L. Navid Osbert (東京)
2 November 2009
Since the coffee shop chat with Joji Kisaragi, I’ve hardly talked to anyone. Kay called late the following morning to see if I was still leaving; after confirming to her that I wasn’t (and handling the necessities of continuing utilities service to my apartment and canceling a reservation I’d made at a cheap guest house in Asakusa) I’ve holed up like a man hunted or a monk striving for satori, every surface in this place covered with papers pulled from those boxes.
That said, what has made it to the site has been minimal. Originally I had wanted to transcribe all of the contents of the boxes, the documents themselves and Joji’s notes on them before contributing my own annotations, but here I’m only digging the project further into a hole. I sit for hours on end, reading and re-reading and scribbling all over the pages, red ink interwoven with the black ink of Joji’s notes. And how strange a feeling to give that handwriting a name now. I’ll have to play catch-up soon. For now draw your own conclusions about the Epic, or just absorb the narrative. Maybe it’s better to be unencumbered by two generations of notes for now.
Still, there’s a glaring issue that’s gone unaddressed up until now. The elephant in the box. Or I should say, one of the many elephants in the box. I’ve already thrown my hands up in the air about the technological issues in the text. As far as that goes, I won’t lie to you — I’m not taking it seriously as a real-world historical research project. That’s the official recorded word on that. It’s more like an exercise, a game — a simulation of historical research. “What would this be like if it were real history?” That kind of thing. Of course, as a not quite authentic historian myself, can I really complain?
The issue is language. What comes endlessly to my attention are the colloquialisms in the text. If George’s goal in translation was to convert the chrono-cultural specific turns of speech in the original document into familiarized modern English figures of speech, he has presumably succeeded.
This is all I can think of to explain much of it.
What about the alternatives to this method? And what if he was wrong in one or two of these colloquial equivalencies? Without the originals I can’t do any more than speculate. That word again.
There is a certain something to be said for the approach though, where the aim in translation is more literary than journalistic. Take the Judeo-Christian Bible for example. Specifically the story in Genesis where Abraham is ordered by his god to sacrifice his son Isaac. The next line after Abraham is given this command reads:
Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey.
This is a literal translation of the Hebrew line at this place in the Hebrew Bereshit, which literally describes Abraham waking early to place a saddle on his donkey. It is a faithful translation in that sense. What it does not convey to the modern Anglophone reader, however, is the fact that the saddling of a donkey was in that cultural context a common metaphor. The word donkey was used to refer summarily to concerns utterly profane and material. “Saddling one’s donkey,” then, was the act of bracing oneself to do something difficult, frightening, or offensive to one’s profane material concerns. The image that can be called to mind here is Abraham rising early in the still-dim morning, going for a solitary brooding walk, looking long and hard at himself in whatever reflecting surface was available, and trying to prepare himself to do what he absolutely wanted not to do but felt he had to do. He was bracing himself for a horrible duty. The image is moving in a way that it’s hard to realize one sentence about a man saddling a donkey can be. Having only a literal translation instead of an equivalent colloquialism, the un-informed reader is here completely cut off from the power of the phrase.
Does this mean that there was no donkey? Maybe. Or maybe in a kind of dramatic double-entendre, we’re meant to picture Abraham mentally saddling his donkey while literally saddling his donkey.
Or maybe the line really is meant to mean he got up and threw a saddle on his donkey and said “Let’s hit the road.” This is the painful, wondrous thing about literature and history. We can know what a word or phrase can mean. We can’t know what it absolutely does. In three-thousand years, surviving uses of the modern English phrase “ass-kicking” could very well call to mind nothing beyond a foot connecting with a pair of buttocks.
I watched a high school history teacher in Korea teach a lesson about making sense of the long-distant past. He broke his class into four-student groups, and had each one dream up a hypothetical country, any kind of civilization they wanted. They had to come up with a name and certain details of daily life. Clothing, food, modes of transportation, a language, technology. That sort of thing. When the students had their civilizations fully imagined, he gave each group a cheap ceramic flower pot and markers, had them draw scenes all over it depicting the life or important iconography of their hypothetical civilization.
Some flower pots, those belonging to the less inspired groups, looked just like cartoonish representations of 21st Century South Korea. Some were futuristic, depicted flying skateboards and breakdancers in space suits. Others portrayed girls in candy-striper outfits with ostentatious neon hairstyles and pets that looked like giant stuffed animals. Still others were battle-murals, historical warrior-kings leading armies to conquest.
When the pots were finished, the teacher collected them and stood them in three neat rows on his desk. He kept the last one in his hands, and held it above his head for the class to see.
He said something brief in Korean. His voice, for all its unintelligibility to me, was heavy with significance. He then drew two plastic supermarket bags from his pocket, unfolded them, and placed one inside of the other. Into this crucible he gingerly inserted the pot. He bent down, placing the bag-wrapped pot at his feet.
He lifted one foot, pointing to it with one finger, and addressed the class again in Korean. He brought his foot down on the pot with all his might, crushing it. Gasps and groans floated up from the groups of students, hanging in the air like smog. The teacher stamped on the broken pot seven times, then held up the now limp shapeless sack for the class to see.
He spoke again in Korean, this time in a voice hushed with the final word of a lesson, and then handed the bag of pot shards to the group nearest him. It was not the group that had made that particular pot.
He muttered something in Korean on his way back to his desk, feigning a limp and intense pain in his leg, and the class laughed with all the relief of nervous tension broken.
When he picked the second pot up, he repeated the speech in English. I can only suppose he did this for my benefit, though he didn’t look at me while he talked. The second delivery was bereft of much of its dramatic flourish.
“This,” he said, hefting the pot in his hand briefly, “is what humans leave behind.” He opened a drawer in his desk, revealing a stash of plastic shopping bags rolled and tied into small balls. He pulled two out and, as before, inserted the pot into them. “This,” he pulled a ball-peen hammer from the same drawer, “is time.”
He set the pot in its plastic sheath on his desk and took careful aim with the hammer. The rough shape of the pot as visible through the plastic crumpled instantly. In all its fragility, it gave the uncanny impression of shattering a split second before the hammer actually touched it. Like a magic trick. He struck it again and again until the bag in his hand had the consistency of a bag of cereal, and then he walked this bag over to another group.
“And this is what you write history from,” he said, handing it off to the students.
And God forbid, I think back now, there is a hole in the bag.
George: if you’re reading this, I need those originals.
