Woman in the Dunes - Chapter 2, Section 3 continued p10-11

Woman in the Dunes – Chapter 2 Section 3 continued p.10-11



The story continues with the man reaching some signs of habitation at the coast as the landscape gradually becomes more sandy and barren. He stumbles across a village and as he make his way through it notices something strange.

I chose this section to highlight since it reminds me a little of what Abe Kobo has said about his novel being a tribute to Lewis Carroll. It is a physical landscape which seems to develop a topsy-turvy logic where walls, floors and even sand hills create a strange almost illusory atmosphere. It’s a prefiguring of the trap he is unwittingly walking into, as he minutely observes through the man’s eyes, each house sitting at the bottom of a sand depression, isolated or trapped in their own individual prisons. At this stage, however, the passages still have a dream like rather than overtly nightmare quality.



「道はますます急な上り坂になり、ますます砂らしい砂になった。ただ、奇妙なことに、家の建っている部分は、すこしも高くならないのだ。道だけが高くなって、部落自身は、いつまでも平坦なのだ。いや、道だけでなく、建物と建物のあいだの境の部分も、道とおなじように高くなっていた。だから、見方によっては、部落全体が上り坂になっているのに、建物の部分だけが、そのままもとの平面にとり残されているようでもある。この印象は、先に進むにつれてひどくなり、やがて、すべての家が、砂の斜面を掘り下げ、そのくぼみの中に建てたように見えてきた。さらに、砂の斜面のほうが、屋根の高さよりも高くなった。家並は、砂のくぼみの中に、しだいに深く沈んでいった。」



‘The road gradually began to incline more steeply and became sandier, and the strange thing was that the walls of the buildings didn’t get any higher. Only the road did. The village itself stayed level. No, that wasn’t quite it; it wasn’t just the road, the spaces between the buildings too were getting higher, just like the road. So from one viewpoint, although the whole village was sloping uphill, the actual buildings were being left behind on the surface. This impression became all the more pronounced as he continued forward until finally all of the houses became buried in the sandy slope and looked as if they were each standing at the bottom of a deep hollow. In fact the height of the slope went higher than that of the roofs and the rows of houses gradually sank deeper into the hollows created by the dunes.’



Notes:

‘ますます砂らしい砂になった’

Literally ‘the sand became more and more sandy/sand like’. The sand before was presumably a mix of hard ground and sand and the text has previously alluded to the consistency of the terrain underfoot. Here we have the sand to hard ground ratio gradually leaning toward the sand part. The line is quite vivid for me as I remember that feeling of walking from the start of the beach towards the dunes (say at Camber Sands in the UK) and the increasing softening and loss of purchase of the foot. Again a metaphor for the protagonist losing control over the physical environment and becoming caught helplessly up in it.


‘いや’

It’s a great moment of vivid drama where you can almost hear the man’s inner voice, urging him to correct his initially unsatisfactory description of the elusive Cagliariesque landscape around him. A moment of self doubt and an attempt to pin down this dream like and bizarre environment he is stumbling through.

境　（さかい）

Lit., border or boundary/divide. Here I thought ‘spaces’ more appropriate since he seems to be referring to the areas between the buildings (and the sand levels) are also rising.


‘見方によっては’

I had a bit of trouble with this. I thought does this mean, from a point of view (any) it could appear to be so, or from his point of view, or one way of looking at it. It could even be ‘seen from this angle’ in the sense of his current ‘camera position’. So I plumed from the old translators cheat; a word or phrase which in English could mean both or either. It could be much like the Japanese and possibly even intentional from the authors POV. I suppose it depends how directly/indirectly you are going to take the word or phrase. I get the image of him looking down around him at what is happening to the houses so it’s directly for me. Of course comments re this are most welcome.

Tale of the Heike - New Translation out in Penguin Books

Just a quick Bookflash. I am always a bit slow regarding these things but a new translation of the Heike Monogatari has been published in Penguin Hardbacks by Royall Tyler. Its been out since January this year (hence my apologies for the slow flash) but has been garnering some decent reviews. It retails at 30 GBP but can probably be resting in your laps at a much reduced price via Amazon...

I am reading through the Bruce Tsuchida translation published by the Tokyo University Press and using it as a crib with the Iwanami Koten series text. It will be interesting to compare the two since the styles are bound to be quite different the translation I am using currently seems quite loose in some places.

