Alison - Post 1: Translators

The Influences of Translators

Haruki Murakami is not shy about the massive amount of Western influence present in his works. As we have discussed, that is part of what makes his work so different from that of his Japanese contemporaries. However, in the initial stages of reading A Wild Sheep Chase, I actually found myself reminded the most of another translated-to-English crime novel, Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Both works, beyond being essentially detective novels, share some traits we have discussed before, like their descriptive sections and the short sentences also characteristic of Chandler. What sparked my comparison between the two, though, was their use of partitioning their works into titled section that often included specific dates during which the story occurred. Explicitly dating the events of a novel is something that I don't often come across, so it stuck out to me.

This made me wonder whether the authors were perhaps influenced by the same people, or even by each other; however, a small amount of research did not show much of a link. I kept thinking about it, and I began to wonder whether the English translators had any overlap in their documented influences. Of course, the structure of a work likely came from the original author himself, but I realized that I've never really considered the literary influences on a translator as to how a work may be translated. We know that each translator is different, but I've never thought too deeply on where these differences might stem from.

Unfortunately, translators do not usually attain the same degree of notoriety as the authors they translate, so there was not much information out there about the sources of influence for either of the two translators in question. I did manage to find, however, that the translator for Stieg Larsson listed Haruki Murakami as one of his favorite authors. This is not to say that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was then influenced by his like of Murakami (who knows whether Stieg Larsson or Murakami influenced the translator first?), but it is very interesting to think about the vast number of factors that play into the form a work takes when it is translated.