April 30, 2008
Interview with William Morris
Labels: path notes, path of dreams
April 28, 2008
Sex and the single Mormon
Two recent threads on Mormon blogs do a good job of encapusating the moral themes in the novel. This autobiographical post (and the accompanying comments) on The Exponent nicely sums up the primary point of conflict in the first half of the novel:
Had I made my marriage decision based on practicalities—financial and otherwise—the wedding would have been held years later. But . . . I wanted very much to sleep with this man I loved and I knew [sex] would happen soon rather than later.
This thread on the By Common Consent blog proves the old writer's adage that the sure way to create drama about something is to place obstacles around it (Buffy providing the all-time classic example: sleep with your boyfriend and he literally turns into the devil).
When it comes to fiction, difficult is good. Not so much in real life, as Harvey Mansfield observes in his review of Sex and the Soul by Donna Freitas, where students at conservative religious schools (such as Connor and Elly)
often suffer deep anxiety in their search for a mate. The boys find it troublingly difficult to put off sex, and the girls are fearful that they will have failed in college if they do not get a "ring by spring" (of their senior year).
Still, the license of Sex and the City is dullsville in comparison. Though as illustrated here, these two extremes might share something in common. Quips Jeremy Lott, "Not having sex means talking about it constantly."
Labels: buffy, lds, path notes, path of dreams, religion, sex
April 27, 2008
"Shadow of the Moon" revisions
TP is the TokyoPop translation. EW is my translation.
1. TP: She found it difficult to relax. For a while, she sat in the big room alone, thinking. Yet the single silver-embossed [1] chair was uncomfortable to sit on, and she feared getting her fingerprints on the sleek surface of the ornamented lacquer table, so there was no leaning on that.
EW: She had wanted to retreat to her room, give herself some time to think things out, but the ornate, overstuffed chairs were uncomfortable. The lacquered table was finished with mother of pearl and would show even a fingerprint if she touched it. She hesitated even to sit there with her chin in her hands. [2]
1.1. The adjective immediately modifying "chair" is one of those wonderful onomotopaeia, fuka-fuka shita, meaning "puffy" or "squashy."
1.2. LIT: "Would leave fingerprints if touched, [so] she hesitated even to rest her chin in her hands."
2. TP: The door to the smaller room was a thin three-paneled sliding door painted all over with an intricate floral design; [1] it folded up along one side of the opening. There was a step up at the doorway, and the rest of the room was hidden from view by a single hanging silk curtain. [2]
EW: The door partitioning the two rooms was folded back. The door was engraved with a delicate fretwork. As she stepped inside, the room became much bigger. Silk curtains hung down over a raised platform.
2.1. Although these fretworks often have floral designs, "floral" isn't specifically mentioned.
2.2. The TokyoPop version is less literal, but gets at the same essential meaning.
3. TP: Feeling very much out of place, [1] Yoko went to the large windows that stretched from floor to ceiling at one end of the main chamber. The window frames were intricately detailed, and the glass itself was brightly colored. [2] Beyond the gleaming panes she could see a terrace.
EW: Bored with it all, Youko opened the big window. The French doors reached from the floor to the ceiling. Stained glass filled the geometric patterns between the lattices. Beyond the doors was a wide balcony.
3.1. TokyoPop is using the literal translation, but my dictionaries list "bored (to death)" or "having nothing to do" as the primary definition. "With nothing else to do" might be better.
3.2. TokyoPop is being literal, "colored glass" instead of "stained glass."
4. TP: Opening the window farther, she stepped through it onto a large terrace, made of interconnected white stones, which hugged the curve of the building.
EW: The terrace, covered with white stone, ran around the circumference of the building. It was about as wide as a small courtyard.
LIT: "It was the approximate spaciousness of a small garden (or yard or compound)."
5. TP: The smile faded from Yoko's face. "I do, don't I? I had been wondering."
Rakushun came to stand beside her. "The royal palace of Kei is in Gyouten, in the province of Yei . Goldenwave Palace , 'tis called."
EW: The smile disappeared from her face. "Yeah, I probably do."
Rakushun stood next to Youko and like her gazed out over the ocean. "The palace in Kei is located in Gyouten, Ei Province. It's called Kinpa Palace , the Palace of Golden Waves ."
Youko doesn't say she was "wondering."
6. TP: Yoko nodded. She knew there had been a time when she would have dreamed of living in a palace like this, but now she found that [1] the idea really didn't interest her.
EW: It didn't peak her interest. She answered with a listless, "Huh." [2]
6.1. The additions are not in the original.
6.2. LIT: "She answered with a spiritless aizuchi." An aizuchi is "a sound given during a conversation to indicate comprehension."
