Rebecca Copeland's Blog, page 14

My Trixie Belden Summer

When I was a child I loved reading mystery novels. My older sisters passed along their copies of Nancy Drew and I was drawn to her sleuthing skills and bold behavior. I devoured The Secret of the Old Clock, The Secret in the Old Attic, and many others. My favorite was The Hidden Staircase. Growing up I lived in a rambling old house in Wake Forest, North Carolina. We had a closet under our long rickety staircase where my mother stored her cleaning supplies. I used to slip into the closet sometimes with a flashlight, determined to find something secret. Maybe a door to another room. Maybe, a hidden staircase. Usually I just found rags smelling sweetly of furniture polish.

I dreamed of mysteries, of secrets, of visitors coming to our house in disguise. The preacher is really an escaped criminal. My piano teacher has bodies buried in her backyard.

But Nancy Drew was just too adult for me. She was too prim, even in all of her bossiness. When I looked at the pictures of her on the front covers of her books they reminded me of my older sisters or of their friends. She wore dresses and pumps and her hair was always coiffed in a saucy up-wave with nary a strand out of place. She must have used hairspray. Adult women used hairspray. I couldn’t really see myself as Nancy Drew. She was too smart, too rich, too not me.

I preferred Trixie Belden. She lived on a farm and was rough and tumble wearing jeans and a garment known as a “halter top” which I had never seen before in my life, except on the covers of the books. Trixie had tousled hair and an upturned nose, which, by the way, she followed when she solved a crime. No prissy deduction for Trixie. She worked on hunches.

Trixie was bad at math . . . like me. She had a little brother who was adorable and annoying all at once . . . like me. She cultivated a friendship with the poor-little-rich girl, Honey Wheeler, who had long silky hair that naturally flipped up at the ends (not like the hairspray-slicked Miss Drew, who I thought I might be when I grew up, but not now).

Trixie and her crew went in search of adventure—poking their noses where they didn’t belong—searching through abandoned houses and turning up secrets. The Gatehouse Mystery was my favorite. As the blurb announces: “When Trixie and Honey explore an abandoned gatehouse, they discover more than dust and spider webs. Stuck in the dirt floor is a huge diamond! Could a ring of jewel thieves be hiding out in Sleepyside?” Well, could it? Let’s find out! Because, of course, that’s what thirteen-year-old girls do in Trixie Belden world. I enjoyed staring at the cover. There was Trixie in her little shorts and halter top (which frankly, just looked like the top to a two-piece swimsuit, which my mother would not have let me wear, even though at ten-years-old there wasn’t much for the top to cover.) Trixie is carrying a scythe in one hand and a shovel in the other. A damn scythe! She wasn’t messing around, that Trixie. She was going to weed-whack her way to the truth.

What else were they supposed to do on those long summer days? What else was I supposed to do? I had a friend named Donna who was also a Trixie Belden fan. We decided to create our own sleuthing agency, and we went in search of secrets. There were plenty of abandoned houses in our sleepy town. Perhaps they weren’t abandoned. My mother later scolded me that they were still owned by somebody somewhere, and when I went in to do my sleuthing I was trespassing. I was breaking the law! “Besides,” she continued, “those old houses are dangerous. The floor boards could give way or you could get bitten by a snake!”

Donna and I decided we needed to carry an emergency first-aid kit with us, in light of my mother’s warning. We were sensible sleuthers. We each found an old eye-glasses case (back in the day they were hard plastic with a snap closure) and we filled the case with a razor—in case we were bitten by a snake—gauze—to create a tourniquet (as if we’d know what to do), a band-aid for whatever cut we might get falling through the floor, and a dime. The dime was our last-resort-safety measure. We needed the dime to call home, in case we got lost or arrested or something.

The summer of my tenth year, the summer of Trixie Belden, was a good summer. Donna and I explored any number of old houses. We didn’t fall through any floors, and we didn’t find any skeletons or old clocks with secrets. But we had fun.

Photo by Ramona Zepeda on Unsplash

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My Grotesque Year

If I had it all to do over again, I would do it differently. Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now.

