Sunset over Casa de Tsunashima

Hakodate, Casa Tsunashima, 8/5/09, 9:39 pm

There are days when the work I put into learning Japanese seems to pay off. I was reading “Kafka on the Shore” in the original, and I was reading a line, and suddenly I realized I was beginning to understand metaphor. One line of dialogue reads “You don’t think that money appears like mushrooms do, naturally sprouting in the forest, do you?” After two or three reads, I realized that, surprisingly enough, mushrooms were not the subject of the sentence, but money was; not only that, but that there was no forest to speak of; only the image of one. It then dawned on me that this might be the Japanese idiom for “money doesn’t grow on trees.”
Another line came soon after. Loosely translated, it meant “‘I’ll think about it then,’ he said, repeating my words as if weighing them in the palm of his hand.” It’s a straightforward enough metaphor, but I still feel quite proud understanding it. We, and by that I mean Japanese language students, are fed an almost constant stream of political/economic vocabulary words, read newspaper articles, and say things like “intensify,” “internationalization,” and “drastic” in class. Learning words like “reflection,” “crimson” and “nestle” is a rare treat, and one I savor.
There are other days when I find myself cursing this language altogether. When I was rewriting my script for the speech contest final (didn’t win, sad to say, but it’s in Japanese; I’m happy I got as far as I did), my instructor and I had long discussions about making my sentences less “direct.” In English, I would say “Uganda is in deep economic peril.” The statement is presented as a fact, whether or not it is arguable. If it is not, I move on. If it is, I present information to justify the conclusion. A subjective statement like “I think Uganda is in deep economic peril” does not go over very well with many audiences, if only because it implies that the speaker has a legitimate outlook on Uganda’s economy not based solely on data, but also based in his vast experience which, when distilled, comes out as a trustworthy opinion. Because of this, the people who usually would have the right to say ‘I think’ are PhD’s in the field, or else other experts, and not laypeople. Another example would be how we are ok with election analysts on CNN saying “I think so and so has a good chance” based not on poll numbers but rather political savvy, whereas we would prefer a high-schooler, if asked the question of whether so-and-so will win, to give clear, declarative arguments backed up with numbers and the opinions of others, not himself. Japanese is quite different. The proper way to talk about Uganda would translate into something like “I’ve been thinking, doesn’t Uganda seem to be in a deep economic crisis?” If one were to come out directly and say, as a fact, “Uganda is in a deep economic crisis,” not layered with polite self-doubt, it would smack of arrogance, lack of respect for the opinions of others, and a blinkered, inflexible mind; in a word, it would be “cheeky.” As a result, my speech, as well as the rest of my writing, is full of “I think” and “It seems,” none of which changes the content in any significant way, but rather subtly modulates the force of the arguments I make, depending on how close they are to a straight out “this is so” statement. What gets me worked up is that, as an English speaker, I read my Japanese work and think I sound like a limp noodle (there are far ruder words I could use, choice ones from Yiddish, but I will refrain), flopping all over the place instead of hitting the point on the head like I would, and have trained others to do, in English. I have a newfound respect for the translators, who have the awful choice of either faithfully conveying words as written and said, or to follow Thucydides and convey the message of those words “as they should have been said” in the receiving language. I would have trouble deciding. “Oh, but a sailor’s life for me…”