7. TP: Yoko shivered. "I think so too.
EW: Youko nodded. "No doubt.
She only nods.
8. TP: You have to take the throne, if only to protect yourself-
EW: For your own good . . . .
The addition is not in the original.
9. TP: "I don't want anyone to think I made my decision out of desperation." Yoko laughed. "In the months after I came Over Here, I thought I might die at any moment. I made it through, though. I was lucky. So you see, I was ready to give up my life before this. I'm not going to let fear of death get in the way of me making my choice now." [1]
Rakushun swallowed noisily. [2]
EW: "I'm not being self-destructive." She smiled. "When I came here, considering the state I was in, dying wouldn't have come as much of a surprise. I've somehow survived till now, but probably more due to luck than anything else. I was as good as dead when I came here, so it's not something I get all choked up about. [1] At any rate, I don't want to be the kind of person who gets all choked up about stuff like that."
9.1. TokyoPop is a tad more literal, though the meanings are close enough.
9.2. Rakushun says, "But."
10. TP: Rakushun lifted his beady [1] eyes and looked into Yoko's. "I can't figure why this is such a tough decision for you." [2]
"It's tough, because I can't do what they're asking of me."
EW: Rakushun looked up at her with his jet-black eyes. "We didn't know that you were so confused by all of this."
"I can't do it."
10.1. "Beady" is entirely the wrong adjective.
10.2. Better: "I can't understand what you're so confused about."
11. TP: The rat began to walk away, his back still turned to Yoko, his hands raised as if to say he had done all he could and would do no more. Yoko watched him leave.
EW: Youko watched as he walked off into the distance. He waved his hand, but didn't turn around.
Should be: "raised his hand." The addition is not in the original.
12. I know, said a voice in Yoko's head that was not her own.
Yoko's eyes opened wide, and she looked around hastily, but of course there was no one there. [1]
EW: But I know.
This wasn't the sound of her own voice echoing inside her skull. Her head shot up and she scanned the surroundings. But it wasn't a sound she had heard with her ears. [2]
12.1. The addition is not in the original.
12.2. My translation is literal.
13. You called me a monster, whined to have me taken from you. My silence was your punishment.
EW: You thought me a monster, begged for me to be taken out of you. That is why. This was an error on your part.
Better: "begged and whined." The rest of my translation is pretty literal.
14. The only reply was the whistling of the night wind and the low crash of the waves far below.
EW: This statement went unanswered.
The addition is not in the original.
The online and offline browser versions have been updated.
Labels: 12 kingdoms, shadow revisions
April 24, 2008
Home literature
I see "home literature" as a direct extension of the stories I once wrote for The New Era. Or to be more precise, the kind of stories I would write if I didn't have to deal with Correlation, but without altering the overall approach or underlying intent.
In other words, taking Chris Bigelow's definition of "provocative, unconventional, yet ultimately faith-affirming stories that yield new insights into Mormon culture and humanity" (which I am totally on board with), here I would exclude from those first two adjective anything violating theological or moral standards.
Now, Whitney more specifically challenged writers to
Make books yourselves that shall not only be a credit to you and to the land and people that produced you, but likewise a boon and benefaction to mankind.
The second clause in that sentence sets the bar far higher than the humble target I'm shooting at here. Namely, to remain faithful to the objectives of "home literature"--fiction that remains entirely within the community of believers--yet at the same time wedges into the niche occupied by the modern, secular, genre romance.
The two would obviously seem incompatible from the start. As explained by the Harlequin writer's guidelines:
We want to see an emphasis on the physical relationship developing between the couple: fully described love scenes along with a high level of fantasy, playfulness and eroticism are needed.
Hard to accomplish--and keep the protagonists temple recommend worthy--when marriage is the goal the plot leads up to. In The Path of Dreams, I came up with a clever (I think) end-run around this problem, though not one that could be deployed formulaically.
Moreover, by inserting a pivot point into the story--the marriage halfway through--those moral constraints (against romanticizing premarital sex) could be set aside for the remainder of the story.
A second reason is that, taking Austen as the classic romance template, by the time the engagement arrived with the certainty of marriage in the historical romance, the social structure of the lovers' lives thenceforth was determined. This is definitely not the case in a BYU romance (to take one sub-sub-genre).
Erica Friedman points out the problem of "stories end[ing] where they should begin." That is, they end with declarations of love and the decision to marry (or the marriage itself), when "what comes next" is really more interesting.
With the plot centered around the marital pivot point, the narrative will veer from strict romance to what I might call "family formation melodrama." The challenge, then, is to keep a firm grasp of the erotic thread and not turn into a dreary soap or one of those painfully unfunny sit-coms about what is in actuality an intolerably dysfunctional marriage.