It's one to put on the wish list for sure and for more details you can go here

Woman in the Dunes -Chapter 2 - Section 1 continued. p-8-9

Woman in the Dunes – Chapter 2 Section 1 continued  (p.8-9)


やがて人家がつきると、まばらな松林になった。いつか地面は、きめの細かい、足の裏に吸いつくような砂地に変っている。ところどころ、乾いた草むらが砂のくぼみに影をつくり、また間違えたように畳一枚ほどの貧弱なナス畠があったりしたが、人影らしいものは、まるでなかった。いよいよこの先が目指す海にちがいない。

‘Finally, the houses petered out and gave way to pine forest. At some point the ground changed to fine grained sandy soil that clutched at the soles of the feet. Here and there, clumps of dried grass cast their shadows upon the sandy hollows and still, as if by mistake there appeared the odd meager-looking aubergine plot, the size of a single tatami-mat. But of any human presence there was no sign. There was no doubt now that the sea lay just ahead.’


松林 Pinewood. I see the trees here scattered and increasing in frequency as part of the change of the landscape as opposed to a discrete outcrop of plants or a grove. The gradual and apparent imperceptible changes in the landscape heighten the sense of unreality or impossibility to pin down the changes, when they happen, exactly what they are, what they mean and here いつか is one of the words in this passage that conveys this indistinct, vague and dreamlike quality to the description. It’s one of his key words and crops up from time to time as well as others (and not only in this novel) to make sure the reader never really feel that he is on solid ground.

I am hammering on about this a bit because I think it’s important not to lose sight of Abe Kobo’s lyrical/poetical sense when translating. It is very deceptive when encountering his prose and I think that a lot of translators including my humble and oft mistaken efforts) can fall into the trap of seeing only the stark modernism in his writing. I have a feeling that we can tend to project the ‘minimalist’ image a bit too much and the underlying lyricism is in danger of being erased with a French style new wave approach to rendering this prose. The only prose I can think that really achieves such starkness is Beckett in the Malloy series. But Kobo Abe’s final agenda is not one of such starkness. Or if on the surface it is his initial intention, it’s a conscious failure almost as a demonstration of his surrealist rejection of scientific logic and communistic utopianism together.

He has stated that this work was homage to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (or possibly Through the Looking Glass, I will have to check that out) and that for me as well his affinity with Kafka’s work leads me to try as much as possible to heighten that surreal otherworldliness.

間違えたように As if by mistake. As if it wasn’t meant to be there.



一枚ほどの The size of a single (tatami) mat. I think you have to put this in since just ‘mat’ might mislead some into thinking we are talking about some kind of micro-farming.



まるで Again emphasis or intensifier of the sense of empty surreal and non-human landscape. This section strikes me a sort of airlock part of the novel where the man has left the known inhabited world and is now passing through a non-world in human terms, his self exile, and his (temporary) freedom from human conditions.

古典Corner 3: Nuns go crazy on Magic Mushrooms

One of the selected translations I read recently from  the Konjaku Monogatarishu (the tale I am referring to is in the Japan (Honcho) section本朝世俗部 section of the work,  今は昔の物語 第二十八巻第二十八話 「尼共、入山食茸舞語」)  relates the strange tale of some woodcutters who losing their way on the mountains north of the capital, encounter a groups of wildly dancing nuns, unable to stop dancing like crazy due to having eaten some ‘dancing’ or 舞茸 maitake mushrooms. The nuns invite the woodcutters to partake of the same mushrooms and lo and behold, they too start uncontrollably busting a few moves all over the mountain forests until they are all danced out and collapse in a pile of rave weary woodcutters. Well, it is a volume dealing with humourous or ridiculous stories滑稽譚and this one certainly fits the bill but could it also be a very early example of (un)holy drug abuse?

The translation I read is in Haruo Shirane ed. Traditional Japanese Literature, An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600, but it also seems to have caught the imagination of some other translators, notably an Esperanto version here . I wanted to see if I could find a manuscript version of the tale in order to have a closer look at the original text (as original as possible) but it does not seem to be a surviving part of the Suzuka manuscript (鈴鹿家旧蔵本) at Kyoto University Library. The collection of tales are from a variety of sources, some other earlier collections and possible transcriptions of orally transmitted tales not written down elsewhere, and according to the Wikipedia entry for the Suzuka Manuscript that it’s likely that it is the source manuscript from which the other later extant fragments and works originate although the whole picture about the Konjaku seems misty at best.

I wonder if there was more than one compiler or a team of compilers (a monk version/s of the Brothers Grimm either travelling around or collecting orally transmitted folk and local tales from travelers from other regions as well as using earlier collections of setsuwa) over many years and in several areas added to the work building it up into the 31 Volume beast that it became…has anyone read all of the tales contained in it?

