Jay Rubin on The Art of Literary Translation

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a literary translator? Or how to translate a text while maintaining the authenticity of the original one? We unpack that and so much more with today’s guest Jay Rubin.

Jay is a Japanese-English translator and novelist. Some of his most well-known translations are of the works of famous Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami. These translations of Haruki’s works include 1Q84, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, and Absolutely on Music. Recently, Jay curated and published an anthology of famous Japanese short stories titled, The Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories.

In our conversation, Jay takes us on a journey of how he discovered his love for the Japanese language and literature which led him to his passion of translating those works for others to enjoy. Further into the conversation, we talk about his process and how he overcomes the difficulty of translating two languages that are almost impossible to translate literally. We also go into detail about his new anthology of Japanese short stories, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, and discuss the format of the book and how he chose the incredible stories to include.

Books and resources:

The Way of Zen by Alan Watts

Rashomon directed by Akira Kurosawa

The Girl from Ipanema 1963/1982 by Haruki Murakami

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

Edwin McClellan

Natsume Soseki

Akutagawa Ryunosuke

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Check out these highlights:

• Learn how Jay discovered his love for Japanese literature and how he came across the opportunity to become a literary translator (4:47 / 19:38)
• Understand the importance of visiting original texts to discover their true meaning (7:10)
• How Jay found his confidence and grasp of the complex Japanese language (10:46)
• The unpredictability of literary translating (21:18)
• Jay walks us through his translation process (22:50)
• Why Jay believes it’s crucial to read an entire story before beginning the translation process (23:29)
• How to approach translating two languages that are nearly impossible to translate literally (24:18)
• How Jay’s new book, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, came together and how Jay carefully selected the stories in the book (28:40)

“I just assumed part of what I would be doing is translating and when I tried it, I enjoyed it. It was really that simple.” 

-Jay Rubin

“I think the unpredictability of translation is what I like. You confront a page of these funny squiggles and you can turn them into real English and the realer, the better.”

-Jay Rubin

“Just the sheer process of absorbing what’s in the original text and then going from what’s in your brain to what you put on the page in English is an exciting process for me. It’s never stopped being exciting.”

-Jay Rubin

“It’s the totally subjective process of immersing yourself in a text and making it come out in your own language that has always been the most appealing part of the work to me.”

-Jay Rubin

Learn more about “The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories”

Japan has one of the greatest short-story traditions in the world, yet many readers in the West know little of Japanese literature beyond internationally bestselling author Haruki Murakami, who introduces THE PENGUIN BOOK OF JAPANESE SHORT STORIES. This revelatory and exciting collection celebrates the art of the Japanese short story and features stories spanning more than 100 years, from 1898 to 1914. Published in a stunning jacketed hardcover by Penguin Classics and edited by one of Murakami’s principal translators, Jay Rubin—who himself has freshly translated some of the stories—it offers compelling tales that Rubin believes will stay with readers for decades, “forming a knot in the solar plexus or inspiring a laugh or a pang of sorrow.”

Organized thematically, the stories in THE PENGUIN BOOK OF JAPANESE SHORT STORIES, some of which are appearing in English for the very first time, paint an utterly fascinating portrait of Japanese culture. By turns gruesome, depressing, comedic, strange, and heartbreaking, they investigate and interpret Japan’s relationship with the West (both before and after WWII), samurai warrior ideology, the inner lives of everyday Japanese people, fraught relationships between men and women, and the disasters, both natural and manmade, that have devastated the country—including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Kobe earthquake of 1995, and the tsunami and subsequent Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown of 2011. Murakami, whose own story “UFO in Kushiro” is included in the anthology, here joins such iconic Japanese authors as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and Banana Yoshimoto. Many of these pages, however, feature the work of authors little known in the West—and new even to Murakami himself, who says in his introduction: “This is certainly an unconventional selection of works by an unusual assortment of writers.…It offers a mysterious and unpredictably rewarding experience.” And it is a rewarding addition to the Penguin Classics and to the body of work by Japanese authors available in English.

 

Learn more about Jay Rubin

Jay Rubin is a translator and academic who has translated Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Natsume Soseki’s The Miner and Sanshiro, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories. He is the author of Making Sense of Japanese, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, and a novel, The Sun Gods. He lives in Seattle.