Midwestern Mice in Silk Kimonos: Yuki Tanaka’s “Chronicle of Drifting”

“[Yuki] Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premises too long.”

It has been far too easy to forget how much one’s perception of the vast English-speaking world, and relative comfort within one’s own seemingly secure and stable knowledge of it, is based on linguistic translation. Our collective sense of what Western culture (aka our inculcated reality construct) is about can loosely be said to be predicated on certain essential texts: The Holy Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and—let us not forget them—a corpus of Greek plays about murder, rape, incest, and other atrocities perpetrated by gods and persons of royal lineage. The first written-down Bibles were in Hebrew. Then as Greek became a common language, spoken by Jews in Egypt, the Septuagint was created, the Greek version of the New Testament, reigning for 600 years as the definitive biblical text, providing the core Christian liturgy and theology of the first three centuries AD. If we ventured to say we owe the basis for American democracy to the Greeks, essentially, we might well be said to have expressed our gratitude in English translation. For there is always something, someone, somewhere preceding us—not only in time, but in space.

Language is the seed that accompanies the constant diasporic movement of humans across the globe, in the same way that pathogens introduce disease to new populations without immunity. That analogy implies no judgement, simply the inevitability of language’s irresistible throb, its genius for infiltration. Languages bleed into one another, creating new dialects, expressing the concepts underlying startling and fertile new syncretistic cultural expressions—poetry not least among them. No political policy, no matter how starkly repressive, has ever been able to stop in a permanent way this dynamic movement, nor will ever succeed in doing so. We may often not be free, in political and economic senses, but censors notwithstanding, our language at its roots is free to continue its inexorable and subversive mutations. You the censor may hamper my individual saying, indeed may punish it, but the linguistic root of my saying will survive, whether or not shorn of its foliage and stem, as it is an eternal phenomenon living in history, not limited to any individual or even collective instance of its expression.

My former dissertation advisor, the genial and ingenious John Felstiner, used to say, with exquisite modesty, that “the translator operates under the aegis of the B+.” That is the most we can ever hope for, by virtue of not being the original sayer. Yet when one looks in a sustained manner at what literary translation has achieved, our shy tribe might let loose a spontaneous cry of pride. In no other way could so many literati and general readers have been exposed to the canon of the classics of world literature. Without Arthur Waley’s astounding 1925-1933 translation of the 1216-page The Tale of Genji, 源氏物語, Genji monogatari, written by lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, first translated into modern Japanese by Yosano Akiko, most of us would simply not have access to this robust tale of a disenfranchised emperor’s son. We would stare at the incomprehensible runes on each page and utter, inaccurately, and without irony, the phrase “It’s Greek to me.” Further, the original manuscript is lost, leaving only transcriptions and translations as evidence of its existence. As Walter Benjamin taught us, translation is a work’s afterlife.