21-seiki x America x Honyaku Enshu (Translating 21st Century American Fiction)

This book is a revised version of a web-based monthly literary translation contest where I served as the judge (2016–2017). In addition to evaluating the translations submitted by 40–60 applicants each month, I present my translations and explain the main criteria for judging the relevance of translated texts. In addition, the book includes an essay that discusses the work of Masae Iwamoto, a renowned literary translator, to provide an overview of contemporary American fiction in the 21st century.
 
The 21st century is an age of “creative economy,” and literary translation is no exception; many books explaining translation techniques have been published. Among them, this book places particular emphasis on translating literature and aims to provide detailed instructions on the basics: how to set the overall tone of the text, how to choose words and images, to what extent should the translator respect the word order of the original text, and how to translate foreign metaphors and gestures into Japanese. The goal is to carefully grasp the basics as much as possible. Literary translation is the process of dialoguing with the source text and building up the story in Japanese by making various decisions.
 
Literary translation requires the translator to be as “faithful” to the source text as possible, given that there is no obvious right answer to be reached from the beginning, and that there is no pattern that can be applied to all texts. Therefore, the translator has to go through a series of detailed decisions with various options in mind, before arriving at a final draft that adequately conveys the characteristics of the source text. This book offers detailed descriptions of this translation process and presents the criteria for making decisions on translation when presented with numerous options.
 
This book focuses on American fiction in the 2010s. Every story has its own literary and historical context and thinking about these contexts also means that the significance of the work must be evaluated. Where does the reader get the sense that a novel or a short story is interesting? What kind of background does it have? The process of addressing such questions leads the translator a step closer to the discipline of literary studies. Therefore, describing the “now” of works of fiction being written and translated is an attempt to connect translation and literary studies.
 

(Written by FUJII Hikaru, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2021)