Of course, we citizens of Utah County know that Mormons happily read (gentile) romance novels and attend R-rated movies at pretty much the same rates as the rest of suburban America. Whether such a genre with a "Mormon" label on the cover could survive that cognitive disconnect is another question.
Labels: books, BYU, lds, path notes, path of dreams, utah
April 22, 2008
Translation notes (12 Kingdoms)
The translation process boils down to reading and typing (and pausing to look up words). When that doesn't work--such as with the infinitely long relative clauses that are grammatical in Japanese but impossible to translate literally into English--I have to think about how to make the "meaning" make sense in English.
Then there are times when I stop and say, "Huh?" And things slow to a crawl. This is when "translation" turns into "decoding."
When the "Huh?" moment arrive (once or twice a chapter), my main tools are JWPce (WWWJDIC), Ejirou, Google, and Yahoo-Japan's suite of dictionaries. I fall back on Yoshie Omura's Twelve Kingdoms glossary a lot. And in a pinch turn to a native speaker for help.
I depend a lot on input from readers pointing to typos, inconsistencies, lapses in logic. I've created a glossary of my own (the entries show up in the notes) to try and keep my terminology straight (though in some cases, such as Naiden and Gaiden, I haven't been as consistent as I should be).
A trilingual linguist friend once told me that a translator's first language skills are his most important. It doesn't matter how well you understand your second language if it comes out as gibberish in your first. My saving grace, I guess, because I'm considerably less fluent in Japanese than I am in English.
Of course, the English may scan correctly but be quite wrong. Shadow of the Moon was my first effort at something long and complex. Looking back at it now, I can usually spot my mistakes, though there are still a few head-scratchers. What makes the most sense is most often the most correct.
Labels: 12 kingdoms, japanese, writing
April 21, 2008
Japanese onomatopoeia
April 20, 2008
Chapter 48 (The Shore in Twilight)
射人 [しゃじん] Shajin (shoot arrow person); in American terms, the director of the Secret Service. The Daiboku serves under the Shajin.
虎賁氏 [こふんし] Kofun-shi (tiger + decorate); the royal bodyguard assigned to public functions.
外殿 [がいでん] Gaiden, lit. "outer palace"
内殿 [ないでん] Naiden, lit. "inner palace"
Somewhat problematic with these two translations is that the author also uses "outer palace" (外宮) to mean: "outside the Naiden and Gaiden." If the White House--specifically the Oval Office--is the Naiden, and the Capitol is the Gaiden, then the "inner palace" (外宮) would be the White House residence, Camp David, and the president's personal residences. The rest of the National Mall would be the "outer palace." Unfortunately, I haven't been terribly careful about making these distinctions explicit throughout.
Labels: 12 kingdoms, shore in twilight
April 18, 2008
The Path of Dreams (excerpt)
Preface
The Buddha’s Disciple
After New Year’s, Obon is the most important of Japan’s national holidays. Also known as the Feast of the Lanterns or the Festival for the Dead, Obon is the time set apart for the veneration of our ancestors. The time dedicated to the restoration of familial and generational ties. The time when we remember the dead.
The Japanese is an abbreviation of Urabon, a phonetic reduction of the Sanskrit Ullambana, meaning “to hang upside down.” It represents the suffering of those “hungry ghosts” whose sins have forestalled their reincarnation and consigned them to the torments of Hell. On the final day of Obon, the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month (according to the old calendar), the Ruler of the Earthly Realms grants forgiveness to all such benighted souls and thus upon all humankind. For none of us pass from this life pure.
The Festival has its beginnings in the Urabon Sutra and the story of Maudgalyayana, a disciple of Shakyamuni Buddha. Not long after his mother’s spirit passed from this life, Mokuren Sonja (as the Japanese pronounce his name) discerned her to be suffering the tortures of Ullambana. Water boiled upon touching her lips. Everything she ate turned to ash.
In despair, Mokuren sought out the wisdom of the Buddha, who told him that his mother’s bad karma was the consequence of a life given over to petty greed and stinginess. To merit her release from hell, Mokuren had to practice dana, or selfless giving, on her behalf. He was commanded to summon the ten sanctified priests from the Ten Worlds to his temple, tend to their material needs, and entreat them to perform for his mother a proper memorial service. Mokuren was further instructed that he must sincerely thank his mother for all she had done for him during her life, her failings and shortcomings notwithstanding.
This gratitude he expressed and these rites he performed. Because of his filial piety, his mother’s soul was reborn into the Pure Land. Mokuren lit bonfires to show her the way and danced with joy at the knowledge of her redemption.
All these elements of the first Obon remain with us to this day.
