‘The joy of translating is gone’

It began in the spring of 1991. I was living in Tokyo and doing my master’s dissertation in Sociology when I had a call from Otto Mannheimer, a dear colleague and friend from the Culture section at Dagens Nyheter. He cut to the chase.

‘Can you translate?’

I thought Otto was kidding and began to hoot with laughter, but I quickly realised that he was asking in deadly earnest. Back then, I had interpreted on behalf of colleagues during interviews, but translating a literary work was a completely different kettle of fish.

‘I’ve never even thought about it. I don’t know whether I can,’ I replied sincerely.

Otto told me he had a problem. He was the publisher of the prestigious Albert Bonniers series of literary fiction in translation published under the title of Panache. A translator from Japanese had dropped out and he was now stuck with an important novel that needed translating pronto because otherwise Bonniers would forfeit its option on the translation rights.

‘Do you think you could take it on?’

I gave it to him straight: I didn’t dare. 

‘Well then, would you consider translating together with someone else? Surely you must have someone you could work with?’

A slight air of desperation had crept into Otto’s voice by now. I ran feverishly through the people I knew. X was too careless, Y didn’t have the time, Z wouldn’t be amused... That was when it hit me. Mum! As it happened, Mum had translated several advanced volumes in the field of Sociology. Perhaps she’d be up for doing this... I asked Otto what the book was.

‘It’s this terrific novel by Kenzaburo Oe – it’s the kind of work only an older, experienced writer can produce.’

‘Ah,’ I thought. ‘Exactly the kind of work that a first-time literary translator should not embark upon.’

Of course, what I told Otto was that I’d call Mum in Stockholm and ask, which was entirely truthful on my part. I did so with the cast-iron conviction that she would reject the idea and say that we shouldn’t take on the project. Mum was a typical Japanese woman of the older generation for whom caution was a virtue and recklessness a sign of stupidity. And just about anybody would understand that taking on one of Japan’s leading post-war writers as a debut literary translation assignment was borderline suicidal. It turned out, however, that I had completely misjudged Mum.

‘Of course we’ll translate Oe... Then we might get to meet him. It’s been years since we met. We used to hang out in Tokyo’s leftist circles,’ she said.

Just a second... Why hadn’t Mum ever told me she knew Kenzaburo Oe? Or that she’d been involved in the Japanese left in the 1950s and ’60s? 

‘You never asked,’ Mum said. Then she added: ‘When do we start?’

My mother’s enthusiasm was perhaps partly down to the fact that we had been living apart for some time and had only maintained sporadic contact. When you are the only child of an immigrant parent, there are many roles that must be performed, especially if that parent – like my mother – has no kin in her new home country. I was simultaneously my mother’s child, sister and confidant, which could sometimes be a heavy burden. In my teenage years, I revolted against all those roles at once, which led to my mother and I having terrible, agonising rows. My poor father was subjected to all the torments of hell: both combatants demanded that he side with them. This permanent state of war ceased when I moved away from home: there was an immediate and marked improvement in my relationship with Mum. It had not, however, become fully normalised when I received a multi-year scholarship to study in Japan and I left Sweden. Perhaps we both subconsciously regarded the translation of Kenzaburo Oe’s novel as an opportunity to rekindle our connection. At any rate, Mum convinced me and we took on the translation.

Otto Mannheimer hadn’t been exaggerating. M/T and the Narrative About the Marvels of the Forest is one of Kenzaburo Oe’s best novels. It is at once a coming-of-age story, a tribute to the oral storytelling tradition of the author’s home village on Shikoku island and the story of the genesis of his writings as a whole. To be granted the opportunity to translate it felt both pleasurable and fun. But how were we to approach it in purely practical terms? Mum was in Stockholm and I was in Tokyo. We agreed to do a rough translation first so that we could get a feel for Oe’s language and its rhythm. Hundreds of emails pinged back and forth between Sweden and Japan, but progress was sluggish. The Japanese sentences had to be completely taken apart, the words recast and then bolted back together. Cultural phenomena had to be explained; tricky words and names from Shikoku had to be checked so that they were correctly spelled. What on earth had we got ourselves into? After a month’s work, we’d made it through a pitiful one and a half chapters of the book. We trudged on heroically, but the work felt increasingly Sisyphean.

