Interview: Haruki Murakami's translator, Jay Rubin

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Haruki Murakami, despite being one of the biggest cultural cross-over novelists of our generation, not to mention a freelance journalist, a translator, and a marathon runner, doesn’t have many pretensions.

He once reflected, “With nothing but my writing, I had made a number of human beings want to drink beer. You have no idea how happy this made me.”

His books are full of mysterious metaphors – wells, zoo animals, catalyst-forming toilet paper – that take immense chances by combining fantasy, mystery and existential … drinking.

Many fans wonder exactly what makes the Murakami machine work, and lucky for them, one of the chief operators– his translator, Jay Rubin– has written a chronicle of his career called Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words.

After consulting Murakami, hashing through the nuances of his writing, and being a fan of his work in general, Rubin has produced countless insights into the author’s life and style. Brave New Traveler was able to catch a moment of the translator and Harvard professor’s time to discuss the task of translating Murakami’s most recent works.

(BNT) What made you decide to write Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words and what was your approach to discussing translation with an audience of fiction readers?

I foolishly thought I could help introduce Murakami to an English-speaking audience by compiling a number of his short stories with commentary.
Translating is the closest reading anyone could ever do, and near the end of a work it can give you a megalomaniac sense of the truth of your own reading.

No one, including Haruki– and eventually me– liked this plan, and the more I worked on the book, the more the commentary – and the factual information – grew, and the use of quoted passages shrank.

Eventually it became quite obvious that Murakami didn’t need any help getting read by foreign audiences.

I’m not sure who bothers to read my book, but I’m pleased that UK Vintage values it enough to have printed two updated versions (the latest just a few months ago, including a discussion of After Dark).

What sort of creative writing do you do, and how does it contribute to your method of translation?

Years of translating have been a marvelous workshop for teaching myself English style, which has in turn improved my translating, but I don’t do my own creative writing.

Haruki Murakami uses many non-traditional (to a Western perspective at least) symbols in his works alongside of frequent cultural references. How much does translating these artifacts to a Western target language change the content?

In other words, what differences would someone who was fluent in both Japanese and English notice when examining both versions of a Murakami work?

Murakami’s most frequent cultural references are Western, so translation almost never involves such changes. He certainly invents a lot of unusual similes, and he has his own pet symbols (wells, corridors), but these strike a Japanese reader as unusual and fresh as they do a Western reader. There is very little difference.

What brought you to Haruki Murakami?

An American publisher asked me to evaluate Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World for possible translation. I told them it was an amazing book that they should by all means publish and volunteered to translate it, but they ignored my advice.

A couple of years later, Alfred Birnbaum’s translation came out from Kodansha International. Reading that one book hooked me.

Many translation theorists believe that translations are most beneficial if they leave elements of the original language in the translation, while others believe this results in a text obviously written in a type of “translatorese.”

Japanese is an especially interesting example, because sentences avoid mentioning subjects so that in a first-person narrative, the “I” is much less present than Americans are used to. How did you decide to deal with that difference?


I hope I’ve given some idea in my appendices on translation how hopeless it is to try to produce a literal translation of a Japanese text. The absence of subjects in Japanese sentences, however, is no more of a problem than the absence of a name in the sentence: “He ate a peanut butter sandwich.” Who is “he”?

How can speakers of English possibly know what “he” stands for? It’s so mysterious! Please read my Making Sense of Japanese (Kodansha International) if you want to learn more about the myth of the subject-less sentence in Japanese.

Describe your process of translation. Where do you do your work? How long do you work for? What particular methods do you use?

I work at my desk at home on a computer for about four hours at a time, beginning after breakfast and ending when my brain turns to mush. I’m not good for much of anything after lunch.

I try to do as finished a job as possible in the first draft, and I always keep the original text close by when working on later drafts. Some people translate first into a kind of literal mishmash and then polish it without much reference to the original, but I’ve never been able to work that way. I try to capture all the nuances right off the bat.

Does translating Japanese make you hyper-aware of other translations you encounter? What is the worst translation that you have ever found in mass-circulation?

I do find myself reading “through” other translations, guessing what the original might be. It can be annoying. I often refer my students to the translation of Natsume Saseki’s Light and Darkness as an example of how wrong you can go when you translate grammar instead of ideas and images.

Do you think your experience as a translator could apply to translating from one medium to another (intersemiotically)? How would you translate Kafka on the Shore into a film?

Translating is the closest reading anyone could ever do, and near the end of a work it can give you a megalomaniac sense of the truth of your own reading. If you asked me this question at such a time, I would probably say that ONLY a translator could do what you are suggesting.