I had been given the opportunity to translate Kirino Natsuo’s award-winning novel, Grotesque, and I was elated. It was the first time I’d been contracted to translate a novel. And it was my first experience working for a major trade press. The agent sent me a contract, and I scrutinized it as well as I could, based on ZERO experience with contracts. I consulted friends. They sent me to mutual friends who translated (in other languages). I consulted my older sister who had been a lawyer in a former life. She wisely sent me to the webpages of ALTA and PEN America. I was told to pay attention to the price per word, the advance, and whether or not my name would appear on the cover. I paid attention to all those things. But the one aspect of the contract I didn’t think much of was the deadline. I had a turnaround time of a year. That seemed doable. I’m a hard worker. I was going to be spending the year in Kyoto teaching at the Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies. I’d have a reduced teaching load and would not be tasked with all the meetings and committee work normally assigned faculty. Besides, I’d be living alone so I could set my own schedule.

The optimism of inexperience!

I had not accounted for the disruption of making the transition from St. Louis to Kyoto; nor had I figured on the time it would take to adjust to a different teaching environment. I had also been naïve when it came to the sheer length of the work. At 536 pages, it was a daunting task. At first it seemed Sisyphean. No matter how many pages I translated in a day, I never seemed nearer the goal of completion. But what I had really not counted on was the brutal darkness of the novel. No one in the story is particularly likeable. All the characters are warped somehow, damaged. True, the narrator is almost beguiling in her evil. But after a while, after spending days on end with her, I just wanted to interact with someone . . . pleasant.

I remember midway through my year, two friends from the United States found themselves in Kyoto. They asked me to meet them at Mariage Frères, a French teashop, for afternoon tea and cakes. I longed to see them, but I was reluctant to leave my desk even for a short break. Fortunately, they convinced me, and I met them at Kawaramachi. We laughed and gossiped as we sipped our tea from fine bone china, our pinkies curled just so. It was refreshing, I felt I had stepped out onto a bright sunny plaza after years of being held captive in a dark basement. But the moment of lightness and laughter was short lived.

Copeland with completed manuscript. Photo by Joe Angeles

Feeling the weight of the deadline, I dragged myself back to my desk and dictionaries. To compound the grotesquery of the experience, the house where I lived was behind the zoo. And the Kyoto zoo at the time, 2004, was a horrible place. (Personally, I think all zoos are pretty horrible. But this one was particularly so, with tiny exhibits and cages.) The house was behind the elephant’s enclosure. From my second-floor window I could see the elephant’s ear, when it faced north, and tail when it faced south. The enclosure was small. I don’t think the elephant got much exercise. If I squinted, I could see the monkeys climbing up and down the concrete “tree” in their compound. Living behind the zoo also engaged my other senses. There was a constant smell, needless to say. And all manner of bizarre noises filtered over the walls of the zoo, across the street, and into my second-floor room. A particular bird regularly made a horrific retching-like noise at all hours of the night. I will never forget the first time I heard the lion roar. It was just at dusk. I heard what I thought was a heavy iron gate scraping across concrete. It was low but loud and nearly vibrated the air in my room. But then for some unexplained reason, I felt myself tremble. My stomach knotted, and goose bumps sprouted on my arms. I realized at that moment that the rumble was not the sound of a gate but the anguished roar of a lion. I was terrified and devastated all at once. The king of the jungle chafed at the inhumanity of his captivity. And I, at my desk, felt chained by my deadline.

So there, in a second-floor room behind the zoo, asphyxiating on animal smells and recoiling from their agonized cries, I sat translating Kirino Natsuo’s dark and brilliant novel.

All of Kyoto awaited me. All of the amazing treasures of temples and gardens. I had never spent time in the city before and longed to take a day or two to sightsee. But I kept reminding myself of my deadline. I did not have time to spare.

Even as conscientious as I was, even as hard as I worked, as the deadline drew closer, I knew I would not finish in time. I sought an extension, which the publisher was generous to grant. Even so, I never felt that I had enough time with the translation. I wanted to linger over passages and allow the scenes to inhabit my mind a little longer. I suppose it is true of almost anything we do. We almost always think, when we are finished, that we could have done better. We always want to change a word here or there, erase, improve, reconsider. Today, when I teach my translation seminar I tell my students: “A translation is never finished. It’s simply published.”

Lion photo by Vijay Kumar Gaba on Unsplash

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Translating Grotesque: Mountain Magic

I was not the first pick to translate Kirino Natsuo’s Grotesque. Kirino’s agent went the rounds of other translators before being directed to me. And once she found me, she did not give me a contract on the spot. I had to “try out” for the job.

