© Chin Music Press Inc, 2016. Front cover. Illustrated by Toshikado Hajiri. Translated by David Jacobson, Sally Ito and Michiko Tsuboi.
I am back from my four month hiatus! I wish I could tell you that I was busy traveling the world…
In reality, I’ve been busy doing research, meeting deadlines for publications, moving and teaching. I am back at the University of Alberta where I’m wrapping up a course on Japanese-to-English translation. Next semester, it looks like I’ll be teaching a course on Literature, Popular Culture and the Visual Arts, so I can’t wait!
As the end of the semester begins to dawn, I was lucky to have been able to contact Sally Ito, a Japanese-Canadian poet and translator based in Winnipeg, to deliver a guest talk to our translation class via SKYPE. I discovered Sally’s co-translated works in The Polyglot Magazine’s Unfaithful Issue, which features poetry in translation in multiple languages, including Japanese. Our class focused on a selection of poems featured in both The Polyglot and Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko. This award winning book, which also received an Honorable Mention for the Freeman Award in 2016, presents a side-by-side, Japanese to English translation of Misuzu’s poems that are also accompanied with beautiful visual translations. Like some of my students, however, this was the first time that I read Misuzu’s works, and I was struck by the simplicity and playful innocence of her poems in light of her life struggles.
© Chin Music Press Inc, 2016. Excerpt from "Day and Night” in Are You an Echo? Illustrated by Toshikado Hajiri. Translated by David Jacobson, Sally Ito and Michiko Tsuboi.
In class, Sally shared some interesting stories that gave us behind-the-scenes insight to the translation process of her co-translated works. I think my students will agree that one of the most challenging aspects of translating expressive texts is being able to capture the nuance, tone and meaning of the source text. And while these aspects of translation can be sharpened with practice and experience, I think one of the most valuable lessons that I learned was that translation is never a solitary activity. Sally’s co-translations are a testament to the power of teamwork (and partnership with her aunt) that is essential in producing accurate, compelling and evocative translations.
Still, even professionals encounter obstacles. For example, what happens when translators can’t agree on an interpretation of a work? We know that not all poets interpret the meaning of a poem in the same way, and in Sally’s case the last lines of the poem “Day and Night,” featured in Are You an Echo, posed a problem for translators because it could be translated in two different ways. To resolve this issue, the translators asked people to illustrate how they interpreted the last lines of poem. I thought this was such a fun and interesting method to achieve clarity in meaning. Sally’s backstory to the translation of “Kaguyahime –Songs from Folktales 2–,” featured in Unfaithful, was also interesting in that it gave us insight to what was happening at the time when she was translating this poem and how a tragic event within a community can impact the depth of meaning conveyed in the translated text. In other words, poets and translators are not locked up in some ivory tower. Not only are they sensitive to the poetic words on the page but they are equally sensitive to how these words make meaning in the world in which she/he belongs. The beauty of poetry in translation lies, to some extent, in its subjectivity that enables the poetic imagination.
Overall, I couldn’t be happier for this experience. It was an interactive session where Sally, as well as the students read poetry out loud (as it should), and we all had so much fun!
Works Cited
Misuzu, Kaneko. Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko. Illustrated by Toshikado Hajiri. Translated by David Jacobson, Sally Ito and Michiko Tsuboi, Chin Music Press Inc, 2016.