In the modern era, the festival is celebrated from August thirteenth to the fifteenth. We light small ceremonial fires, welcoming the spirits to our hearts and homes. As Mokuren served his elders, we too leave offerings of food, flowers, and incense upon the household altars. The Bon Odori dance brings friends and neighbors together to celebrate the harmony of all creation made possible by the disciple’s example.
On the evening of the final day, the okuribi bonfires burn like stars on the mountains, lighting the way to heaven. We cast paper lanterns upon the waters to guide the spirits of the dead back to the Pure Land. As they slip from this mortal realm, dancing along the paths of the ceaseless currents, the words of the Buddha are not lost from our thoughts, reminding us always:
The weight of obligation we owe our ancestors is as boundless as the heavens.
Chapter 1
Snapshots
Elaine Chieko Packard had a guilty conscience. Dreams. She felt guilty about dreams. But dreams so real she could almost believe she was not dreaming at all. One simple fact reminded her that these fantasies existed only in her mind: she was a missionary, for crying out loud.
Good girls—especially good girls who went on missions—didn’t have dreams like this. Good girls didn’t do a lot of things. They didn’t open their mouths when they kissed. They certainly didn’t go all the way. They didn’t get to the on-ramp, or even leave the driveway in the first place. Other girls did, the girls passed around like a wad of used chewing gum. And how gross was that?
As a teenager, Elly sat in church and listened dutifully to the lessons on morality and chastity, mesmerized by the images her imagination could conjure up. The slasher movies of moral peril. She didn’t even snicker about them to her friends, though it was a lot like watching the last scene in Time Bandits over and over: “Mom! Dad! It’s evil! Don’t touch it!”
If she wasn’t careful, she’d go kaboom too.
The subject was petting. Sister Summers approached it with half a dozen euphemisms and more frightening quotes from dead General Authorities before Jennie Howell finally blurted out, “But it’s okay once you get married, isn’t it?”
Sister Summers turned pale and changed the subject.
Elly considered the whole thing a pointless exercise. The girls who did fool around weren’t listening. They weren’t in class. They were sleeping in Sunday morning after spending Saturday night doing what the rest of them were being told not to. The girls who weren’t going to weren’t going to. She’d known since puberty that she’d never stand anywhere but squarely in the wasn’t-going-to camp.
Abstinence made sense to her. What she didn’t get was this incredible paranoia over losing it. To be sure, Sister Summers wasn’t paranoid. Only timid and easily embarrassed. Now Brother Collins, Elly’s Seminary teacher, he was paranoid. Every lesson on morality came down to us versus them. Her honor and good name hung in the balance. They were going to get her, like the dumb girls in the horror flicks always running up the stairs instead of down. One scream of regret. Disgraced for life.
The problem was, Elly never felt gotten to, pursued, tempted. She felt, well, left out. And curious. Men were supposed to be the sex with sex on the brain. But women’s magazines were obsessed with it. At the supermarket, she’d mosey over to an empty register and sneak a Cosmo off the rack. What does a man expect of a woman in bed? She had no idea. How can you have the best sex ever? Ditto. Is he your sexual soul mate? Not a question that would ever come up in a temple preparation class.
The occasional boy who kissed her awkwardly at the end of a date didn’t arouse her to any breaking point. Didn’t arouse her at all. But deep inside her secret self she desperately wanted to believe she could be propelled to a soul-shattering act of wantonness—that it could overpower her completely.
“Don’t you wonder what it’s like?” Jennie Howell whispered to her one day after Seminary as they walked back to the high school, textbooks clasped against their chests like body armor. Elly shrugged as if she never gave it a second thought. She had a closet full of second thoughts.
“I mean,” Jennie went on, “I know for a fact that Karen Andersen did it with Jeff Clark, and they were both in church on Sunday. I mean, if you killed somebody you sure wouldn’t show up in church the next Sunday.”
Jennie thought too much about these things. So did Elly, though she tried not to make it a matter of public conversation. The subject was simultaneously too real and too imaginary, like a travel brochure to a distant, foreign land she would never visit.
She’d grown up in a distant, foreign land—Japan. She wanted sex to be like that—thrilling and yet deeply familiar, and herself chock full of forbidden knowledge.
Elly stood in the Barnes & Noble, the fat romance paperback in her hands. Curiosity, that’s all. Yet she lingered over the words as she read. She saw in her mind’s eye, like a voyeur at the rear window, the man’s hands slipping inside the woman’s blouse, their lips parting—
She cast her eyes about furtively, as if the pictures in her mind were being projected in Technicolor on the high walls of the bookstore.
Elly knew about pictures—the time at Girl’s Camp when Becky Hoggan took a picture of her in the shower. Becky was not a good girl. Becky was the kind of bad influence they warned her about in church. But Sister Johannson looked upon her as a lost sheep worthy of being fellowshipped back into the fold.
