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Lost in Translation
Not everything is as it seems...
I have often thought about what is lost in translation. I have spent hours comparing lines of poetry, trying to understand what falls between the cracks when moving from French to English. But reading Sputnik Sweetheart, it hit me like a revelation. More than the meanings of individual words are obscured. The cultural resonance of a text easily eludes the foreign reader. What is foreign and controversial to one reader, might be familiar and banal to another.
I was struck in Sputnik Sweetheart, as I had been when I read Norwegian Wood, by the strong sexual elements. I blushed a little as I read certain sequences on the subway, looking up occasionally to be sure no one was reading over my shoulder. A little Google research revealed that explicit sexuality in Japanese literature is hardly a novelty, which was something perhaps I could have guessed from graphic portrayals of sex in anime and the popularity of Lolita fetishes in modern Tokyo. Despite the proliferation of pornography and sex zones touting over 3,000 sex shops, peep shows, telephone clubs, and “soaplands”, Japan is reportedly one of the most “sexless societies in the industrialized world.” The parallel this offers to the recurring theme of alternate worlds and the instability of reality might easily have escaped me.
In the same way, the allusions to Freud, of which the dream sequences and references to repression are just the surface, seemed obvious and omnipresent to me, a Western reader, but would they have stood out to a Japanese counterpoint? It is unclear. However, it seems especially important given the concerns particular to Western psychoanalysts and theorists, ranging from Freud to Foucault. From that perspective, what is real? Is it the world that is saturated with sexual permissiveness? Or is it merely a cloak for a more conservative reality, in which what Foucault would term Victorian values reign? Or, to tumble further down the rabbit hole, is the conservative underbelly merely repressing a wanton unconscious?
It is perhaps this reliance on traditions from both the East and West that makes Murakami so compelling and intellectually satisfying. And if the contrast between East and West provides yet another parallel to that between reality and some alternate dimension, it is similarly unclear which is which.
I also find it very
I also find it very fascinating what is lost in translation. I truly believe that to fully understand a work it must be read in its original language, yet because we do not all speak 20 languages, translations are not a bad replacement. Within translations, some weird quirks in the language or deeper meanings can still be seen. I remember reading The Reader, which was originally written in German, and constantly thinking 'well this is new. I've never read english like this before." And that is only speaking about language. Then there is the whole cultural aspect where that raises the questions: is this normal in their culture? And are they aware these are Freudian concepts? These questions are interesting and go further than only the differences between mainstream cultures, they also speak to individual differences -many readers even here in the U.S. would have different answers to those two questions. As far as your questions about which world is real. Ironically, I just finished reading about Freud in my psychology book, and the author posed an interesting hypothesis: That the id, the ego, and the superego can be considered 3 different persons (worlds) inside oneself, yet that we cannot take this too literally because the 3 are constantly interacting, influencing our actions fluidly. I'd say that based on Freudian principles, this book perfectly portrays his "tip of the iceberg" philosophy, where society and reality is only a small part of what is really going on.