Jay Rubin - Murakami Haruki translator

Tomorrow Harvard professor Jay Rubin, translator of Haruki Murakami’s works and author of the highly acclaimed, “Making Sense of Japanese” is coming to my school to give a talk. One of the more famous Murakami novels he has translated is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

The topic of his talk hasn’t been disclosed yet, but I’m sure it’s going to be interesting.

Apparently, Jay Rubin gets “first dibs” to publish any work that Murakami publishes. If he likes it, he gets to translate it. If he doesn’t like it, others get to do the translation.

I have done some freelance technical translation, and even though in this type of writing both the original Japanese and target English are supposed to communicate the intended message as straightforward as possible, it’s still tough. I can’t imagine translating a piece of literature… and especially something by Murakami whose stories often include abstract and complex narrative structures. It should be fun hearing what Professor Rubin has to say!

Here is a article from The Guardian entitled “Jay Rubin on the difficulties of translating particularly unpleasant passages” where Professor Rubin discusses the difficulty of translating an especially gory and explicit scenes from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I hope this turns your stomach a little: “His men held Yamamoto down with their hands and knees while he began skinning Yamamoto with the utmost care. It truly was like skinning a peach. I couldn’t bear to watch. I closed my eyes. When I did this, one of the soldiers hit me with his rifle butt. He went on hitting me until I opened my eyes. But it hardly mattered: eyes open or closed, I could still hear Yamamoto’s voice. He bore the pain without a whimper - at first. But soon he began to scream.”

This is just the beginning of the passage in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in which a Japanese espionage agent is skinned alive by a Mongolian army officer. It gets much worse. I remember living with this chapter day after day as I translated it from Murakami’s gruesome Japanese into (I hope) equally gruesome English. Unlike the narrator, Lieutenant Mamiya, I did not have the luxury of closing my eyes - even for an instant - as I worked on it. I am occasionally reminded of the experience when I see people hiding their eyes at a violent film. I once tried to talk to Murakami himself about this passage, but he refused: it was just too sickening, he said.

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My personal favorite Murakami Haruki book is Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but there are still many Murakami Haruki books I have yet to read!

If anyone has any burning questions they want me to ask the Professor, let me know via the comments in the next 7 hours or so and I’ll be sure to ask and let you know how he responds!

- Harvey