Here we are again. Translation Day 2019 is coming and at L'illa deserta, like every year, we celebrate it by talking to translators in two parts: Chinese translators and translators of other languages. Today we wanted to talk to Jordi Mas López , a Japanese translator, while tomorrow we will talk to Irene Tor-Carroggio , a Chinese translator. As you can see, we have a very oriental Translation Day 2019.

As you have seen in previous years, translators are not always just translators. This is especially true when we talk about Jordi Mas López, who is a translator, Japanese professor at the UAB and, last but not least , a poet. And, besides, I am especially happy to have him on the blog because we were classmates and we have always kept in touch. We have many topics to cover!

Let's start at the beginning, though. Who is Jordi Mas?

Jordi has a degree in Translation and Interpreting (Catalan, English and Japanese) from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​a master's degree in Translation Theory and Comparative Literature and a doctorate in Translation and Interpreting from the same university, where he teaches Japanese language and literature. He also translates works from Japanese (classical and modern) and has published several works of poetry. He has won awards in both categories: translation and poetry. So let's get to it!

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Jordi, you did your degree in Translation and Interpreting with a combination of Catalan, English and Japanese. The first question is very predictable: at a time when oriental languages ​​were not as fashionable as they are now… why did you choose Japanese? Was it a conscious choice or a rebound?

More like a rebound. At that time, to choose a second European foreign language they asked for a minimum level, and I had only done a little, very little, of French. That's why I decided to throw myself into it and do a second distant language. Arabic really appealed to me, but the year I started my degree there was no promotion for it, so I ended up doing Japanese without really knowing where I was going. Luckily, both the language and the culture quickly hooked me.

Once you graduated, while you were preparing for your master's and doctorate, you started teaching at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting at the UAB, and you continue to do so. What subjects do you teach there? Have you noticed if interest in Japanese has grown?

I usually teach first-year Japanese and the Japanese part of the second-year East Asian classical literature course, in both cases in the East Asian Studies Degree. I also tutor final-year or master's theses, which is quite an interesting job because I try to give students the freedom to choose the topic they prefer and, since they do them with great interest, the result is usually quite good and I learn a lot myself. When necessary, however, I take on other Translation or East Asian subjects, usually languages. 

I would say that there was a very important boom in the study of Japanese in the first half of the nineties, shortly after I started studying it, and that since then interest in this language has perhaps not increased, but it has not decreased either, which has a lot of merit because, currently, both China and South Korea, which are very powerful countries in the field of popular culture, have a much greater presence than they did twenty or twenty-five years ago.

As we said above, one of your most outstanding facets is the translation from Japanese to Catalan. Surely, the translations that have reached the most people are those of Japanese series such as the very well-known Shinchan . This series initially has simple plots, but… was the translation just as simple? Or maybe there were references and humor that were difficult to transfer to Catalan?

I actually sweated a lot with some episodes. An important part of Japanese humor is based on puns (since Japanese is quite poor phonetically, it's quite easy to make them, and they're constantly making them). And there are a lot of them in Shinchan . I remember one in particular that was based on a triple homophony: ôkama (which was the name of a potter who appeared in the episode), okama (which would be a transvestite man) and kama (which means oven, in this case the potter's). While I was translating, taking into account both the text and the images, I played with the words paller and taller and I kept making and unmaking them, and the translation ended up having little to do with the original text. Obviously, I mentioned it to the series' linguist, just in case he thought I was making fun of him, and he thought the translation was good. And some friends who saw the episode told me that they hadn't noticed anything strange. What saved you, with Shinchan , is that the style of the series is unrealistic, and this allowed you to translate quite freely and add twists that would have been unthinkable in another series. 

At the other extreme we have translations of classical Japanese texts such as Tosa Diary , by Ki no Tsurayuki , or The Narrow Path of the Interior , by Matsuo Bashō (winner of the Vidal Alcover Translation Award). I especially remember the translation of Cent de cent , an anthology of tankas (a Japanese poetic genre) that we discussed in this blog. We are talking about works written centuries ago (Ki no Tsurayuki, 9th century; Matsuo Bashō, 17th century), which is why the distance is double: linguistic and temporal. Can you tell us about any typical problems of classical Japanese?

