语言与文风2020lithub.com
村上春树一部小说错综复杂的翻译过程
The Intricate Translation Process for a Murakami Novel
导读
这篇来自 Literary Hub 的文章，梳理了村上春树小说在翻译成英文时经历的复杂过程，涉及译者与编辑如何在字面意思与文体风格之间做取舍。对写作者来说，它提醒我们：风格往往体现在那些最容易被翻译丢掉的地方，比如结构呼应、时间线索和语气节奏。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
风格不能只靠词汇层面的对应来保留，句子的节奏、重复和语气同样重要；写作时就要有意识地经营这些。
- 02
在长篇中埋设前后呼应的细节，例如日期、物件和短语；这类结构线索比华丽辞藻更能撑起整体的统一感。
- 03
具体而真实的品牌名、地名和书名，能让人物显得国际化且可信；写作时可以善用这些具体名词。
- 04
要区分自己想写的主流畅销小说与真正擅长的风格，不必为了迎合主流而牺牲自己独有的声音。
HN 评论精选
翻译会重塑风格与结构，读者读到的可能已是译者的版本。
我常常怀疑，自己对村上作品的评价有多少要归因于翻译。英法和英德之间几乎可以逐词对应，译者的介入空间有限；日语则差异巨大，字面意思还好处理，但“准确翻译风格”几乎难以想象。得知《奇鸟行状录》的译者 Jay Rubin 和美国出版商对书的结构做了不少改动后，我猜不透日语就想读到“真正”的村上几乎不可能；你读到的多半是 Rubin 等人在复述村上的故事。
wk_end查看英文原文
Let's see. I enjoyed Hard-boiled Wonderland quite a bit, failed to make a dent in Kafka on the Shore, and loved Wind-Up Bird almost despite itself - the writing read "flat" to me, as many others are saying, and the dramatic conclusion was trite and disappointing, though I'm open to the possibility that I missed the point. I've often wondered how much of my opinion I could chalk up to translation. After all, I know there's plenty of room for the translator to insert themselves when going between English and French or German, languages I speak that are close enough to English you can often jump word for word between them, even with closely related words. Japanese (a language I'm learning but know an awful lot less of) is vastly more different; you can usually capture literal meaning without too much issue but the thought of translating "style" "accurately" really boggles the mind. Especially when I learned how much the translator of Wind-Up Bird, Jay Rubin, and the American publishers played with the structure of the book, my conjecture is that there's no "real" way to read Murakami (or any Japanese writer) without learning Japanese first; if you try to you're mostly just reading Rubin or whoever retell Murakami's story. I look forward to whenever my Japanese is strong enough to be able to test that theory, but that'll probably be another few years still. Turns out Japanese is hard.
村上的结构靠精确的交叉指涉支撑，翻译一旦走样，线索就会断裂。
俄语村上译者科瓦列宁写过一本关于村上的书：三分之一谈翻译过程，三分之一做文学分析，三分之一讲他与日本和日本人的经历。他谈《硬 boiled 仙境》翻译难度的那一章尤其精彩：要充分沉浸书中，才译得出对得起原作的版本。他的文学分析解释了“为什么”：村上的散文结构极为严密，埋着细微的交叉指涉；若译法不同，这些线索就会“失步”，译入语读者便失去理解小说真正结构的钥匙。他举了《且听风吟》开篇一句为例：“这个故事始于1970年8月8日，十八天后结束——也就是同年的8月26日。”顺着书中其他时间指涉推下去，会有发现。
wanderer2323查看英文原文
Dmitrii Kovalenin, Russian translator of Murakami has written a book on Murakami which is 1/3rd about the translation process, 1/3rd literary analysis of Murakami's novels and 1/3rd about author's experiences with Japan and Japanese people. Kovalenin's chapter on the difficulty and involvement of translation the 'Hard-boiled Wonderland' is especially striking and goes into much similar details of how he had to be immersed in the book to a great extent to pull off a translation that would honor the original. It is his literary analysis chapters that shed a great deal of light on 'why'. Turns out that Murakami's prose is highly structured, with subtle cross-refereces that, if translated differently will 'de-sync' and leave the reader of a translated version without the clues to understanding the real structure of the novel. While an example of a structurally meaningful cross-reference escapes me at the moment, I do remember a different example of a structural clue. It occurs in the 'Hear the Wind Sing', the first book of the Sheep Trilogy, which ends in the much-recommended 'A Wild Sheep Chase' (technically it was later followed with a 4th book in 'Dance, Dance, Dance' so it's a 4-book trilogy). In the very beginning of the 'Hear the Wind Sing' there is a small unassuming line: 'This story begins on August 8, 1970, and ends eighteen days later — in other words, on August 26 of the same year'. If you follow the other time references given in the book -- such as days of the week mentioned on the radio etc -- this time frame given cannot possibly be true. The assumption that it is not an author's mistake gives a hint that there is a hidden structure to the novel, which on its face looks fairly simple and linear. I personally think that it is very difficult to get to like Murakami if you start with 'Kafka' or, god forbid, the 'Wind-up Bird'. These are hard books and they require a specific mindset to enjoy. 'Sheep' into 'Dance' is much easier to enjoy and 'Norwegian Wood' and 'South of the Border' both provide a large tractable multi-layered experience that can be explored up to an individual desire for complexity in undertones. According to Kovalenin, Murakami himself refuses to elaborate on his books' structures and recommends instead to 'understand [the books] via the way you feel about them'.
用具体的品牌、地名和典故塑造人物，能让作品跨文化可读。
村上作品在国际上受好评我不意外：他笔下的人物总是很有世界主义色彩，会提到美国流行乐队、喝欧洲名酒、引用柏拉图和亚里士多德。更让我意外的是他在日本国内也受推崇，因为传统上日本人似乎不太看重那些被认为“不够日本”的艺术家，黑泽明就是例子。
AdmiralAsshat查看英文原文
It doesn't surprise me that Murakami's works are well-regarded internationally. His characters always read as highly cosmopolitan: they name-drop popular American bands, they drink famous European liquor, they quote Plato, Aristotle, etc. I'm more surprised that he's well-regarded domestically, because the Japanese traditionally do not seem to regard well artists that they perceive as not being "Japanese" enough (see: Akira Kurosawa).
区分作者的“本色风格”与刻意的主流尝试，有助于认清自己的写作定位。
村上是我最爱的作家之一。想要“经典”村上风格（多含魔幻现实主义），推荐《寻羊冒险记》，它诙谐且易读；《海边的卡夫卡》则更空灵。《挪威的森林》我也很喜欢，但它与他多数作品很不同：村上在《巴黎评论》访谈中说，那是他尝试写主流小说之作，写得不错，却有人工痕迹，并非他真正的风格。《奇鸟行状录》很好，但需要投入更多时间和精力。建议从《寻羊冒险记》开始。
gautamcgoel查看英文原文
Murakami is one of my favorite writers. For "classic" Murakami style, which generally has a lot of magical realism, I recommend A Wild Sheep Chase, which is hilarious and quite accessible, and Kafka on the Shore, which is a bit more ethereal. I also really enjoyed Norwegian Wood, but be aware that this is quite different from most of his work. In an interview with the Paris Review, Murakami says that Norwegian Wood was his attempt to write a mainstream novel. It's quite good, but it's also artificial, in the sense that it is not his true style. Windup Bird Chronicle, mentioned in another comment, is good, but a bit more of an investment of time and energy. I really recommend starting with A Wild Sheep Chase.
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