The shower was a solar-powered contraption. It consisted of a black metal tank exposed to the scorching summer sun, a coil of PVC hose, a valve, a showerhead, and a blue plastic tarp stretched around a crude two-by-four frame. Elly was rinsing her hair in the thin, lukewarm stream, her back arched, her head flung back, when she heard the click of the shutter.
She cast a doe-eyed expression over her shoulder in time to catch a flash of sunlight off the camera lens. Without her glasses on, several blurry seconds passed before she realized what was going on.
“Becky!” she squealed, crouching down and covering her breasts with her arms.
“Just kidding. You’re out of film.” She held up Elly’s little Olympus.
“That’s not funny.”
Becky laughed. The corner of the tarp flapped back into place.
A week later, Elly showed her slides at Mutual. Anyone who’d brought a camera to Girl’s Camp had to. Witty, self-deprecating asides helped. Incriminating photographs helped too, as long as they weren’t that incriminating.
Elly had neither. She clicked through her slides with sparse commentary. This is the campsite. This is the lake. This is Jane and Sister Johannson. Good grief, why hadn’t she sorted through these slides first? This is Becky in her fatigues. A pretty good picture.
“This is—” Elly had to stop and say, “Oh, this is the shower.”
A few hoots from the boys at the back of the recreation hall. Some applause from the girls in the front. Unlike the boys, the girls were not amused by the prospect of running around for a week like feral children. No one else had thought of taking a picture of the shower. How very clever of her! Elly’s thumb pressed down on the button of the remote. Wait a minute, had she thought of taking a picture of the shower? The carousel clicked forward, the slide popping up from the lens housing, the next one falling down into the cradle.
She hadn’t thought of taking a picture of the shower.
Becky had.
Elly hit the back button. A purely instinctual reaction. The gut to the spinal cord to the tendons to the fingers. A blur of peach and blue flashed on the screen, followed by a moment of white. The picture of the shower snapped back into focus.
“Hey, we already saw this one!”
“Uh, it jammed.” Elly leaned over the projector, her body blocking the light. She pulled off the carousel and stepped into the shadows behind the bright cone of light.
“Um, I guess that was the last one.” Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely breathe. Sister Johannson stepped toward her. She was going to reach out her hand and say, All right, Elly, hand it over. Then the bishop was going to take her to his office, shaking his head with profound disappointment. He’d summon her father. Then her mom would find out. Elly would claim it wasn’t her fault. Who knew what Becky would say, but no one would believe her either.
Elly eased herself into the closest seat, holding the carousel against her chest the way a drowning man clings to a Mae West. Sister Johannson said cheerfully, “Who’s next?”
LaRae Cordner sprang to her feet, a slide carousel in one hand and a boom box in the other. “I am!” LaRae could turn five minutes of kindergarten show-and-tell into a Broadway production. No one would remember Elly’s slides afterward. That suited her just fine.
Late that night, Elly sneaked her father’s slide projector into her room. She locked the door and closed the curtains. Why had she believed Becky? Then it occurred to her—the Photomat at Smith’s Grocery! Some pimply-faced kid manning the developing machines had seen everything! She’d never go there again.
The image pulled into focus. Elly exhaled in surprise. She’d seen herself naked before in the mirror. Coming out of the shower. In passing. The human body didn’t offend her. She could look at Leonardo’s Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s David without blushing.
But this was different. To begin with, it was her.
She tipped the projector so the image displayed unbroken on the ceiling. The lack of shame in the display, the casual innocence in her nudity, that’s what made it so—different. Wasn’t she supposed to be embarrassed, mortified, chagrined? She wasn’t. She didn’t know this person. Yet this is who I am.
She lay on the bed and stared at herself. The dark cascade of her hair, the supple muscles of her back and belly. The concave slope at her waist. The curve of her breasts set against the vibrant blue.
She wasn’t unattractive. Really. It was an extraordinary revelation.
Elly hid the slide where no one would find it.
But that moment haunted her—her thumb resting on the button of the remote—when her family honor and good name hung in the balance. Foresight was not her forte. Hindsight wouldn’t have helped at all. Only sheer dumb luck had allowed her to stop the slide projector in time. Sitting in church, she relived the scene over and over. Her heart pounded in her chest. Sweat trickled down her back.
That moment came back to her at the Barnes & Noble. She looked at the glossy book cover, the bare-chested Fabio look-alike with his muscled arms wrapped around a buxom, raven-haired woman about to burst out of her décolletage. It was the wrong book. She’d picked it up by accident. Good girls didn’t do things like that.
She put the book back on the shelf and feigned a disinterested air as she strode to the remainder racks. That night, Elly Packard decided she would go on a mission when she turned twenty-one.