‘My God – at this rate we’ll never make our deadline,’ Mum lamented.

The summer holidays arrived and I went home to Sweden. Mum and I sat side by side beneath the linden trees at our summer house on Gotland, working together. She would read the source text aloud, we would discuss it and then I would write down a rough translation. Never have we got through as much tea, coffee or chocolate as we did then, but suddenly everything was flowing. It was almost magical. 

The story of the small village in the middle of the island of Shikoku and its resistance to the centre of power – led by various combinations of matriarchs (M) and tricksters (T), sly, irreverent foxes – took shape. But then there was the other story: the one about a little Kenzaburo Oe sitting horror-stricken beside his grandmother’s sickbed and being forced to swear that he would pass on the stories of the village.

We noticed how well we complemented one another, Mum and I. She had a superb sense for the Japanese, but was less certain about the nuances of Swedish, while for me it was the exact opposite. But together, we were able to crack even the tougher sentences by intuitively feeling our way through them. 

‘No, he’s not sentimental,’ Mum might irritably say of some character in the novel. ‘He’s more Eugène-Jansson blue.’

‘How about nostalgic?’

‘That works!’

We kept at it, calibrating atmospheres and emotions in the novel with the aid of references to art and music – ‘more jazz than rock’n’roll’, ‘like Bach, not Beethoven’, ‘think the Skagen painters’ – and we kept at it throughout our collaboration of almost thirty years.

M/T and the Narrative About the Marvels of the Forest was an unusually difficult Oe work to translate. Usually, Kenzaburo Oe wrote in straightforward, deliberately unaffected prose, but in this novel he paid tribute to the oral storytelling tradition and retold the ancient myths. This left Mum and me with a lot of food for thought. Ought we to include a glossary of all the archaic Japanese terms, or would the reader figure out what was meant on their own? And what were we supposed to do with Oe’s grandmother’s broad dialect? In Swedish, should her rustic way of speaking be Gotlandic, Scanian or West-Bothnian? We quickly agreed that a glossary was necessary, but we both thought that our dialectal attempts sounded ham-fisted. In the end, the grandmother was left to speak standard Swedish, while retaining an elegant and old-fashioned way of expressing herself. 

By the time we had charged through half the book, we felt invincible. We were even so bold as to take time off from our working days to pick wild strawberries or go walking and swimming. It was all going so well! That was when we encountered a word – a small, sneaky word – that brought us crashing back down to earth.

‘So, the hero is perched on an engawa,’ Mum said, and was about to tell me what he was up to when I asked her how she thought we should translate that word. An engawa is a kind of roofed veranda that runs along the outer walls of traditional houses.

‘What about... veranda?’ I said tentatively.

‘No, no, that’s completely the wrong association. Everyone will picture something like the porch you see on houses in Sweden or America. That’s completely off. It has to be corridor!’ Mum protested.

For once, she became resentful when I wouldn’t give in. We began to try and define this banal word so that we might explain it – and we really struggled. The traditional Japanese conception of an engawa is a bridge or transition between an inner world – the home – and the outer world. 

‘Yes, that’s right – it’s a corridor between one world and the other!’ Mum said triumphantly.

But try getting the Swedish reader to visualise this veranda-cum-corridor in their mind’s eye! In the end, we agreed it would just have to be called an engawa and that it would be included in the glossary.

Eventually, Mum and I divided the book’s chapters between us and began to polish the sentences separately: we would change a word here and there, as well as shifting commas and full stops to improve the rhythm. After a few months, we swapped our bundles of chapters and continued our fine tuning. Finally, I took the whole novel and went through it from start to finish before getting my dad, the cultural editor, to proofread it. Whenever there were occasional disagreements within the family, we would call Kenzaburo Oe – Mum had reconnected with him – to find out what he thought. He patiently assisted us by explaining dialectal words and telling us the backgrounds of various legends. Over time, our protracted work on the manuscript led to us becoming firm friends with both him and his family. 

