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As with most literary criticism, I'm pretty skeptical of this. Thinking in the opposite direction, Snow Crash would be easier to translate than Neuromancer. Neu
by ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago
As with most literary criticism, I'm pretty skeptical of this. Thinking in the opposite direction, Snow Crash would be easier to translate than Neuromancer. Neuromancer would be easier to translate than Finnegan's Wake. That doesn't mean that Snow Crash is part of some homogeneous morass or any less worthy than those other two novels. Though I suppose many literary critics would prize the Joyce over the Stephenson, there are no absolutes in art. There is just what people like.
- needle0 7y agoI felt the author was pretty careful in emphasizing that he's not declaring neither Mizumura nor Murakami is superior over the other, just that translatability can be a factor in how works spread. BTW, all three works you mention has been translated into Japanese (including Finnegans Wake!) The translation for Neuromancer is also something to behold; Hisashi Kuroma, the translator, invented a literary "cyberpunk style" which can only be done with an Asian language. Words in Kanji are sprinkled with ruby text [1] which, instead of annotating the pronunciation of the word, fills in the romanized equivalent English neologism, eg. "接続" would be annotated not as "せつぞく" but as "ジャック・イン" (jack in). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character