Edward Seidensticker On Nagai Kafu and Kawabata Yasunari (Micah)

 In this text, Seidensticker dives into the various nuances that arise when translating between two very unrelated languages such as Japanese and English. One example he cites is a translation of a line in Shakespeare's Hamlet. In English, the line he references is elegant not just for the meaning, but also because of its simplicity despite the meaning it carries. He points that this elegance is distorted when translating into Japanese though, as double the amount of syllables are used. Seidensticker says that this is an indication that the rhythm of the text is ruined, and I would agree that this is quite important especially for an artistic piece of writing that Hamlet is. 

Another issue that Seidensticker brings up is ambiguity. Many Japanese texts have passages that are left intentionally ambiguous, so the reader can come up with their own interpretation. He mentions that as a trasnslator, this becomes an issue as editors want a clear translation and can be quite troublesome when there is nothing to translate.

Aside from the issues that comes from translating text, Seidensticker brought up an interesting way to see how accurate a translation may be, which is comparing the number of proper nouns in the two versions of the text. If one is more than the other, it is sometimes considered to be a bad translation. Seidensticker does mention that using this metric can lead to the rhythm of the text to deteriorate. I think that the logic of this sort of test makes sense, but in practice I would imagine that the rhythm and readability of the text is more important in the quality of the translation.