Polly Barton\u2019s translation of Aoko Matsuda\u2019s short story collection Where the Wild Ladies Are<\/em> (Obachan-tachi no iru tokoro<\/em>) was published by Tilted Axis Press and Soft Skull Press to rave reviews from The New York Times, The Guardian<\/em> and NPR<\/em>. As Publishers Weekly<\/em> wrote, Matsuda\u2019s collection \u201cturns traditional Japanese ghost and yokai stories on their heads by championing wild, complex women.\u201d In this interview, Barton discusses the challenges of dialogue and the sources of her inspiration.<\/p>\n David Boyd and David Karashima: As a translator, how do you approach dialogue? Does translating Matsuda’s dialogue involve any additional layers or concerns?<\/strong><\/p>\n Polly Barton:<\/strong> I guess my first priority for translating dialogue is that it sounds like actual dialogue. And to do that, I often have to drink down the Japanese and then forget about it while I spit it out in English, as if I was saying it or writing it. I think it\u2019s as a result of that that I get told that so much of my translations are \u201cunashamedly British\u201d sounding. Aoko\u2019s dialogue is very funny, but I feel that the humour is very much tied with not only mood or character-building but also with humanity and empathy, and so it never feels like just an extra that can be tacked on at the end. The humour almost drives it, and then along with that comes everything else, particularly the relationality between the characters.<\/p>\n DB & DK: \u201cHina-chan,\u201d we’re presented with two distinct styles of dialogue, one of which is associated with the Edo period. How did you deal with that? Did you do anything to signal oldness? Formality? Anything else you wanted to convey?<\/strong><\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> Yes, this scene is all about the narrator encountering a (ghost) character from a totally different background, and her reaction shifting from a conventional one of horror and surprise to one of empathy (which paves the way for the love that develops between them). And it\u2019s important that the reader\u2019s reaction traces this same arc, but at the same time, the contrast between the spoof Edo period language of Hina-chan and the hyper-casual vernacular of the narrator is extremely amusing. I conceived of it mostly in terms of establishing this contrast, so while the narrator uses short sentences, plain language, lots of question marks and explanation points and is generally very expressive, the archaic quality and formality of Hina-chan\u2019s language is signalled by long sentences, overblown grammatical constructions, quite poetic word choices, and a generally much more elegant mood.<\/p>\n DB & DK: Did you have any English-language models in mind when handling Hina-chan’s dialogue?<\/strong><\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> You know, I don\u2019t think I\u2019d consciously articulated this to myself before, but thinking about it now, I think I had Jane Austen washing around at the back of my mind. Or at least, her influence was. I feel like the fake-Edo English is loosely based around Austen\u2019s language usage \u2013 which is starchy and can work to connote \u201chistorically nonspecific oldness\u201d while also being perfectly comprehensible, both semantically and in terms of emotional resonance as well.<\/p>\n DB & DK: Perhaps we can focus on your translation of \u201chanzai daro.\u201d What’s happening with the narrator’s voice here? How did \u201cFuck!\u201d come into being?<\/strong><\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> I think this is one of the things that Aoko does so incredibly well, these kind of internal monologues from the characters that are clearly internal but also so very verbal\u2014the kind of thing you might say to yourself if you were alone in a car, or something. And I guess from \u201chanzai daro,\u201d I got this fresh, sharp blade of indignation. It\u2019s masculine language, and there\u2019s something incredible endearing about it from this narrator \u2013 it\u2019s basically her empathy coming off in the form of this hot steam. For \u201chanzai daro,\u201d I have \u201cI mean, he should have been locked up!\u201d which deals with the semantic content, I guess, but that didn\u2019t feel quite enough, and that’s where the \u201cFuck!\u201d came in. I felt like I needed something for the vent of steam, and that was the \u201cFuck!\u201d I know there are some Japanese translators who find it questionable to use swear words, but I\u2019m not one of them, or at least, I\u2019m definitely not when I\u2019m translating Aoko. I feel like what is so remarkable about her as a writer is that nothing is off-limits to her linguistically, from what\u2019s around her in the contemporary moment, and I feel like I then take that permissiveness of her\u2019s and apply it to the English model, and that necessarily embraces swearing.<\/p>\n DB & DK: Translating dialogue often creates a certain kind of cartoonishness, which we sometimes seek to avoid. That said, there are some cases in which that cartoonishness can be embraced. Did you find anything like that in your translation of \u201cHina-chan\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> Finding that balance was definitely something that I thought a lot about whilst translating this, and something that I worked on more with my editors. Because it is cartoonish in the original\u2014it\u2019s a ludicrous situation being described. The narrative embraces that, and the humour depends on it. I feel like it needs that cartoonish quality to convey the clash that\u2019s taking place in this scene. But if it\u2019s only stupid, then we lose the emotional resonance. So, for humour I had things like, \u201cIt would be a great honour if you would let me serve you, as your chambermaid.