Fortunately, I’m in a calmer state of mind at the moment, and can only reply, “Huh?”

Does being a translator make Murakami aware of the potential for his works to be translated?

Yes, aware, but not obsessed. He is not writing primarily to be translated.

Interview: A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin

Author Nathan Rabin doesn’t write for the satirical section of The Onion , but that doesn’t mean the head writer of the publication's A.V. Club isn’t funny. In his new memoir, “The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture ,” he writes, “I’ve not only trademarked the phrase ‘heartwarming tale of triumph over adversity™’; I’ve also trademarked the concept of triumphing over adversity in a heartwarming fashion.”

He does so while snickering at earning the nickname “Rude Boy” and feeling oddly accomplished by being labeled “The Angriest Guy in the mental hospital circuit.” His teen angst, unlike the faux Nirvana fans discussed in his book, was brought on by real life hardships, including broken homes, abortions and name brand snack cherishing poverty. But Rabin’s rare talent for self-distance combined with his culture junky knack for detail make him one of the only writers whose description of an admittedly false suicide attempt makes sure to point out that icy grape Kool-Aid was involved.

Rabin’s chapters each describe a period in his life by relating it to its reflection in pop culture. The first chapter connects his Jewish upbringing to the entertainment industry by not so subtly suggesting Jews “famously run the media,” using Hasidic rapper Matisyahu as the phenomenon’s bizarro precipitation point. Sometimes it works, sometimes coming back to the pop object in question in the last sentence of a chapter starts to feel a bit canned.

Rabin’s prose is anything but minimalistic. Packing pop culture references into the corners of as many clauses as possible and a “Simpsons” reference into every chapter, anyone who has grown up in America or just plain known someone crazy will find something in which to relate.

A&E chatted with Rabin in eager hopes of bonding over pop culture journalism nerddom.

Do you get called “the next Chuck Klosterman ” a lot?

My editor is Chuck Klosterman’s editor and my agent is Chuck Klosterman’s agent and my publisher is Chuck Klosterman’s publisher. There is a definite connection there. I think people wanted to read this [his memoir] because Klosterman proved there was a market for this kind of book; he created a niche, the pop culture memoir. Pop culture is a very communal thing and a common language people share and a way of bonding and affirming your identity and finding like minded souls. I don't think it’d be fair to call me the next Klosterman though. Mr. Klosterman is still relevant himself.

I think if he’s the low-culture pioneer, your story has taken that to the next level. Your whole story, in a way, symbolizes that the high-culture low-culture divide is a thing of the past.

I think a lot of it has to do with technology and the fact that DVDs make everything available on the internet. It creates a culture where everything is on similar footing. When I was writing this I was a little, ‘Yeah it’s a pop culture memoir and people are expecting half cultural criticism, half memoir.’ It’s a context and a framework, a jumping off point. My education was going to movies and working at a video store. There was not this delineation between high art and low art.

How did you transform from “the angriest man in the mental hospital circuit” into the “moderately likeable gay everyman” [his description by focus groups]?

When I was in the mental hospital, I was so angry there came a point where my spirit was broken. I thought, “I need to get out of this place and if that entails following rules and being part of the system, I’m willing to make that sacrifice.” I thought of it as the compromise of adulthood, that you swallow your anger and swallow your rage. I grew up very poor, with nothing. I never had the luxury of being a dick or an asshole after a certain point.

Also, I had a certain amount of success and I felt comfortable and safe and secure. There was a passage when I was talking about the mental hospital and I wrote that I was thinking very vividly when showering and crying, “Anything that I accomplish from this point on will mean more because it came from this personal abyss, this nadir.”

You seem to describe a lot of people in your life with an absence of judgment, like Noah, the kid who “boffed the wall” at night. Do you think writing helps you find empathy for people?

Totally. The memoirs that I’ve read when people hold grudges or they’re bitter, it seems like it diminishes the writer more than the person they’re writing about. When they’re writing mockingly and belittlingly and about a co-worker, I just start empathizing with the co-worker. I think a lot of it is I’m worried that people will judge me and a lot of people do. I’m a big believer in forgiving and empathizing. The older I get, the more I understand where people are coming from. I love all the people I write about — Noah, we were all fucked up kids and we had all these traumas. We did these creepy acting out sorts of things.

Did you invent the word “romasochist?”

I did. That’s another thing, when I was writing this book I didn’t know if I’d have an opportunity to write another, so I wanted to put everything in there. I erred on the side of excessive with length and got a little cutesy sometimes. Yeah, a lot of people have that idea that they’re going to come through on the other side but it ends badly. But you have this hope and this sense of romanticism and masochism.

