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David Yang - “It was like translating film subtitles or poetry”

Feb 24, 2024 05:30 AM IST

The translator of Japanese artist duo Nishioka Kyodai’s ‘Kafka: A Manga Adaptation’ talks about hybrid translation and Kafka’s influence on Japanese literature

What drew you to translate this collection?

David Yang (Courtesy Pushkin Press)
David Yang (Courtesy Pushkin Press)

Kafka has long been one of my favourite writers, so I jumped at the opportunity. I was immediately blown away by the art style, as I felt Nishiokya Kyodai did a fabulous job at capturing the uncanny and disorienting sense of impending doom that I had always gotten from reading Kafka’s prose. Moreover, since I had majored in German literature in my undergraduate days, I thought it was the perfect chance to combine my background in German studies with my current focus on Japanese literature.

What was it like to translate Kafka’s stories into manga?

Unlike translating a novel, translating a manga, especially one as wordy as this, entails being as concise as I could so that the words would fit into the text boxes, preserving as much of the excellent artwork as possible. In this sense, the process of translation was kind of like translating film subtitles or poetry, where spatial and visual considerations influence what you can do. This was challenging for me as someone who prefers long sentences. Another challenge was striking a balance between German and Japanese. The title page of the English edition of the manga says “translated from the Japanese,” but actually most of it was translated from the German. As I mention in my afterword, I tried to come up with an English version that is somewhere in between Kafka’s German original and Osamu Ikeuchi’s wonderful Japanese translation, which Nishioka Kyodai selected as the basis for the text. This resulted in an extremely stimulating but also challenging process of hybrid translation, during which I was constantly confronted with the task of deciding between preserving features of the German original and that of the Japanese translation. Overall, I think I stuck more to the German than to the Japanese, but tended to use a register that is slightly more formal than that of Kafka’s original since that was the tone I got from Ikeuchi’s Japanese.

Illustrated by Nishioka Kyodai, translated by David Yang (Pushkin Press)
Illustrated by Nishioka Kyodai, translated by David Yang (Pushkin Press)

A lot of Japanese writers have been inspired by Franz Kafka’s works, especially Haruki Murakami. Tell us your thoughts about how Western literature and art has influenced contemporary Japanese culture.

It is not possible to properly discuss the influence of Western literature and art on contemporary Japanese culture without writing a tome so I will limit myself to Kafka. Last November, I had the opportunity to attend a conference on Kafka where three Akutagawa Prize winning Japanese novelists — Kaori Fujino, Hiroko Oyamada, and Takahiro Ueda — discussed Kafka’s influence on their works. Another Akutagawa Prize winner, Yoko Tawada, writes in both Japanese and German and has translated Kafka into Japanese. This really shows how present Kafka still is within contemporary Japanese discourse. I can’t say if Kafka’s influence is particularly strong in Japan, but it is possible that an experience with Japanese bureaucracy leads to a better understanding of his work, and I say this only half in jest.

As a translator, what’s the best way to approach a text that is a classic and has been read worldwide, especially in English, a language that’s considered hegemonic?

As a long time fan of Kafka, I really treasured the chance to produce a new English rendition of his works, but since there were already so many excellent English translations, it was quite a daunting task at first. Because the unusual nature of this project, however, with the twofold mediation of the visuals and the Japanese translation, I also felt that I was liberated from the duty of producing a more “literal” translation. The point of the project, as I saw it, was to create something fresh, a translation that was perhaps more faithful to the spirit of Kafka’s work than to the letter, as it were. Normally, relay translations (ie translating from a translation) are seen as inferior and inadequate, but in this case (although I did rely heavily on the original) I think the Japanese translation standing in between the English and the German actually yielded better results. I understand the concern with the hegemonic status of English, but my hope is that this translation might provide an entry point into Kafka’s works for as wide an audience as possible, and maybe even encourage some of the readers to pick up German or Japanese in the future. I was very heartened to read a recent article on Kafka by Nilanjana Roy in the Financial Times in which she recounts an encounter with two young women reading my translation aloud near Hauz Khas lake in Delhi on a wintry day.

Which out of these nine stories is your favourite and why?

I personally enjoy Nishioka Kyodai’s rendition of The Hunger Artist the most since it is like a flip book animation in which you can see the hunger artist gradually dwindling in size as his fast goes on. This creates a formalist frame for the story that is absent in the original prose, and I think this kind of visual formalism is an excellent complement to the story that takes it beyond what words could have achieved alone.

What are some of the other classic texts that you wish were adapted in the form of graphic novels / manga?

I think allegorical and atmospheric rather than plot-heavy expository texts work best for the graphic novel format. I am thinking along the lines of classic texts such as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities or Cosmocomics (even has the word comics in it, so it really is a low hanging fruit!). Some of the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, like The Library of Babel and the Circular Ruins, come to mind as well.

Arunima Mazumdar is an independent writer. She is @sermoninstone on Twitter and @sermonsinstone on Instagram.

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