\u201d\/\u201dMy chambermaid\u2026?\u201d But for example, when the narrator realises that the figure in front of her is a ghost, I avoided going full-on \u201cIt\u2019s a\u2026gh-gh-ghost?!?!\u201d because I felt that carries us too far into caricature, and ultimately prevent the reader identifying with the characters.<\/p>\n DB & DK: How did you settle on your translation of \u201cfirst contact\u201d? Why avoid the direct translation? Did it feel too (literally) alien?<\/strong><\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> This is one of those times where the katakana English phrase works so well in Japanese, precisely because it can be katakana English: it manages to be amusing and have that science fiction reference, but also signal fondness and warmth. Whereas I think \u201cfirst contact\u201d in English is a far less humorous beast\u2014it feels to me quite cold and clinical, generating this sense of approaching a great other. Which is exactly what this story seems written against to me \u2013 it\u2019s about seeing past the trappings of otherness and finding intimacy with this being who was otherized in life and then otherized in death\u2014so it felt really important to avoid that. I deliberated a lot but in the end I went for \u201cthose first hours\u201d, which is quite marked in that it\u2019s kind of overblown and sentimental, while in its composition being quite simple.<\/p>\n DB & DK: “Shigemi-chan is just fine.” There’s a lot happening in this exchange. Could you touch on what went into your decisions here? How did you arrive at being okay with \u201cchan\u201d in this piece?<\/strong><\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> I felt like in this story \u201cchan\u201d is doing a lot of work \u2013 it\u2019s standing in contrast to the archaic title that Hina-chan suggests (Shigemi-dono), so it\u2019s a marker of contemporariness, but it also marks their shift over to a relationship of equality and less reserve. At first, I was worried about whether that would be legible to an English reader not familiar with \u201c-chan\u201d and how it functioned, but then I realised at some point down the line that the way that the dialogue is set up means that it\u2019s defined for the reader in use \u2013 that in saying \u2018X is just fine\u2019, you\u2019re telling the reader that to Shigemi\u2019s (modern) eyes, X is more casual and more intimate.<\/p>\n DB & DK: Finally, \u201cdorodoro,\u201d \u201cburuburu,\u201d etc. \u2014 Could you tell us a little bit about how sound symbolism is rendered in your translation of \u201cHina-chan\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n PB:<\/strong> Yes, sure. I don\u2019t really have a particular policy for dealing with mimetics in Japanese, I tend to take it on a case by case basis. Often for a mimetic + verb construction in the Japanese, I\u2019ll just go for a single verb or adverb or adjective in English, but I try to make sure that whatever word that is attends as much as possible to the visceral qualities of the original, and maybe factors in a bit of sound symbolism as well, if possible. Dorodoro boroboro here became \u201ctattered, muddied kimono,\u201d which seemed to me to replicate a little bit of the repetition and reduplication. Ikari de buruburu to furueta, became \u201cshook with anger\u201d: it\u2019s definitely simple, but feels again quite visceral and strong in English, which seemed like what was called for.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Polly Barton<\/strong> is a translator of Japanese literature and non-fiction. Born and raised in London, she studied philosophy at Cambridge before travelling with the JET Programme to teach English in Sado Island, Japan. Her translations include Spring Garden<\/em> by Tomoka Shibasaki and Where the Wild Ladies Are<\/em> by Aoko Matsuda (which was awarded a World Fantasy Award in 2021). Barton\u2019s memoir Fifty Sounds<\/em> was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021.<\/p>\n David Boyd<\/strong> is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated fiction by Hiroko Oyamada and Mieko Kawakami, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa\u2019s\u00a0Slow Boat<\/em>\u00a0won the 2017\/2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.<\/p>\n David Karashima<\/strong> is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University. He has translated the works of a range of contemporary Japanese writers including Hitomi Kanehara, Shinji Ishii and Hisaki Matsuura. His nonfiction book Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami\u00a0<\/em>was published by Soft Skull Press in 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Polly Barton\u2019s translation of Aoko Matsuda\u2019s short story collection Where the Wild Ladies Are (Obachan-tachi no iru tokoro) was published by Tilted Axis Press and Soft Skull Press to rave reviews from The New York Times, The Guardian and NPR. As Publishers Weekly wrote, Matsuda\u2019s collection \u201cturns traditional Japanese ghost and yokai stories on their heads by championing wild, complex women.\u201d In this interview, Barton discusses the challenges of dialogue and the sources of her inspiration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1122,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews-en","ja"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1124,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions\/1124"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}