As a film critic, do you ever think that the majority of films have simply become impossible to criticize, just because they take so few chances?

I find something really interesting about every film I see, even if it’s formulaic. I think formulas and clichés are interesting in themselves. There was a great Onion article a while back where a studio sadistically threatens to make “Coyote Ugly 2,” “We’re going to put a dump truck of money in, until you can’t say no.”

Why did The Onion’s Decider websites suddenly get re-branded as A.V. Club? Was the Decider name not working out?

It is hard to launch a new product in this market, which is terrible. I guess eight or nine years ago there was an effort to establish The Onion and A.V. Club as separate brands. I remember thinking at the time, “That’s [expletive] insane. We’re going to try and distance ourselves?”

It reminded me of 2000, when Al Gore was like, “I don’t want to be associated with Bill Clinton .” It backfired and he lost.

They realized we have something strong with the A.V. Club and we were separating ourselves from that to launch something at a scary time.

For more film and literary talk with Rabin, check out the A&E blog.

Interview: Helado Negro

Helado Negro

ALBUM: “Awe Owe”

LABEL: Asthmatic Kitty

There’s always a lot of word-play when Helado Negro is involved. The first thing people think is, “What is helado negro?” Upon finding out that it means “black ice cream,” they think, “What’s black ice cream?” Turns out it’s raspberry ice cream, but then, what does his album title “Awe Owe” mean?

A&E tried to answer these and many more questions about Helado Negro, AKA Roberto Carlos Lange. The son of Ecuadorian immigrants , he began producing his own music in his Florida home and Brooklyn apartment, his diverse background serving as his launch pad into various projects and collaborations.

His album as Helado Negro is complex, melodic folk with quirky production touches and layered harmonies that make it sound like early Sufjan Stevens or the experimental days of Grizzly Bear.

Lange called A&E to talk about hip-hop, partying and the Germanic origin of the last name Lange.

What does your album title mean?

[To be] in awe of something and just caught in that state and it kind of told the story [about] a lot of the record, what I did, things I was just impressed with, experiences that I was impressed with. And “owe” is just the concept of humbleness and remembering I owe other people my life.

I could say maybe some of it is like a subconscious inspiration from my friend David that I work with. He used a lot of letters when he worked in a visual work, like murals on the street. In a way, a lot of graffiti writers truncate words to make them shorter words. You got to put your idea across. In a way I take from that too, getting an idea across in the simplest means, using the things I have around me. That was the biggest thing about this album: doing what I can with what I got — my ambitions, and to inspire as many people as I can.

You have many projects, including the hip-hop oriented Epstein. Do you rap?

I never emceed on any of that stuff. A lot of them are just friends or people associated the label, Arepaz . No I don’t rap. It’s more hip-hop based, only because a lot of that was birthed with me getting my MPC for the first time and buying records, being like, “Oh sh-t, this is boogy down production.”

Is your record primarily organic instruments or a mixture of samples?

It’s not 100 percent samples. I think sampling is a part of our culture. Sampling is an art form. People disregard it, “You’re not playing instruments.” What if I didn’t have arms or legs, and I made this music? People would be like, “He’s a genius.”

People get so bent out of shape about things being non-musical, but samples can still be informative musically. I know I’m kind of repeating something someone’s already said a million times in a million interviews in the 20-30 years of hip-hop. It’s a part of me and it crossed over to my music.

What was your musical education like? I read that your hard partying parents were influences.

My parents always had music in the house and parties on the weekends. A lot of times during the early part of the party, 9-3, there were a lot of people just dancing conga, merengue — typical Latin American music. I think for a lot of times, late night it would roll into folk sing-alongs, where everybody’s had a few drinks, and they would go late in the morning, singing and playing guitar or whatever instruments you’d bring. My mom would go to sleep around 2 or 3. They would have karaoke machines and record themselves I think that gave me an interest for things like that. I started recording myself, kind of mimicking.

I played guitar in middle school because my uncle gave me a Spanish guitar. Later I went to an art school.

I was always growing up peripheral to that whole culture of Ecuadorian influences. I was also inspired by electronic music and hip-hop. Those two things have always been the biggest. In high school I wanted to make beats. I had a friend who was an emcee so I made beats. In college I bought an MPC sampler sequencer, and I’d sample, make a beat send it to my friends.

You studied art in college. Do you like working with visual artists, or is your music influenced by visual art?

It’s not so much that it influences it, but it’s just that together we make a better whole. Sometimes things just come out of you that move people and they’re the most important things to focus on. Me working with someone else does something naturally that affects people visually. Together we make this “super thing.” I think it just keeps building from there. People need to keep coming together with other people to see what we can make together, to make something bigger.