Incommensurability of Literature

The most popular entry in my weblog is "Haruki Murakami's Speech on Catalonia International Prize "As an Unrealistic Dreamer"".

I knew the fact that Haruki Murakami was popular all over the world, but after I wrote this entry, I realized how popular he actually was.

And then I could make a lot of friends who loved Haruki Murakami's works on the Internet. One of them is Ru, who is writing her weblog "Be my knife". She's read many works of Japanese literature mainly in English, and her impressions are always interesting to me.

Of course I, as a native Japanese, read Japanese literature in Japanese, and I read foreign literature almost in Japanese translations. I'm interested in translated works of literature. I wonder if I can understand and taste foreign literature as much as Japanese literature, and at the same time I also wonder how the readers who read Haruki Murakami in foreign language understand and taste his works.

I tried to read some of Haruki Murakami's novels in both of Japanese and English. I felt that the tastes of his novels were preserved in English translation.

I wrote about the relationship between Japanese and western literature in the entry "Multilingualism and Literature". Haruki Murakami has been deeply influenced by modern American literature, and he translated many of them into Japanese, for example, Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, and Raymond Chandler. His style of writing is sometimes unnatural for Japanese readers, because it's almost like a translation of an American novel. So I feel that English version is more natural than his original works in Japanese.

In a comment on the weblog "Be My Knife", she wrote that she was reading Tanizaki Junichiro's "The Makioka Sisters (細雪)". It's the most favorite novel in the modern Japanese literature. I've never read it in English, but I think that it's quite difficult to preserve the taste of this novel in English. Kansai dialect, which the Makioka sisters speak, is attractive in this novel, but it could be translated, couldn't it?

I translated Haruki Murakami's speech in on Catalonia International Prize, and many people read it, but I've been anxious about whether I translated the way he spoke in this speech.

Levy Hideo, who was born as a native English speaker, chose to write in Japanese, because he wants to write about the things that he can express only in Japanese.

I'm writing a Japanese weblog and this English one and I write different topics on these weblogs, because I also think that there are some things that I can write about only in English and other things only in Japanese.

I'll go back and forth between Japanese and English.