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Labels: BYU, ebooks, kindle, lds, path notes, path of dreams, peaks island press, publishing, religion
April 16, 2008
Empresses and kings
Adding the character for "woman" (女王) specifically makes it "queen" or "empress." When the En refers to Empress Yo, he uses "Jo-ou" (女王) several times. When he introduces Youko to Rokuta, he says "Empress of Kei" (景女王).
But when Rakushun first tells Youko, "You are the Royal Kei," he says "Kei-ou," as does most everybody else, including Youko.
I use "queen" to refer to the wife of a king (as in "Shoukei was the daughter of Queen Kaka, Chuutatsu's wife") and to Seioubo, "Queen Mother of the West," which translates literally as "west + king + mother" (西王母).
When speaking generically, I translate it as "king." When referring to Youko, I use "empress." To be more linguistically consistent, I should perhaps use "emperor" and "empress." But I prefer "king" to "emperor" and "empress" to "queen."
Throughout Japan's history, "emperor" has been a mostly titular role, with the political and military power residing in the hands of the shogun. "Empress" and "king" have more muscular, hands-on connotations to me.
Even in a Chinese context, the late dynasty emperors who spent their lives holed up in the Forbidden City seem pretty close to their Japanese counterparts. The early dynasty emperors like Ying Zheng remind me more of European kings in the Henry V mode.
Labels: 12 kingdoms, china, history, japanese, language
April 14, 2008
"Shadow of the Moon" revisions
TP is the TokyoPop translation. EW is my translation.
1. TP: "Yes," replied Yoko. She wondered where his lecture would lead, but for now it seemed harmless enough to agree.
EW: "Yes."
The addition is not in the original.
2. TP: "Over There, you have presidents and prime ministers. Here, we appoint a king to rule.
EW: "This palace is where the king resides . . . .
The addition is not in the original. Enki is the one up on current affairs in Japan, and even the collective use of "we" is rather misleading.
3. TP: "I am not speaking to illustrate my own virtues--do not jump to conclusions.
EW: "That is beside the point.
Better: "I wouldn't go that far. Let's not get ahead of ourselves."
4. TP: "One way might be this 'social democracy' you've talked about," [1] Enki put in, much to Yoko's surprise. [2] "The people choose their own king, and if they don't like him, they make him quit."
"Indeed," said the Ever-King. Then, turning to Yoko he added, "My minister has a great interest in the affairs of Over There, you see. [3] However, we have a different way of doing things Here.
EW: There's always democracy," Enki interjected. "The people choose a king to their own liking. And when he becomes not to their liking, they choose somebody else."
"Well, that's one way," the En responded. "But here it is done another
4.1. The term translates directly as "democracy." The author uses kana instead of kanji, additionally suggesting that the world is a foreign import. LIT: "There's this thing called 'democracy.'"
4.2. The addition is not in the original.
4.3. The addition is not in the original.
5. TP: . . . Elegant, yes?"
"I suppose," said Yoko, uncertainly. [1]
The Ever-King nodded, seeming unperturbed by Yoko's lack of enthusiasm. [2]
EW: . . . Do you think that would work?"
"Yeah, I suppose that would work."
As if in agreement, the En nodded once.
5.1. There are ellipses in the original: "That . . . I suppose so." So the adverb "uncertainly" could be read in this context.
5.2. This is fairly vague expression: "En nodded, if only for the sake of nodding."
6. TP: Yoko nodded, her mind racing.
EW: Youko's head slumped.
The verb here is typically translated "to cast eyes downward," or "to hang one's head." If I were to add anything, it would probably be something like:
Youko's head slumped. Oh, crap.
7. TP: If I did all as Enki suggested, the kingdom would surely falter."
"Really?" asked Yoko, frowning.
EW: If I adhered to every word Enki spoke, the kingdom would fall to pieces."
"Yeah . . . I suppose."
My translation is pretty literal.
8. TP: "So, once he chooses you, you're free to do as you will--and he is not?"
EW: "So, you're saying that after you're chosen by the kirin, you can pretty much do what you want?"
The addition is not in the original.
9. TP: Keiki protected her [1] as she grew more extreme. When she began killing those women who remained in the kingdom, Keiki fell ill."
"What happened then?" asked Yoko, barely breathing. [2]
EW: And when Keiki protected them, she tried to have those who remained killed. At that point, Keiki fell ill."
"And . . . ?"
9.1. TokyoPop is correct: "With Keiki covering for her, she only grew more extreme, and tried to have those who remained killed."
9.2. The addition is not in the original.
10. TP: "What happened to her then? To the Prophet, I mean."
"To become king is to die and be reborn as a god. When one has ceased to be king, that one may no longer live."
So, the former king of Kei died--she killed herself--to save Keiki.