She sent me several pages from the first chapter (but not the opening pages) and gave me a deadline. The assignment arrived just as I was on my way to my father’s log cabin in eastern Tennessee. He had built the cabin by hand over a period of time beginning in the late 1970s and by the early 1990s, he had made it quite “comfortable,” for anyone longing for a rugged mountain adventure. The cabin was one room with a sleeping loft. In the late 1980s he added a utility room. This was followed by the addition of a well and electricity allowing for a modest bathroom equipped with a flush toilet and shower stall. Before you imagine the cabin was luxuriously outfitted, I should note that the facilities he added were all salvaged from elsewhere and showed the chips and dings of their past lives. Still, it was a marked improvement over the earlier outhouse with its pink toilet seat and hiding hornets.

For me, the cabin was the perfect retreat for contemplation. There was enough electricity to fire my laptop and heat water. Being midsummer, the days were long, and I did not need to depend on the weak light from the single bulb as there was a large sliding glass door to let in light. It did get hot during the day under the tin roof. But with the slider open in the evening, the cabin cooled down, and it was pleasant to fall asleep listening to the crickets and distant owls.

My father’s cabin

In July, I packed up my laptop and dictionaries and drove the ten hours from St. Louis to the cabin for the long weekend retreat. It was there, on the oilcloth table cover, that I set up my office and went to work on those twenty pages. Coincidentally, the pages the agent selected included the scene where the narrator, her sister and parents, are staying at a mountainside cabin for the New Year’s holiday.

The narrator, her mother, and her sister travel to a local hot springs for the outdoor bath, and this is where we really come to recognize the narrator’s hatred of her sister. Even now reading those passages of the creepy hot springs trip sends chills down my spine.

Outside the night had fallen and the stars were out. The air had turned cold. A cloud of white steam hovered over the bath. Unable to see the bottom of the pool, it looked eerie, like a black pond. Something glittery and white floated in the middle of the pool. It was Yuriko’s body.
[. . . . ]
Yuriko was floating on her back in the steamy water looking up at the sky. The women and children, submerged in the water up to their shoulders, surrounded her and stared at her wordlessly. I looked at Yuriko’s face and was horrified. I had never seen her look so beautiful. She was almost godlike.
[. . . . ]
I suddenly noticed what it was. Yuriko’s eyes gave off no light. Those eyes in that perfect face of hers were completely without light. Even a doll’s eyes will have a white dot painted in the center to suggest light, won’t they? As a result, a doll’s face is sweet and charming, and yet Yuriko’s eyes were dark ponds. The reason she had looked so beautiful floating in the bath was because the light from the stars had been reflected in her eyes.

[The sisters leave the neighbor’s cabin where they had celebrated New Year’s Eve.]

I yanked the door open and stepped out ahead of her into the darkness. I don’t know why I was so angry. The cold air stung my cheeks. The snow had stopped falling, and it was pitch black. The mountains were there looming over us, pressing in around us, and yet they had dissolved into the darkness of the night and were completely invisible. With no light but the flashlight, Yuriko’s eyes must be those black pools again, I thought. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. I became frightened by the knowledge that I was walking alone through the darkness with a monster. I gripped the flashlight and started running.

“Wait!” Yuriko shrieked. “Don’t leave me!

Eventually Yuriko stopped screaming, but I was too scared to turn around. I felt like I was walking with my back to an eerie pond. Something was crawling up out of it and chasing me. Angry to have been left behind, Yuriko was running after me. When I finally turned around, her face was directly in front of me. I gazed slowly over the white sculpted features of her face now illuminated in the light reflected off the snow. Her eyes were the only features I could not see. I was scared.

“Who are you?” I blurted out. “Who the hell are you?”

As I sat alone in the cabin at night, surrounded by woods and the cries of the crickets, thinking about the monstrous Yuriko and her misanthrope sister, I couldn’t help be feel slightly terrified. I had my dog Taru with me, a German Shepherd, and that helped. But I was truly isolated. My father’s cabin is on top of a mountain ridge overlooking nearly 50 acres of woodlands. The road to the top is now impassable, but in 2004 it was still possible to drive to the cabin door. Possible, but treacherous. I was glad when my self-imposed translation retreat was over.

Later, Kirino told me that she first came up with the idea for her novel when she was visiting a friend who had a cabin in Gunma Prefecture, nestled in the mountains. I doubt her friend’s cabin was as “rustic” as my father’s! But it made me feel a special bond with the author, knowing that we had both experienced the magic of the mountains at different ends of the creative process. Over the years I have found that my best writing comes to me in the mountains.

