[rabite gets whacked!]

Thanks, Adilegian, for providing a better educated and reasoned rebuttal than mine. I considered deleting my initial response but I'll let the emotion stand.

As it is, I just finished Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, which is a powerful memoir in the hand of the 19th century Australian outlaw. And, from a literary standpoint, nearly transcendent. The end is just a physically powerful thing; I don't think I've ever read violence so shockingly portrayed, and not for reasons of gore or detail but of despair and defeat. What a monster.

[chompers po pable]

just finished The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which is wonderfully translated by Jay Rubin. just started Hard-boiled Wonderland, and am finding it to be generally mangled by Alfred Birnbaum. reminds me of some of the inferior translations of Dostoevsky, where i spend half my reading time trying to figure out what the original author was trying to say. bad translations piss me off, especially when the material is so brilliant. like i can clearly hear the near idiotic voice of the translator actively mangling the subtle voice of the author, and unfortunately, sir Birnbaum did the only english translation.

i.e: second sentence in the novel, referencing the elevator that the narrator is in : "Or at least I imagined it was ascent." Alfred the eternal fuck confusingly uses "ascent" where "ascending" would naturally work better. making the reader do a double-take and disrupting the flow of the story.

a few pages later: "Yet, supposing that were the case, wasn't it a trifle flighty--not to say inconsiderate--as a choice of expression?" here Birdbum uses "say" rather than "mention," again briefly interupting the natural flow of the novel.

it goes downhill from there.

the two examples i used are pretty blatant errors, though crammed in between the blatant errors are many quieter, mildly annoying problems with birdbum's awful, offbeat, tone-deaf translation.

[Broco]

Although I'm not very fond of Hard-Boiled Wonderland in general, I don't remember anything especially awful about Birnbaum's translation. Your complaints amount to saying that he likes to use formal expressions occasionally, and it's not clear to me that that's inappropriate for Murakami.

In fact the only thing that struck me about the translation was the clever rendering of kuroguro as "INKlings" -- a lesser translator might've gone for the literal rendering "black-blacks", and I appreciate the degree of effort and creativity that went into preserving many of the connotations there. (Admittedly it is offbeat, though.)

[chompers po pable]

i will maintain that to some extent, murakami's voice is muddled due to the translation, which is highlighted by the fact that i read Wind-up Bird immediately before reading this.

it would be unfair to say that birdbum's translation doesn't have it's strong points, however. some of his descriptions are wonderful, and the more i read, the more comfortable i feel with it. (which is undoubtedly helped by the fact that it's the only translation, and is better than nothing.)

i still find much of the translation unnecessary...orwell would kick birdbum in the nuts.

anyhow, here's hoping that Rubin or someone else gives Wonderland a proper translation in the future.

[chompers po pable]

finished up Hard-boiled Wonderland, read A Scanner Darkly (like, whoah, dudes.), and started The Brothers Karamazov.

[108]

[chompers po pable]

i thoroughly enjoyed it. and well, my argument against birnbaum would be more effective if i actually knew japanese! i need a drink, i think i cut my throat on some of those words i just ate!

[PianoMap]

[Felix]

i just read sputnik sweetheart (over the course of about 23 hours). it was wonderful. good thing i have so much free time and am somewhat electively "homeless!"

on the topic of the translators - having read blind woman, sleeping willow immediately before this, i picked up on a portion of sputnik that was almost identical to one of his short stories (the name of which escapes me, and i don't have the book to verify). enough certain parts were subtly different, however, that it seemed to me it couldn't have been murakami's effort to make them so. having glanced at this discussion, and knowing that sputnik was translated by gabriel, i assume, if memory serves, that the short story in question was probably rubin, and not birnbaum. and yeah, i think i like him better.

EDIT: okay! been reading bunches of murakami these past couples weeks. i think i generally go gabriel > rubin > birmbaum.

[Takashi]

A girl (that is currently very mad over Norwegian Wood) offered me The Great Gatsby for Christmas. I finished reading it a while ago, and Fitzerald's particular brand of effusive, intricate prose surprised me and filled me with reverence.
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low-end.net | Whimsy (soon) | Serfdom 2.0

[gooktime]

OK, I'm going to order some Murakami. If this shit sucks I'll have your heads.

[!=]

Anybody has read: 家畜人ヤプー? http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B2%BC%E6%AD%A3%E4%B8%89

I'm curious about it but can't .. entangle the hype from the reality, the niche-looking topic from its relevance.

[Dracko]

It certainly sounds intriguing. Is there an English edition? Has anyone read some Kenji Siratori?

[Renfrew]

I just finished reading South of the Border, West of the Sun. I have only read a few of his books, and I think that I enjoy his short stories the best. I read The Elephant Vanishes, and I would like to get Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman when it loses its hard unyielding exterior in favor of a softer, more papery one.

I've gone back to trying to finish up Catch-22. I've been reading it off and on for over a year now, and its time to finish it up.

[mechanori]

I'm reading Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test...

