(Click here to jump right to the book’s Amazon page) Trying to sift through decades-old Japanese literature can be a bit of a challenge, and finding works that really stand out is even harder still. But when I stumbled upon Masao Yamakawa (山川 方夫) some months back I knew I had really found something special. … Read More »
In this post I talk at length about translation, touching upon how I consider it to be a creative act, but also going into some suggestions on how to be a better translator.
Compared to English, Japanese has countless differences in how things are expressed, including major things like word order, particles, and levels of politeness. However, if you ponder things long enough, and do enough research, you can often find something similar in English, or at least a roughly equivalent way to express things, whether that is… Read More »
Doing a lot of translations these days, I come across a bunch of sites related to word meanings. One site of particular note that I would like to give a brief review of is Linguee (http://www.linguee.com). This site supports meaning lookup for twenty-some languages, although I have only used it for Japanese to English. For… Read More »
This is my translation of the 5th part of Kenji Miyazawa’s famous story “Matasaburo of the Wind”, which happens to be the same story referred to in the song “Matasaburo” by the rock band Yorushika.
I’m proud to announce the release my first anthology of Japanese literature containing a diverse set of stories from several authors, published in parallel English/Japanese for Japanese learners.
I’m happy to announce “Gensen”, a new place to read Japanese literature in a serialized form, much like a digital literary magazine. To start with I have published “Cactus Rose” and “Acala the Immovable”, fiction pieces that I highly recommend.
This is the second post of my Tackling Translation Troubles (TTT) series where I go over common challenges faced in Japanese to English translation, leveraging my own experience. In each episode I will try to use at least one example from Japanese literature to illustrate the topic at hand. (You can see the full list… Read More »
Arigatai Books is proud to announce the release of a new ebook with short stories from a fresh (albeit classic) voice, Masao Yamakawa, an Akutagawa/Naoki-nominated writer with a unique literary style. The stories are published in both bilingual English/Japanese and English-only versions.
This is my translation of the 4th part of Kenji Miyazawa’s famous story “Matasaburo of the Wind”, which happens to be the same story referred to in the song “Matasaburo” by the rock band Yorushika.