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Oct 2023
11:36pm, 9 Oct 2023
43,847 posts
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Night-owl
😂
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Oct 2023
12:01pm, 12 Oct 2023
53,201 posts
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McGoohan
Okay. How to go about this? First, the positives – it was an easy read and I whizzed through it.
And thanks to Linds for clarifying and crystallising one of the things I’ve semi-observed about novels in translation but have never been able to put into words before, specifically this: “I can see that (with my translator head on) there is often an imperative to maintain the 'foreignness' of a book.”
What’s interesting is that I seem to see this more in Japanese books but not, say, books translated from French. I thought Sam Taylor’s translation of HHhH for example attempted to be as lucid as possible and unforeign. But then Sam Taylor is also an author in his own right. So, problem Number One for me with 'the coffee book' is that Geoffrey Trousselot is a terrible translator mainly because he has no authorial skills. I submit into evidence, page 67. (Apologies Linds – I feel like I’m stepping all over your field of expertise in my size 12 hobnailed boots.)
I think Trousselot’s job is to do more than simply drop the Japanese original into Google Translate and just tidy up whatever comes out - which is what it feels like. He should make it readable too. I have picked page 67 as I made a mental note of how bad this page was. “She let her usual cool demeanour slip, and replied in the casual tone she had used while wearing a T-shirt just earlier.’ Huh? I’m not sure that’s entirely made it all the way through the translation engine into English. Then you get words like ‘refill’ – which is a bit of a key word in this book, I accept – but repeated sentence to sentence without any attempt to make the language more interesting. Fusagi ‘seemed to find the café a comfortable space to leisurely read his magazine’. Ugh. I don’t mind the split infinitive but the language is so clumsy. I’m blaming the translator for at least some of this. So it’s quite often a lumpen read.
But the next problem is definitely the author’s. The characters are cartoons. When we first meet Fumiko she slumps across a table and stays there for several pages, like a panto version of despair. They’re all a bit like that, somehow larger than life yet thinly drawn.
The final thing, the nail in the coffin for me about this book is its moral stance. It’s presented as a series of lessons, a bit in the vein of the genie from the lamp – be careful what you wish for, that sort of thing. I think we’re supposed to get some sort of lesson from each. Unfortunately I fundamentally oppose most of the lessons he’s trying to teach us. First one, The Lovers – this is a very unequal pairing with the (female) boss bullying a younger colleague into a relationship and then getting upset when he wants his own career. The message is that it’s okay to let him go … because he will come back. What? Back to your narcissistic control? This is a toxic manipulative relationship.
The old man with dementia too. His wife decides to stay with him – all very laudable… and then we have scenes of her insisting she’s his wife despite him not remembering her and him getting distressed. Exactly what you shouldn’t do to someone with dementia. I don’t think the author means any criticism of the wife either, this is portrayed as a loving end to their story.
And the worst one is the sisters. To fulfil a promise to her dead sister, Hirai gives up her own business to take over her parents’ inn – which had been their dream and her dead sister’s dream and crucially not what she wanted at all. So an act of pointless sacrifice presented as something right and noble.
Despite myself, the last part did make me well up a little but it was more like the author was poking me in the eye the whole time. Cry damn you, cry! Isn’t this an upsetting idea!? Cry!
So… and I always feel bad saying this after rubbishing a book in this way… thankyou Little Nemo for choosing. This book has been on my radar a while as it always seems to be pushed in Waterstones etc. I really didn’t like the book, but I appreciate the choice!
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Oct 2023
12:16pm, 12 Oct 2023
10,069 posts
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GordonG
hey all. forgive me for crashing into this thread, not least because i've not read this book. if this question is more appropriate elsewhere than do say so.
But McG's critique raised a question in my mind. The bit about "The old man with dementia too. His wife decides to stay with him – all very laudable… and then we have scenes of her insisting she’s his wife despite him not remembering her and him getting distressed. Exactly what you shouldn’t do to someone with dementia. "
As a statement of fact of how to support someone with dementia, that may well be true. But isn't that likely to be exactly how things do sometimes happen in real life? I'm not sure i understand why that shouldn't be part of a storyline (aside from the quality of the actual writing)
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Oct 2023
12:26pm, 12 Oct 2023
64,434 posts
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LindsD
The whole foreignisation vs domestication (for those are the terms) is a massive debate in translation, not just literary translation, and I think that this is probably what's going on here. I won't go on about it, but I can, if anyone is interested. I could write a blog if there's interest.
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Oct 2023
12:26pm, 12 Oct 2023
64,435 posts
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LindsD
But translators should also be writers; that's true.
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Oct 2023
12:27pm, 12 Oct 2023
64,436 posts
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LindsD
But the lumpen nature *could* be in the original. Then the debate becomes 'should the translator improve on the original or render as is'?
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Oct 2023
12:29pm, 12 Oct 2023
64,437 posts
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LindsD
And I think that McG, in turn, has also articulated some of why I felt uncomfortable in that I also didn't agree with the moral lessons, or at least thought 'how strange - why would you do that'?
And Fumiko is just horrid.
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Oct 2023
12:30pm, 12 Oct 2023
81,918 posts
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Diogenes
I am always interested. For my uninformed part I feel that the translator should stay true to the 'voice' of the original work but ensure that the translation is of equal literary quality and conform to key grammatical and style guides of the host language so that it doesn't sound stilted or childish if it is not in the original.
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Oct 2023
12:31pm, 12 Oct 2023
81,919 posts
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Diogenes
[I think I'd quite like to be a translator, but that's not a possibility when you can only speak one language.]
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Oct 2023
12:37pm, 12 Oct 2023
64,438 posts
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LindsD
Any translation that sounds stilted or childish where it is not in the original is a bad translation. The problem is that most people will never know.
And staying true to the original work may mean retaining its foreign quality. If you know that the novel is set in Japan, but they all start calling each other 'mate', then that's going to be weird, isn't it? That's an extreme example, but there are thousands of decisions to be made in every text at both micro and macro levels.
I'll shut up now. Thank you for being interested.
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Book Group
Jul 2025