Maitake (舞茸), or Grifola Frondosa, an edible polypore mushroom which is often found growing at the base of oak trees and common to Japan. It is traditionally used in Japanese and Chinese herbal medicine (as well as being eaten for food generally) as a regulator of blood pressure and a general tonic for fortifying the immune system. It is known in Japan as 舞茸 probably due to the undulating wavy form of its lobes suggesting a dancing image. And yet I can’t help thinking that the nuns may have stumbled upon a patch of psilocybin –rich lookalikes.

Woman in the Dunes Chapter 2 Section 1

Chapter 2 (page 8-18) covers the journey from the everyday world from which the man has disappeared to the insect collecting grounds where he hopes to find his sought after specimens and make a name for himself. There are roughly four or possibly five sections in this chapter. The first section deals with his arrival at the end point station and his heading off in the direction of the seaside.

ある八月の午後、大きな木箱と水筒を、肩から十文字かけ、まるでこれから山登りでもするように、ズボンの裾を靴下のなかにたくしこんだ、ネズミ色のピケ帽の男が一人、S駅のプラットホームに降り立った。

だが、このあたりには、わざわざ登るほどの山はない。改札口切符を受取った駅員も、つい不審の表情で見送った。男はためらいも見せず、駅前のバスの、一番奥の座席に乗り込んだ。それは山とは逆方向に向うバスだった。

‘On an August afternoon, a man, a big wooden box and a water flask slung crosswise over his shoulders, his trouser bottoms tucked into his socks and wearing a grey piqué hat, looking for all the world as if he were off on a mountain climbing trip, stepped down onto the platform at S- Station.

And yet there was nothing here in the way of mountains worth climbing. The station staff at the ticket gate waved him through with an involuntary expression of surprise.  Without dropping his stride, the man jumped into the bus outside the station and headed for a seat right at the back. It was bus headed in the opposite direction to the mountains.’

Notes

ある八月の午後:    As I mentioned before this is a reprise of the opening of Chapter 1. And so seems to be almost like a second Chapter 1 as opposed to a Chapter 2. The impression of déjà lu adds a layer of surreality to the novel. Was the first chapters August this one? Is the man who disappeared the same man in chapter 1?

I looked briefly at the Dale S. Saunders translation of these initial passages and he seems almost perfunctory in his treatment, resulting in a kind of stark realism or quasi-factual prose style but I think that this loses the strange unreal atmosphere and the feeling that we are travelling in the wrong direction in the universe into a place where imperceptible changes take place, when exactly it is hard to tell and the crossing of a border into an untenanted and mysterious world. I will touch more upon this in the section following.

まるで:   ‘Looking for all the world..’ Alternatively could be translated as ‘as though’ or ‘as if’. But I think that ‘まるで gives that impression that the guy is decked out in the whole mountaineer/hiker look in all its slightly train-spotter glory and quite brazen in a way or obviously standing out’

ピケ帽:    I wonder what this hat actually looks like, not only in my imaginations eye, but what comes to the eye of the Japanese reader (or other readers of the Japanese for that matter) I have put it down as a (Fr, Piqué) cap which refers to the material it’s made of or at least the design of the weave. The shape is something I am more interested in is the shape. I can see a cotton hat with a short brim all the way round, the kind you see old geezers wearing when they go fishing or for a ramble in the countryside. Does this matter anyway? Strangely it does to me! Insect hunters just don’t wear any old hat they have to wear those fishing hats to look the part! I often wake up at night wondering about the type of hat the protagonist of Woman in the Dunes is wearing. I have not seen the film for many years so I am really quite in the dark over this apart from my mental image of the grey fishing hat. It’s also a good way of heightening the strange atmosphere by contrast – the hat and some objects the man is carrying are described minutely – the environment he is moving in begins to shift and becomes hard to define, to pin down. For me this heightens the intensity or resolution of the lone figure in an increasingly otherworldly landscape.

S駅:  This reminds me of the 学校の会談 series of books I used to read…many a year ago when I was learning Japanese and looking for a fun (and creepy!) way to improve my reading skills. In A School, F Town in H Prefecture it’s said that if you walk round the toilets three times..you know the rest..It gives a kind of anonymity but at the same time it could be a real town, it could be YOUR town! You can see this in some literature of the 18^th-19^th Century in England. I am thinking of the ghost story in particular and specifically those of M.R.James where only the first letter of a town or the name of an estate is given, leaving in place of total anonymity, a tantalizing clue as to the possible identity. Let’s face it, at this point in the novel, the station has more of a name/identity than the protagonist who is still just ‘a man or the’ man at this point – and you can’t say that with many novels.