EW: "What happened to her?"
"That royal part of her died, and what made her a god was reversed. No longer a monarch, she could no longer continue to live."
And so the Empress Jokaku of the Kingdom of Kei had passed away.
TokyoPop is correct: ""Becoming a king or empress means dying as a human and being reborn as a god. When you are no longer a monarch, you cannot continue to live."
11. TP: . . . There is only one way to bring them succor." [1]
"The true king must sit upon the throne?" [2]
"Precisely." [3]
Yoko shook her head. "I can't do this."
"I think you can. I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a king."
"I don't believe you."
EW: There is no way of saving them." [1]
"So why didn't he go and choose the right king as soon as possible?" [2]
"That is what he has done." [3]
Youko shook her head. "There's just no way."
"Why is that? I believe that you possess all the necessary kingly attributes."
"You're kidding."
11.1. Should be: "There is no other way of saving them."
11.2. Should be : "You mean, placing a righteous king on the throne as soon as possible?"
11.3. TokyoPop is correct.
11.4. LIT: "You are equipped with a kingly spirit." Both versions work.
12. TP: . . . I ask you to save your kingdom. Please."
EW: . . . I am pleading with you to help save my kingdom, and yours."
I wasn't sure about the antecedent to the pronoun here, which is why I fudged and threw in "and yours." Upon further examination, it should be "your kingdom."
13. TP: Indeed, a short time ago I received a strongly worded request from the Naze-King to deliver to him any kaikyaku who may have come from his land into mine.
EW: In fact, I have received from Kou a strongly-worded petition seeking the extradition of a kaikyaku who fled to En.
LIT: "I received a strongly-worded request from the Royal Kou to hand over kaikyaku fleeing from Kou to En." I prefer "extradition," though.
14. TP: The Ever-King turned his gaze to Yoko. His point was clear.
EW: There was much more in the expression on his face that was left unsaid.
Better: "His gaze fell on her. There was much more in his eyes that was left unsaid."
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Labels: 12 kingdoms, shadow revisions
April 13, 2008
Chapter 47 (The Shore in Twilight)
冗祐 [じょうゆう] Jouyuu, the warrior spirit that "possesses" Youko and helps her fight; he first appears in chapter 6 of Shadow of the Moon.
Labels: 12 kingdoms, shore in twilight
April 11, 2008
Defending the personal pronoun
If the problem is the lack of expert/credible sources in students' writing, not using first person doesn't solve the problem; it just covers it up . . . . I'd much rather read a student's personal/eyewitness account of 9/11 than a thousand third-person conspiracy theories.
This is one of Seth Roberts' hobbyhorses, that personal data is much better than no data at all, and while not every correlation points to a cause ("I did X, then Y happened"), it probably points to something. A placebo effect is still an effect. He recently pointed to this article about self-experimentation in defense of first-person emperical evidence.
This is somewhat beside the point, but I'm pretty sure the part in the article about the doctor injecting himself with his patient's blood was the basis for a House episode ("You Don't Want to Know").
The problem of presenting evidence and making testable claims aside, the first person does help to discipline POV, a reason I recall mystery writer Dick Francis citing. I do prefer the third person, but must admit to getting notes back from my editor saying, "POV violation!"
Disbelievers in the power of the personal pronoun can always wander over to the "This I Believe" website.
April 08, 2008
Juhyou
Especially noteworthy are "juhyou" (樹氷), or "frost-covered trees" (tree + ice). They are a product of Japan's "snow country," where cold Siberian winds meet warm Pacific currents, creating record snowfalls at fairly low latitudes (similar to the Appalachians of the mid-Atlantic region). The result is a natural flocking machine.
See a gorgeous photo essay on the subject here.
April 07, 2008
Chapter 46 (The Shore in Twilight)
Labels: 12 kingdoms, fantasy, japanese, shore in twilight, translations
April 06, 2008
Escaflowne: A Girl in Gaea
Shadow of the Moon being a case in point. Consider as well: The Wizard of Oz, The Phantom Tollbooth, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Shoji Kawamori and Kazuki Akane's Escaflowne is a fascinating addition to the genre.
Here, Hitomi, an angst-ridden Japanese high school senior, is transported to the world of Gaea, in a parallel universe from which you can see the Earth and the "dark side" of the Moon (adorned with a giant stone eye). She is the "Wing Goddess," disgorged as if born from the heart of the War Dragon Escaflowne, yet with no knowledge of how to call or control it.
From the onset, Hitomi’s is an almost existential presence. Her helplessness in organizing her own fate is of no small moment, for the control of Escaflowne will determine the victor in the apocalyptic war between Van and Folken, two brothers locked in an interminable internecine conflict that echoes Jacob and Esau. Van’s first impulse is to kill her for refusing to yield control Escaflowne to him, while Folken attempts to kidnap her to gain the same power, a power she does not believe she possesses.