It is fucking brilliant. He writes in an elegantly stylized prose, which occasionally becomes poetic prose, which occasionally becomes poetry. It's a wonderfully coherent mish-mash of styles and time and narrative. I'm enjoying it a lot more than Naked Lunch, which seemed to be more of a stylistic template than an actual novel.

[Dracko]

An interview about Warren Ellis' upcoming novel, Crooked Little Vein. I hadn't heard much about this, but if this is anything to go by, it could be promising: A lot of Ellis' best works are of the pulp, Weird crime/detective fiction (Desolation Jones and Fell) variety, perhaps even more so than his pure sci-fi stuff (Global Frequency and Ministry of Space). The interview is worth the read if only for the quips on America and the comments on the Internet's role in modern fiction-writing.
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[Felix]

[SplashBeats]

[boojiboy7]

Finnegan's Wake is wonderful and idiotic and insane and no one should read it but eveyrone might want to. I still haven't finished it.

Now, don't fuck with Ulysses.

[rabite gets whacked!]

I have plans to read Finnegan's Wake, aloud, as a bedtime story to my first child in infancy.

[Renfrew]

[Capt. Caveman]

Am I the only one who finds Murakami's narrative voice painfully, painfully boring? I've read Hardboiled, Wind-Up Bird, and Norwegian Wood and in all three I just could not get around the blankness of his narration/lack of character in his protagonists. Now I've often heard the argument that he writes in that kind of voice so as to make it easier for the reader to place themselves in the narrator's point of view, but then it doesn't really make sense to me why he makes these little attempts to give the narrator a "personality," by indicating his particular tastes, such as digging Russian novels and having reservations about chubby women in Hardboiled. He goes so far as to establish certain traits but nevertheless his narrators, and even his more interesting characters, lack humanity, they all come off as rather cold and aloof.

Perhaps that's the point and maybe I'm just not reading him right, but I always find his situations and imagery to be a lot more interesting than his characters, which for me is a problem because I feel like any good story must have interesting, somewhat believable characters.

Right now I'm in the middle of reading The Brothers Karamazov (which Murakami seems to enjoy name-dropping) and I'm really digging it. I usually hate long-winded authors and convoluted plots, but I find Dostoyevsky's characters and their philosophical sparring pretty compelling.

[chompers po pable]

caveman, i think that "identity" is a major theme in Murakami's stories, in an existentialist sort of way. his characters seem to be in flux, identity wise (constantly)...and in that way, viewed from that angle, it more or less works.

and i'm a little over halfway through The Brothers Karamazov as well, and also enjoying it. Dostoevsky's characters are definitely heavier, and this "heaviness" through their relative static states (as opposed to Murakami's characters).

in some ways the difference between the two authors works can be viewed as modernism heavily frosted with existentialist views vs. postmodernism lightly sprinkled with existentialist views. also, i think fried vs. baked works well.

and in other ways, their works are so different that a comparison doesn't really accomplish much aside from amusing me.

[Dracko]

[rabite gets whacked!]

psst japan

[Broco]

[rabite gets whacked!]

Broco, that sounds about right.

And to go along with that, he also uses these blank protagonists with maximum self-insertion potential.

[Capt. Caveman]

[108]

[chompers po pable]

[Dracko]

[chompers po pable]

Dracko, watch Blow-up. The film meanders along much like Murakami's novels, which tends to piss people off. there are some interesting ideas in it if you can get past the pace and style. it's definitely worth a watch.

i will be picking up Labyrinths soon.

[Swimmy]

Personally I like characterless, over-the-top narrative, but I don't think Murakami is over-the-top enough to pull it off.
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[Adilegian]

I’m bored, bored, bored at work. I think I’ll resurrect this thread!

[Felix]

speaking of war and peace -

i just finished anna karenina before work today (fruits of the past two weeks as i took a break from murakami).. it was really something. reminded me a lot of a (boring, 80's) woody allen movie, which is not surprising as i remember reading some quote from him somewhere about how hannah and her sisters was mostly a cop from tolstoy.

on the one hand, you have levin, who's basically just trying to figure out how to live; on the other, you have anna and all her dealings, and it's mostly schlock, except it's not particularly objectionable schlock. it's hard to really be fully cognizant of either of the main narratives because there's just so much of them, and even more information about nineteenth century farming technique and what have you because that's just how russian novels do things.

this is mitigated by a couple things: one, the historical context is much much easier to appreciate here than i found it to be in crime and punishment (for whatever reason). two, tolstoy's narration is both omniscient and, in a weird way, completely tactless about it, to the extent that any given action a character takes is always always superceded by the impulse behind it and everybody comes off as hopelessly guilty. it's endearing!

not my style. but i liked it. ain't no schlock like czarist schlock, i guess.

[sync-swim]

I wrote a review of "Air" by Geoff Ryman

[rabite gets whacked!]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[108]

I think the one thing more important about Catcher in the Rye than anything else is that he doesn't tell you what it is he did after he went home.

Though maybe that's putting it a bit cheaply.

I read Kenji Miyazawa's Night on the Galactic Railroad on the train yesterday and today!

Hey hey!
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[klikbeep]

[slipstream]

I am reading Infinite Jest. The font on the front cover is the same colour as tennis balls.
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