Nick's review
Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata
Nick's review
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Nick's review
rating:
Let it be known that this is a terrible translation. I am convinced that I would have enjoyed this book ten times as much if someone other than Edward Seidensticker had bothered to translate it. My reasoning? Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories is one best collections of short stories I have ever read. In the back of that book is "Gleanings from Snow Country," the last work Kawabata wrote before he died. It is a condensation of the novel in question. Remarkably, it is not even a rewriting but rather a series of excerpts from the book, reprinted with exact fidelity; Kawabata thought he might "glean" the book for its most important moments but leave them unchanged.
The only thing that has changed for us is the translator. Whereas J. Martin Holman, one of the two translators of the stories, creates passages of simple beauty, Seidensticker's writing is academic, dull, and rhythmically wrong. Who knows ...more
The only thing that has changed for us is the translator. Whereas J. Martin Holman, one of the two translators of the stories, creates passages of simple beauty, Seidensticker's writing is academic, dull, and rhythmically wrong. Who knows ...more
