J. Philip Gabriel is the translator of works by Haruki Murakami, most recently Sputnik Sweetheart, as well as Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe's Somersault (forthcoming) and Senji Kuroi's Life in the Cul-De-Sac. Mr. Gabriel is also the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature. He is an associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, and his translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's and other publications. Mr Gabriel is the recipient of the 2001 Sasakawa Prize for Japanese Literature and the 2001 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for Translation of Japanese Literature.

Mirsky: What brought you to languages, more specifically to Japanese, and to translation?

Gabriel: My interest in foreign languages stems from the influence of my stepfather, who was a professor of Russian, German, and Chinese. As a teenager I studied Chinese with him, and later majored in Chinese in college. I was always interested in modern and contemporary fiction, but the Chinese fiction I encountered during college was not very stimulating, so on the advice of a classmate, I began reading modern Japanese literature in translation, everything from Soseki Natsume to Kawabata to Oe. I was intrigued by what I read, and wanted to read more—in the original.

Later I had the opportunity to live and work in Japan. In Nagasaki, I was a member of a weekly reading circle with some local Japanese professors during which we read and compared Japanese short stories and novels and the English translations. I found this whole process quite stimulating and fun, and in the course of our conversations found myself re-translating certain sections. This piqued my interest in possibly doing my own translations someday.

In 1985 a magazine in Japan called The English Journal held a contest for translators that I entered and won. So the seeds were definitely sown by the time I entered Cornell in 1986. There, as part of a paper I was writing, I started translating some of Murakami’s short stories. Eventually one of these was published in a small literary magazine—the first Murakami story to appear in the U.S., and the four or five other stories I’d done found their way to the author. We met in Tokyo while I was doing my dissertation research, and I ended up translating as my first novel the work of another writer I’d met—Shimada Masahiko. Later The New Yorker published one of the translations I had begun in graduate school, and I became one of Murakami’s regular translators.

Mirsky: The craft of translation is an unusual one, and one that’s not well understood. What are your thoughts on translation as a skill, and on the abilities a translator needs to do a good job?

Gabriel: I remember once being told by someone in academia that translations—mine or anyone’s—shouldn’t count for much because basically anyone who knows the two languages can do a good translation. Naturally I don’t agree, and have seen enough poor translations to know that not just anyone can do a decent job. I recall the words of a senior translator in my field, namely that one must have three abilities to be a good translator. The ideas are obvious, but the concepts and the order have stayed with me. First, you need to have a good command of your own language (the assumption being that you translate into your own language)—a skill honed by reading good literature, including good translations. Second, you need a solid knowledge of culture, particularly the cultural context of the writer and the original work. And third, you need a good command of the original language. The order here is interesting, because most people would assume that number three is the top priority.

In other words, you must be a decent, and hopefully better-than-decent, writer yourself in order to do justice to the original work—hardly a new thought, but one worth keeping in mind. The reader of a translation, after all, is not going to read a single word by the original writer, and as translator your own prose must do the original justice. And being a good writer, as every writing program tells us, depends on being a good reader.

I think it’s a necessity to live in the country whose language you’re translating. I don’t think it’s a good idea to live there permanently, but at least a few years of experience is critical. My first encounter with Japanese was on the streets, so Japanese has, from the start, been an entirely living language to me. This allows me, when I read and translate, to hear the language and picture the situations and characters.

Mirsky: How do you approach a translation? What are your steps?

Gabriel: My banal comparison is to climbing a mountain—if you look up at the summit you’ll get dizzy and want to give up, so especially with long books it’s best to keep your eyes focused on the path in front of you and take one step at a time. In my case, when I translate, I get myself in the right frame of mind by reading fiction in English that’s similar to the work I’m translating. The day before I translate a section I go over the text carefully with my dictionaries and try to get it all firmly in my mind. There is a danger, however, in over-preparing, because you then lose a sense of freshness and enthusiasm over the section you’re working on.

After preparing a section, the next day I just sit at the computer and directly type in the translation, marking spots I need to come back to. I’m always trying to work in translation around my main job—teaching and doing research—so I try to get up early in the morning, before the rest of the family is up, and do my self-assigned section for the day, a rough draft of four to five pages. This usually takes about three hours. Though I usually work early in the morning, I paradoxically find I sometimes do my best translation when I’m very tired. The other day I stayed up all night in order to go to the airport for a 5 a.m. flight, and to stay awake I did some translating. Somehow I was coming up with amazing language, the words just flowing out, making me think that the unconscious—or something hovering on the edge of the unconscious—was at play.

After I’ve finished the entire book (my last one, a novel by Oe, was 900 pages), I go back to the hundreds of spots I marked to try to solve the problems. Getting the correct readings for place names and people’s names in Japanese, for example, is difficult—even native speakers are often not sure, because the Chinese characters all have multiple readings. In one novel I translated a minor character’s name one way, only to find that the author preferred an alternate reading of the name. (Thank goodness for the search-and-replace function on the computer!)

After I’ve straightened out most of the problems, I read through the whole translation in a few sittings to see how it reads as English. This editing is actually the part I enjoy most (running down the mountain after reaching the top). Finally, I compare, line by line, the original and the translation to catch any mistakes or omissions. This is very time consuming—and usually ends with me having to get a pair of stronger glasses—but with some authors (Murakami, for instance, who is himself a noted translator), I get a lot of feedback that helps me revise and catch potential problems.