つい不審の表情で見送った:   It’s the つい part that I am particularly concerned with here. In this context what is it doing? What does it mean here? Can it be left out or changed? I think it implies an involuntary action or reaction, so the station staff could not help but look at him with a quizzical air. So it’s quite important to have this in the text and in translation. The idea being that in Japan and doubtless in other countries station staff as well, it’s not appropriate to react openly to a passengers appearance however odd or out of place. Here the appearance was so unusual that the station staff could help himself and hence つい.

ためらいも見せず: 　Literally ‘without showing any hesitation’. I jazzed it up a bit.

古典 Corner 2 - 蜻蛉日記

I reached the section dealing with this Heian period work yesterday. The Anthology I am reading just gives a few excerpts from the whole poetical diary but even from that little its clear that its a work of great psychological and emotional depth.

It was written around the end of the 10th Century CE by a figure we have come to know as the mother of Michitsuna and is an example of the diary literature genre 日記文学 of the period. The diary covers the period of the authors life 954-974, 天暦8 to 天延2 (The Era dates Tenryaku 8 to Ten'en 2), and in terms of format is divided into 3 sections consisting of memoir, day to day entry style and a mixed section of poetry and observations/reflections.

It also features several examples of poetry (of remarkable depth and elegance) that are exchanged between the author and her husband Fujiwara no Kane'ie, a noble who had attained the post at court of Captain of the Right Guards. They would have probably been texting each other nowadays...how times change and yet remain the same!

It is often regarded (I have read quite amusing asides by readers of various editions and formats of the work) as a dark and sombre, even depressing piece of literature, but there are also great moments of levity,  as well as vivid and detailed description too in the midst of her constant relationship woes. It is really remarkably moving and well worth poring over. It is not entirely clear to me whether this is a 'real' diary or not - perhaps it will never be entirely sure and the work does seem very egocentric almost self-obsessed to the exclusion of other people and events as seperately realised objective figures. Fascinating as an early example of prose fiction still on its newborn tentative fragile legs and significant as the very few works of its kind of any length that has survived pre-Genji Monogatari. The transcriptions are based upon a composite amalgamation of texts and fragments.

There is an interesting article entitled 'Style and Point of View in the Kagero Nikki' - Watanabe Minoru and R.Bowring on JSTOR (From Journal of Japanese Studies Vol.10,No.2 (Summer 1984) which is in turn based upon a translation by Richard Bowring of a chapter of a book by Watanabe Minoru, 'Heiancho Bunshoshi' Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai 1981 (｢平安朝文章史」東京大学出版会 1981).

Amongst other things the article deals with Watanabes concept of the 'unmediated author' of the Kagero Nikki and a contrasting appraisal of the prose work and poetry as vehicles of expression and degree control of emotions in the Kagero Nikki.

From Watanabe's interesting and at the time (1981) novel appraisal, bringing his skills as a Language history expert and expertise in stylistic analysis to bear on weighing up the artistic merits of the text it would appear that this works position/status in Japanese Literature is a trailblazer (albeit an unconscious one) in early Japanese prose fiction - not entirely successful but certainly a significant precursor if not enabler of greater works to come such as the Genji Monogatari. It is also noteworthy as one of the first works to have been written for its own sake as opposed to having been commissioned by another.

From here on in..Chapter 2 and beyond: Structure

Chapter 2 will be the subject of the next posts. It seems to me that this is the real beginning of the action of the novel from the standpoint of the protagonist. There is more substance to the following chapters than the prescript of Ch.1 so what I plan from here on in is the following:


1. Give an indication of the Chapter characteristics in terms of the text I am using (cf. the first post re Woman in the Dunes for my purposes referred to as WOD from now on). So for example Ch.2  is from pp 8-18 in the text I am looking at.

This will help when I am referring to a passage that I may not post in translation but wish to mention in connection with a comment or reference.

2. Describe a overview of the structure of the 'action' or content of the individual chapter. So with Ch 2., I can break it down into about 5 sections.

3. Post a selected passage for translation and language/style comment from each section of a given Chapter structure.

4. Give a synopsis or recap every so often so that I can remind us all of where we have been with the novel and where we might be headed.

5. Provide links to freely available and free access articles about the novel and related subjects. I have found a couple already but although very interesting as they are they refer to the novel as a whole (spoiler alerts and so on) and cover areas I have not posted about so I will leave them until a bit later on.

Next up will be Chapter 2.

I still haven't located a copy of the 1991 English translation of Dale Saunders (in Penguin Modern Classics) so I am still flying by the seat of my pants translation-wise so I am sure to be making some errors. When I can get hold of it for comparative purposes I may have some more things to say re that! I am very interested in the process or 'art' of translation, especially in terms of Japanese novels and therefore will be trying to add more about the process I am going through to arrive at a given take on a particular passage, phrase or word.