M/T and the Narrative About the Marvels of the Forest was published in 1992 by Panache; it was well reviewed, and it is said to have influenced the Swedish Academy’s decision to award the Nobel Prize to Oe in 1994. This meant that our whole family got to attend the Nobel Prize award ceremony and banquet with the Oe family, but above all it meant that Mum and I were noticed in a way that translators rarely are. The paradox is that when a translator has done their job properly, they have made themselves invisible. The translation is so close to the original that practically everyone believes the work was written in Swedish – or that it’s so easy to translate that just about anyone could have done it. Obviously this is not true.

At present, there is no translation criticism worthy of the name: translators are expected to be pleased if they even get mentioned in reviews. And if they are, it’s usually because their translation is ‘faithful’, ‘sensitive’ or ‘fluent’. When critics want to show off, they might make claims such as: ‘While I may not speak the original language, I must say that the author sounds more authentic in other translations.’ It’s so stupid that one can’t be bothered to respond to it.

After working on M/T and the Narrative About the Marvels of the Forest, Mum and I thought our translation career was over, but we were mistaken. One day, the legendary publisher Per Gedin rang up and asked whether we’d like to translate an incredible Japanese book for him. Per didn’t think it would sell, but he was most enthusiastic about the author and thought he ought to be available in Swedish.

‘Who is it?’ we asked, intrigued.

‘His name’s Haruki Murakami and he’s gained a cult following in the USA. I think he’s absolutely brilliant.’

So it came to pass that we translated Murakami’s collection of short stories, The Elephant Vanishes. Our task in this instance was finding the right form for a language that was completely different from Oe’s: more youthful, more urbane, and more influenced by pop culture. Mum and I proceeded on a trial and error basis. Curious to see how others had dealt with it, we read the American translation, only to be left perplexed. The language didn’t sound at all like Murakami’s Japanese original. It was far brisker and more caustic, but it was also less poetic. We called the author and asked him what had happened to the language.

‘Hmm, well,’ he said, somewhat embarrassed. ‘I don’t meddle in the work of my translators. I’ve spoken with them, and they and the publisher say that my tempo is too leisurely for the American reader. And since I’m a translator myself, my view is that all translations are interpretations. Maybe that’s me in hotted-up, American form.’

We asked him whether he’d like to be hotted up in Swedish too.

‘No, no, no. If Swedish readers can accept me as I am then naturally I prefer that.’

A few years later, Mum and I would find out that the Americans had cut one and a half chapters from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Haruki Murakami was by no means thrilled about this, but the publisher said it had to go – otherwise they would struggle to publish the novel. For Murakami, whose first great literary and musical loves were American, there was great value in being translated into English. So great, in fact, that he was prepared to have his text harshly doctored. 

Over time, there followed more works by both Oe and Murakami, as well as others by authors such as Yoko Ono, Yu Miri and Taichi Yamada.

Since Haruki Murakami is also a translator himself, he has – just like Oe – been helpful to Mum and me and easy for us to work with. The only problem is that he’s so productive and pretty intuitive when he writes – he doesn’t always remember what his intentions were after the fact. In Kafka on the Shore, there’s a scene in which a fish species we don’t have in Sweden rains from the sky. How were we going to solve that one? When we called Murakami, his response was: ‘Was there a scene like that? I don’t remember it. Oh well, why don’t we say it’s raining mackerel – you have those in Sweden, don’t you?’

When I wrote to the Murakamis to let them know that Mum and Dad had died, I received a short message in reply: ‘We’re sorry for your loss, which is ours too. We regret that we can do nothing for you from afar, but we share in your mourning. /.../ You always seemed to have such fun when you were translating, and your joy made us so happy in turn.’

And that’s just how it was – we were having fun. Mum and I revelled in our sojourns in Murakami’s universe as we wrestled with his words, while Dad would look forward to proofreading us. It was the best kind of family business. But now both Mum and Dad are gone and they’ve taken with them the joy of translating. So now, some eighteen books later, I’m closing this chapter.