Photo at the top by Gantaro on Unsplash

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Translating Grotesque—The Cruelest Cuts

I like translating. I enjoy the experience of entering a text, digging beneath the surface of the language in search of patterns and meanings and movement. I am exhilarated by the challenge of making these discoveries come alive in a second language. When it all comes together, when it works, it’s like alchemy: mysterious, organic, and very nearly magic.

Becoming adept at the craft of translation, however, did not prepare me for the business of translation. When I was given the opportunity to translate Kirino Natsuo’s novel, Grotesque, the word “grotesque” took on more than one meaning for me.

Translating Grotesque was my first experience with a major trade press. I had translated Japanese literature before, of course. I translated several stories by Uno Chiyo for an academic book with the University of Hawai’i Press. I had also translated a number of works by Meiji women writers for Columbia University Press. But on both occasions I proposed the projects and had to convince the publishers to take on my project.

Becoming adept at the craft of translation, however, did not prepare me for the business of translation.

My first experience with a non-academic press came in the late 1980s when I was approached by the British publisher, Peter Owen. He had been taken by Phyllis Birnbaum’s translation of Uno’s Confessions of Love (Irozange) and was hoping to follow it with a similar work. He asked me if I would recommend a work and then translate it for him. I selected The Story of a Single Woman (Aru hitori no onna no hanashi). I think Mr. Owen was disappointed when he finally read the work in English. Given the title, and what he’d heard of Uno’s love life, he was expecting something a bit more “racy.”

Peter Owen Publishers is a very respectable, independent press known for bringing international authors to a British readership. Working with him was similar to working with a university press. He was willing to produce a book that retained the flavor of the original, even if it placed demands on his readership.

Translating for a major trade press was different. There was a greater urgency to produce a volume that would read much as any English original would read. While working on Grotesque, for example, there was talk of rendering monetary sums in dollars, rather than Japanese yen. That plan was scraped (to my relief).

On another front, there was no guarantee that my name, as translator, would appear on the cover. (It appears on an inside page,) Perhaps most surprising for me was the editing process. After I completed the translation—in 790 manuscript pages—and submitted it to the press, the editing began. Of course, editing is crucial to any publishing enterprise. Translators are writers, after all, and they make mistakes, in the original and in their native language. Also, when you’re translating, sometimes you lose sense of what sounds “right” in your native language, and you write sentences that just don’t make sense to the English reader. It’s important to have a good editor to challenge you on places where logic seems thin or to catch inconsistencies or grammar mistakes. I was fortunate to have an excellent copy editor for Grotesque.

But I hadn’t been prepared to have the editor propose cuts to the translation. In the interest of making the novel more accessible to the press’s readership, they wanted it to be trimmer. I have since learned that this procedure is standard with the large trade presses in the US. But it seems European-language translators are not confronted with the same editing expectations. In fact, from what I’ve read, they are shocked by the American approaches.

I’m of two minds about it. On the one hand I shudder at the thought of re-shaping a work that has already been published in the source language. But on the other hand, I recognize that the publisher is producing a book for an entirely different audience. It is not the same book. Even when the translation is “faithful” or “literal” or whatever term you want to use, it really isn’t. It is not a mirror, a perfect copy, or an equivalent. It’s a separate work for a separate audience with a completely different reading experience. In the case of Grotesque, the author understood this. And she agreed to the edits.

During a reading she gave in the United States, Kirino mentioned that some parts had been edited. Somehow, her reference to cuts was later represented as “censorship.” The author of the Wikipedia entry on Grotesque states that the publisher censored scenes in the book because they were deemed taboo for an American audience. I doubt this. After all, the book deals with incest, statutory rape, prostitution, SM play, and necrophilia . . . all of which appear in the 480 pages in English. Scenes were edited not because they were “shocking” or “taboo” but because they were deemed repetitive.

Grotesque is a difficult work. It is long. It includes a variety of narrative voices and narrative forms. The main narrator is untrustworthy; and the entire novel challenges concepts of truth and lies. Perhaps it is not unreasonable, then, that the translation as well participates in this narrative game by also appearing “truthful” but also somehow deceitful. In a way, paraphrasing Ryan Fraser (Underground Games: Surface Translation and the Grotesque), all translations are “grotesqueries.”

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

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