R. Pulvers and J Beichman Reading (Matt)

 In the R. Pulvers reading, he talks about how sometimes when translating, you need to distance yourself from the actual translation to see what the sentence is actually trying to say. This reminded me of the idea in the Wakabayashi book where you can take a look at the sentence in a different perspective. In the example that was given, we see that instead of saying that "he won't give in" to the rain, wind, and snow, he changes it to be a positive perspective where they are "strong" in the rain, wind and snow. It is nice to see the application of seeing things from a different perspective is used not in just daily sign translations, but also in things as abstract as poems. He also talks about how if you want to be able to match the meaning from the original language into the translated language, you need to be able to match the tone in both languages. In the same example, I do feel like having it translated to something where the feeling is a "I won't give in" type of feeling, then it kind of lose the rhythm in english. To achieve that similar tone in both Japanese and English the example of "Watashi wa zettai ni makenai" does feel like the tone would be close to "I won't give in", but since that is not how it is written in the original, I like the translation of using a different perspective of being strong.

In the J. Beichman reading, they talk about the different ways of being able to translate the meaning, rhythm, and tone between the different languages. Sometimes they find that following the structure of the original language makes for similar tones/rhythm, but that might not always be the case. I found it interesting that even visual line breaks can completely change the feeling of a poem. The one that stood out to me was the difference between "black frozen" on one line, and "black frozen road". The black frozen as a stand alone made more of a feeling of desolation, compared to the latter which you just imagine a road. It's cool to see that in poetry, there can be a little bit more freedom in the translation, because you want to be able to give off the same rhythm and tone as the original language so that the reader is able to get that same feeling as if they were reading it in the native language.