Hitomi’s role in the conflict finally becomes apparent as the showdown between Van and Folken reaches its inevitable fury. Her role is, in fact, simply to be. She becomes a talisman who, according to her own desires, will catalyze either the apotheosis of Van’s abnegation or Folken’s annihilation. She must choose between the rightful but dispossessed king, and the severe elder brother: the overman.
In Jungian terms, she is their anima, and they her animus. The heroic journey is one of the self through the long, dark night of the soul. Hitomi’s once frivolous toying with thoughts of suicide suddenly sharpens to a point in the substance of Folken’s Nietzschean offer of eternal peace and infinite atonement through total extinction, the promise to resolve all internal doubts in glorious self-destruction.
The alternative choice is that of forgiveness, of reconciliation. And so it is at that cathartic moment of abreaction when Van accepts himself, accepts Hitomi, accepts Folken as brother, that the war abruptly ends. And the moment in which Hitomi accepts Van, accepts Gaea in its totality, Gaea vanishes. She disappears from the reconciled world on silver wings, for she is the Wing Goddess.
To be sure, the movie is perhaps better judged in terms of its theme and intent than by the particulars of story and plot. The film is specifically titled Escalflowne: A Girl in Gaea, to distinguish it from the series. In the process of truncation, gaps show up in the galloping plot and characters that spring onto the stage with fully-developed vendettas and alliances that must be explained in a few lines of dialogue.
At any rate, the intricate complexity of the world, the wonderful matte art, is compelling enough on its own. The screen spills over with that medieval post-modernism that Japanese anime art directors love so: soldiers in 16th century samurai garb flying around in massive dirigibles, firing cannon out portholes like tall ships (a trope later used in The Last Exile). That is, when they're not whacking each other's heads off with swords.
As mentioned, the movie is a redacted retelling of the television series. A good deal of Hitomi’s backstory has been left out, along with the romantic sub-plots. Director Kazuki Akane's explanation is that the fan base for the series was overwhelmingly female, and he wanted to broaden the base for the movie version. Well, maybe.
He also engineered a complete character redesign for the movie. Character design is one of those specializations that emerges when an industry reaches a critical mass in relationship to everything else in the field (like the position of "story runner" in Hollywood television production). The only example of obvious character redesign in an American production I can think of is between the first and later seasons of The Simpsons.
The "look" of animation in Hollywood is typically considered the product of the studio, unless the source is directly attributable (i.e., Peanuts cartoons look like the Peanuts strip). In Japanese animation, though, there are specialists in character design as well as mechanical design (to handle the robots and all the things that go whrrrr). A particular artist's name in the credits will raise expectation about the "look and feel" of the final product.
These changes not unexpectedly outraged devoted fans of the series. But I found I quite liked these editorial decisions (and even more so after watching the series). Despite the redactions and adaptations, anybody familiar with fantasy should be able to fill in the blanks on their own. After all, the real fun in practicing literary analysis is being able to ignore what the author might have actually meant in the first place.
Labels: anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, robots
April 01, 2008
The unbearable lightness of light novels
The discussion concern the "light novel," a popular novella format in Japan, basically an illustrated paperback of around 40,000 words. Several U.S. anime and manga publishers have been licensing light novels. Sales have not been encouraging.
In response, Erica Friedman (a small publisher in her own right) gets down to brass tacks, admonishing the licensors and licensees to "Rework your projections and admit that you’re all working in a teeny-tiny, grassroots industry."
Her essay encapsulates the aspirations of small publishers, and the pitfalls awaiting them. In the comments, she points to one fail-safe strategy: plumb the lowest common denominator. (Which is pretty much what yaoi does.)
One obviously approach is making first volumes available free, because "you can't expect people to buy stuff that they don’t know about!" Baen Books does precisely this. It offers many of its titles--especially first titles in a series--for free online.
Baen Books is now making available--for free--a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online--no conditions, no strings attached.
As Eric Flint explains:
[P]erhaps most important of all, free books are the way an audience is built in the first place . . . . Most readers of science fiction and fantasy develop that interest as teenagers, mainly from libraries [and] . . . people lending books to their friends.
Niche and micro-publishers serious about expanding their markets should memorize this essay. Though perhaps Tim O'Reilly sums up the problem the best: "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy."
The Baen approach is a kind of serialization. Manga, after all, is a thriving expression of the serial novel, very much in a form Dickens would have been familiar with. English translations of Japanese light novels could benefit from a similar marketing strategy.
Related posts
Selling Twilight in Japan
Typesetting Japanese
Labels: light novel, publishing