Translation is a kind of traffic, in nearly every sense of the word. There’s the most obvious sense, in that translations cross borders of time, place, and culture, moving from one language into another.
But traffic’s other meaning—that is, the buying and selling of goods—also applies. Translators themselves can be said to traffic in words, sounds, images, and more; whether what is trafficked is tangible or intangible, it’s implied that what is bought, sold, and bartered is in any case commodified. When we think about traffic we also inevitably think about congestion, about impediments to smooth circulation—of vehicles, of course, but also, by extension, of ideas and things. While translations do cross borders, broadening our cultural knowledge as they present one language in the terms of another, they can also become an impediment to free communication. As a translator of contemporary Japanese fiction, I’ve seen both the flow and the congestion, and have witnessed at close range the unintended consequences—and our lack of control as translators—when it comes to the way our texts move or fail to move across borders.
Economic concerns
For the past decade or so I’ve been working on what is essentially an ethnography of the publishing industry, primarily in Tokyo and New York, and the way the intersection—and often the collision—of aesthetic and economic considerations influences what gets translated, how it is translated, and how it is marketed and consumed in another literary context. That is, ultimately, how the traffic of translation is subject to the larger economic concerns of the publishing industry, and how these concerns shape a canon of literature in translation that may bear little resemblance to that in the source literature and culture, but that comes to play an important role in the way that culture or nation is perceived in the national imagination of the target culture.
So, for example, reducing the argument to its simplest terms, in the 1950s and 60s, Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata were translated, marketed, and read in the US as representatives of a newly docile, aestheticized, Zen-like Japanese culture that was explicitly meant (by translators and publishers and perhaps policy experts as well) to replace the bellicose wartime image of Japan, as Edward Fowler has argued. This was one piece of a general rehabilitation strategy for the country in concert with promoting its new role as a reliable ally in the US Cold War calculus. At the same time, however, this image bore little resemblance to the positions Kawabata and Mishima often occupied in the domestic Japanese literary canon or marketplace.
Cultural capital
In more recent years, Haruki Murakami has been similarly—though quite distinctly—marketed as the foremost literary representative of what Douglas McGray has called Japan’s emergent “Gross National Cool.” That is, at some point after the bursting of its economic bubble at the end of the 1980s, Japan began a transition from being a producer and exporter of industrial and technological products (Honda Civics and Sony Walkmen) to being a producer and exporter of cultural capital.
As its hold on industrial domination receded, it succeeded, more or less, in reinventing itself as a possessor and wielder of soft power and cultural capital that could rival US global hegemony in the popular culture imagination. In effect, Hondas and Sonys were replaced by Pokémon and anime and sushi. At that point Haruki Murakami was, I would argue, more or less consciously identified as the most likely literary equivalent of this phenomenon. His slacker narrators and magical-realist plots were key to his selection for translation and export as another form of Japanese cultural “cool,” at a moment when the world was increasingly receptive to the notion that Japanese film, fashion, and food carried with them a kind of global cultural cachet. In other words, Murakami’s fiction, apart from its literary value, became a kind of cultural product representing a certain view of Japan as futuristic pop phenomenon. To cite just one example of this, when the translation of his bestselling novel 1Q84 was published in 2011, I remember walking out of the Harvard Coop in Cambridge, where a wall of the heavy volumes had been stacked in the lobby, and into the Urban Outfitters store where there were equally impressive stacks of the book, but this time they were clearly intended as fashion accessories to match the rest of the disposable books that chain tends to sell. - Lit Hub
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