had to do was translate the first chapter to see where it was all going. Okay, the Sword of Orichalcum was a bit of a wild card, but most likely Master Harold would mount an attack on the castle of Nozampoule in order to seize the sword. Warwick and Alienor, who had been getting by pretty well on the whole, would just have had a fight at that point. Heroes and heroines in romance novels were always fighting over the most trivial of things.
“You have no respect for my freedom. Until now we have always cleaned the castle this way!”
“Freedom? Do as you please, my lady. But now hear this, you will find no other man who cares as much for women’s freedom of movement as I. You know too little of the standards of the world.”
And so on, ugh. Whoops, now I was writing my own novel.
Anyway, after their fight Alienor would take her leave of the castle and weep alone in the woods. “His heart has gone as far from me as the moon in the night sky. Oh, what am I to do?” and so on. Which was where Master Harold would show up and ravish her away.
Of course, Warwick and his loyal henchman Chandos would come immediately to her rescue, fighting with the Sword of Orichalcum.
“So you want this sword? It’s yours! If you can make use of it. What do I care? I have a jewel beyond the value of this sword, the maiden treasure of Nozampoule!” Warwick would fight like a lion, driving off Master Harold and reclaiming Alienor.
“Oh, my lady, thank heavens you’re safe!” Marie the lady-in-waiting would welcome them back to the castle.
Warwick and Alienor would clear up their misunderstanding and fall even more in love. Happily ever after.
No question. I’d lay money on it. Let’s see, how did the source text actually end? Why not read ahead a little?
“In the evening of Midsummer’s Day, the landfolk dancing in the castle courtyard one and all wore expressions shining with joy. Their delight was reflected likewise in the faces of the young domain lord and lady as they looked on.
“Warwick dropped suddenly to one knee, extending his right hand to Alienor. ‘Tell me, Alienor, once again: will you have me? I’m a coarse parvenu and nothing more, but will you be mine? For all our lives, if you will it.’
“Alienor smiled and took her husband’s hand. She spoke: ‘Be it unto me according to thy word.’”
Sure enough! Aaagh! The end scene was exactly what I’d predicted. Why should I even bother translating it? Let them print the one chapter I’d already done and leave the rest of the pages blank, the readers would be able to fill in the rest for themselves line for line. Could I get away with that?...well, no. Time to stop letting my brain run its mouth and get on with the next chapter.

Photos: Various hydrangeas and roses (?), a very elegant cat not too proud to let me stroke it (unrelatedly, it delights me that the Japanese onomatopeia for petting a furry animal is もふもふ, mofu-mofu, while the Chinese word for doing likewise is 抚摸, fumo), a temple pond, and my veranda’s best efforts in the form of a morning glory and some cherry tomatoes.