An SL Quote for Our Time

He had the personal touchiness of most propagandists; he believed that because he was sincere, therefore his opinions must always be correct. 

Arrowsmith, Chapter 21, Section 2

Rhyming in Japanese

See UPDATEs 1 & 2 below...

Working now in Chapter 19 where Martin has just met Doc Pickerbaugh, the would-be poet. 

I wondered how the translator had dealt with Pickebaugh's poems. So far - after just a couple at this point - the translations are fine, but, unsurprisingly, no attempt at rhyming was made. 

I say unsurprising because, as the reader will likely know, Japanese poetry tends not to rhyme. Rather, certain syllabic patterns are met. 

I did a little digging and found some very interesting sources. I will, perhaps, post them as an update at some point. Or, ask if you'd like to see them before then.

For the purposes of Arrowsmith, though, non-rhyming translations are probably fine. It crossed my mind to force them into some sort of syllabic pattern, but doesn't that just take us ever further afield?

UPDATE 1:
This verse from Chapter 19 was translated in rhyme, and not badly:
Zenith welcomes with high hurraw
A friend in Almus Pickerbaugh,
The two-fisted fightin' poet doc
Who stands for health like Gibraltar's rock.
He's jammed with figgers and facts and fun,
The plucky old, lucky old son--of--a--gun!

This sent me back to some of the earlier verses, where I did find some rhyming, albeit not altogether convincing. I now see some opportunities to patch some of these earlier rhymes. I will report back as I progress.

UPDATE 2:
I did patch some of the earlier rhymes and am reasonably happy with what I did. For those of you who read Japanese, I'll explain the details there one day soon.

The debate between brute force direct translations and more interpretive translations is even more real for verse. Especially in the case of the silly verse written by the likes of Pickerbaugh, what's important is not every word, but rather the overall meaning. And, since the original rhymes, I don't think it's a bad idea for the translation to do so as well, within reason.

Stupid is as Stolid Does

It's the early 40's in Japan. The war is on. Supplies are short. Our translator works on into the night, translating an American novel so his countrymen can better know their enemy, or so he will say.

I think about him sometimes. Maybe his eyes are growing dim. Maybe the old print of his English edition is just poor. Maybe sake is more readily available than electricity. Translation is grueling work. 

The end of Chapter 15 is as good a translation as we've seen. Flows smoothly. Few mistakes. And then my rewrite of the beginning of Chapter 16 is littered with footnotes. Among other things, he has confused 'well' with 'yell' and 'stolid' with 'stupid'. Sometimes he misses the point of an entire phrase, but all too often he suffers from what seems to be just plain sloppy reading. 

Granted, not every sentence Lewis wrote will make straightforward sense. And sometimes the idioms coupled with jokes can be too much even for a native reader, let alone a foreign one. 

As a reader small differences in interpretation are often corrected by later context. As a translator though, these small discrepancies become cemented in the mortar of the finished work. When the passage seems strange, or even if it doesn't, double check the source. Then check it again.

Obviously I cannot know what our translator faced. But he comes across as talented, though a little brute force sometimes. And rather sloppy now and then. I hope modern readers will find our joint effort an improvement. He probably did his best. I'm just trying to do the same.

The Whole Shooting-Match

At the end of Chapter 14, Mr. Wise is offering to lease his building to Martin, "furniture and the whole shooting-match."

In the Japanese translation, this came out as "including furniture and hunting supplies."

It's an honest mistake of the sort I'm sure I make in Japanese. But that doesn't mean it's not funny.

Intrigues with the Beautifiers

In Chapter 13, Part III Gottlieb has just "produced antitoxin in the test-tube." He's at dinner with Hunziker and others, and is being praised for his work. 

"Of them all, Hunziker was most generous in his praise. Gottlieb wondered if someone had not tricked this good bald man into intrigues with the beautifiers."

Admittedly, I didn't immediately know that was meant by intrigues with the beautifiers, and the translator got it flat wrong too. 

This work gets me deep into every passage, but also takes place alongside many other activities and investigations, so I often have a gap of a day or more between paragraphs. 

Such was the case here. Just as I was wondering whether Gottlieb was finding Hunziker more handsome than usual, in the light of the reflected glory, I realized that just a few paragraphs earlier Gottlieb had discovered some of the shady business of the firm, including a facial cream "guaranteed to turn a Canadian Indian guide as lily-fair as the angles." 

Aha, just the intrigues we were looking for. As he was being praised for his scientific work, Gottlieb couldn't help but think this wasn't a bad man after all.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing If

In Chapter 13 Part III we read this:
"Gottlieb would have made an excellent Sherlock Holmes -- if anybody who would have made an excellent Sherlock Holmes would have been willing to be a detective."

The Japanese translation is mostly fine, except that the word if is missing.

So, is it a good translation? I guess that depends upon what the definition of the word if is.

Voluptuous Maiden

Late in Chapter 12, Gottlieb has just been dismissed from the university when his wife falls ill. He calls Dean Silva who graciously makes a house call. Looking around the room the Dean sees, among other things, "the color-print of a virtuously voluptuous maiden."

This phrase conjured, for me, an image which I have seen numerous times before: a curvaceous but well-covered young lady. But the translator has turned this into "modest but lust inducing." Not at all the kind of picture I expect to be hanging there near the crucifix. 

The word voluptuous, in English, does have this latter meaning too; in purely linguistic terms, the translation is not wrong. But it's a cultural cue that I think the Western reader would use to disambiguate. We've seen that picture before, where, perhaps our translator was used to the Japanese version of a beautiful maiden, slender, with any hints of curves carefully concealed in a kimono. No wonder he got it wrong. 

For me this project began as an effort to preserve a good but dated translation of a beautiful work. All along I have shown deference to the original translator, allowing him his own interpretations to the extent that I felt fidelity to the original work would allow. 

In the case of brass bands, discussed previously, I was able to use other research to verify that Lewis meant what I thought he did. Here I cannot, and yet I feel fairly confident that I know what he meant. So I did change the translation, and in doing so, I realized that I've begun to allow myself a bit more latitude. 

Certainly I will always keep it faithful to Lewis, and I will continue to admire the tremendous accomplishment of the original translator. But, in the end, I think they'll both forgive me if I do leave behinds a few breadcrumbs.