Mirsky: Is it a challenge to work with the kind of authors you do, living and famous? Is it a strain?

Gabriel: With living writers there is both extra pressure and extra satisfaction. The pressure, of course, comes from knowing that their watchful eye hovers over the project, but this leads to the satisfaction of entering into a dialogue not only with the text, but with the creator. Oe and I, for instance, sent quite a few faxes back and forth as I tried to locate references to other literary works within the novel. Translation is often a lonely business, and this part of the process ameliorates some of the loneliness and isolation.

Mirsky: What encourages you to take on a job?

Gabriel: I guess what I find the most stimulating is tackling a new writer and reaching the point where I finally feel comfortable with his, and my own, voice—where the voice I hear in my head as I read is the same voice that coming out in translation.

I’m the type of person who likes to meet deadlines, but it’s also comforting to have at least some editors and publishers out there cheering on the translator, who recognize that translating a work of literature, no less than its original composition, is a creative act.

Mirsky: How do you handle the cultural issues inherent in translating a book originally designed for Japan and Japanese readers into something comprehensible for an American or English audience?

Gabriel: Most of the books and stories I translate are quite contemporary, so the number of problems related to cultural context and cultural differences are fewer than if I were doing earlier literature. Even so, the western and Japanese lifestyles are different enough to create all sorts of minor difficulties. One difficulty I’ve encountered in several works is the question of how to convey a verbal/visual image of ordinary Japanese homes. When I worked on Kuroi’s Life in the Cul-de-Sac, for instance, I found it a challenge to convey a picture of the small Tokyo suburban neighborhood depicted in the novel. The author, of course, writing for a Japanese audience, could assume that most of his readers could readily call up a mental picture of the setting. In that novel the actual houses and the physical neighborhood play a vital role in the story—the “ghost” of an earlier house rises up, in an entirely placid way, to haunt one of the inhabitants of the present house that replaced it—and I still wonder how well English readers can picture the interiors and exteriors of Japanese homes when reading the translation. Fortunately, I was allowed to write an afterword, but publishers generally eschew any footnotes or explanatory essays.

Presently I am working on an historical novel set in the bakumatsu period (1850s-1860s). The author, quite naturally, assumes a certain amount of knowledge on the part of his Japanese readers, an assumption that doesn’t apply to my readers. (It also means I have to do a considerable amount of research and background reading.) Furthermore, the novel depicts early encounters between Americans and Japanese. This creates a lot of difficulties for the translator, as the author explores the linguistic and cultural encounters. The novel uses the Japanese script katakana when characters converse in English or a mixture of English and Japanese, but, unfortunately, the contrast between scripts gets flattened out in translation. A similar problem arose in the first novel I translated, Shimada’s Dream Messenger. The novel contained chunks of text that were actually in English in the original. On the printed page in the original you had a striking contrast between the two languages that disappeared in the English translation.

Every novel, no matter how imaginative, has its basis in some aspects of a shared culture, which is why it’s so vital to have a hands-on experience of the country. Much recent Japanese fiction—Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, for instance—does seem very international and not too “Japanese,” but there’s still a lot of Japanese fiction which requires a working knowledge of how Japanese people live, think, and interact, best obtained through first-hand experience. Since Japan is a fast-changing place, it’s important that I visit every year to recharge my linguistic and cultural batteries.

Mirsky: As you may be aware, Knopf published Sándor Marai’s Embers in an English translation by Carol Brown Janeway that was itself translated from a German edition translated from Hungarian. How do you feel about this sort of thing?

Gabriel: I haven’t heard of the case, but I know that sort of practice goes on far too much. The German translation of Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun, for instance, was based on my translation of a Murakami novel, not the original. A hundred years ago this kind of second-generation translation was more common, but nowadays, when there are many good translators out there, I have trouble understanding the justification for the practice.

Mirsky: How has being a translator informed your own writing? What are you writing at the moment?

Gabriel: I think translating has opened my eyes to the many possible ways of conveying a thought, or constructing an argument. This actually makes it more difficult for me now when I do my own writing (academic papers, for example), for I can’t leave the phrasing alone and am constantly tinkering with how I’m conveying an idea.

Translation certainly alters my perception of English. When you translate, the strong points and weak points of your two languages come into sharp focus, and I find myself sometimes getting frustrated at the limitations inherent in any language.

The book I’m writing on spirituality in Japanese literature explores the fiction (and in one case non-fiction) of four modern Japanese writers, including Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami. The book grew out of my own personal religious beliefs and interests, as well as translation projects I was involved in—the translation of Murakami’s non-fiction book Underground on the Aum affair, and his later novel, Sputnik Sweetheart, and my most recent translation, of Oe’s novel Somersault, a novel that also grew out of the Aum affair.

Mirsky: Is there anything you think informed readers should know when they sit down to read a translated work?

Gabriel: Readers should know that translations, if they’re worth anything, are always labors of love. Excuse the crass mention of money, but figured on an hourly basis, translations pay about as well as working at McDonald’s. Readers should read translations critically, but should keep in mind that what they hold in their hands is the result of months, and often years, of an intense intellectual struggle. They should know that the translator loves the work, and has tried his very best to guide the reader to share this love. Murakami’s very first novel, Hear the Wind Sing begins: “There is no such thing as perfect writing. Just as there’s no such thing as perfect despair.” Obviously there is also no such thing as a perfect translation, either, but I do not despair … Quite the opposite. I love what I’m doing.