One of the typical problems in tanka translation is puns based on homophones, of great lyrical intensity but formally very similar to the ones I just mentioned. When you encounter them, you have no choice but to reformulate the poem, trying to say the same thing and have a similar final effect, but the diction ends up varying greatly. Another, which occurs in all classical poetry, is self-referentiality. Many poems use a particular word or motif because it appears in a previous poem, or even in a series of poems in which the authors have been quoting each other.

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The aim was not to copy a poem from the past so that one's own would be better, but to make the previous poem present, to pay homage to it, making a poetic allusion to it that any educated person would be able to recognise. The result is that some words, such as "rosada", "mànigues", "oques", "flors"..., ended up being loaded with poetic implications that the original did not make explicit, because it was not necessary, but which do have to be explained, in one way or another, in the translation, because the Catalan reader does not have to know them.

Obviously, we can't close the section dedicated to translation without talking about the current authors that you have translated into Catalan. The best known is Haruki Murakami, whose works you have translated, such as 1Q84 . What can you tell us about him? Is it easy to access the author to resolve doubts? 

Haruki Murakami has a very interesting style. It's quite neutral, but at the same time very personal, because at the beginning of his career he made a very conscious effort to move away from the usual style of Japanese narrative. In Japan, there is a very marked difference between high literature and more popular and consumer literature, and Murakami is positioned between the two, using a style that in Japan has often been criticized for being "un-Japanese". As a storyteller he is very skilled, and I think that, as a translator, the best thing you can do is to let yourself be carried away by his text.

The truth is that I have never asked him any questions. Albert Nolla, who is the one who most often does the translations into Catalan, told me that he cannot be asked directly, but that he has a very efficient secretary who sends him your questions as a translator, if you have any, and he gets back to you with the answer. 

Anyway, there is also life beyond Murakami. Considering that my server is not a fan of this author at all and would like to read other current Japanese writers… could you recommend any?

A hilarious author, for example, who I think influenced Murakami a bit, although he is much more crazy, is Yasutaka Tsutsui (two or three of his books have been published in Spanish). Sweeping home, because they are texts that I have translated, I would recommend The Hunting Rifle , by Yasushi Inoue, which is a fascinating short story, and The Dog Husband , three stories that Yoko Tawada wrote at the beginning of her career. I made the proposal to translate Tawada into Catalan to the Godall publishing house, because I think she is an essential author, although very atypical within the Japanese scene (in fact, she publishes in both Japanese and German, because she has lived in Germany since she was twenty-two). And there are also, of course, the classics of the 20th century, which are little by little being translated into Catalan, such as Kawabata or Tanizaki .

Let's leave translation, but let's not just leave Japanese literary forms, as they have an important presence in your professional career. To begin with... what is a haiku? 

In its classic version, a haiku is a poem of three lines of five, seven and five syllables (although many lines contain metrical licenses) and must necessarily include a kigo or seasonal word, that is, a word or phrase that places it at a specific time of year. It is also very common for Japanese haiku to include a kireji or caesura word, which serves to fragment the three lines into two subunits, if it is in the middle, or to emphasize their emotional content, if it is at the end. The objectivity of the haiku is also usually highlighted, because, since there is very little space to say anything, subjectivity is often implicit, and the result is somewhat reminiscent of a photograph, in which what is there is simply shown, without adding anything to it. Furthermore, in classical haiku, overly intense or personal themes or treatments were usually avoided, which further enhances this feeling of objectivity.

In your doctoral thesis you already talked about haikus and how they have come to have a place in Catalan literature. In this thesis, which has even been published in book form for the public, we see that poets like Joan Salvat-Papasseit or Josep Maria Junoy incorporated these forms into their work. Did they know Japanese? How did they come into contact with it?

No, they didn't know Japanese. Salvat-Papasseit probably got there through Josep Maria Junoy, and Junoy got there, like the other Catalan-language poets, through French. Haiku became very fashionable in France at the end of the First World War, and for a few years many were written in French. It was a form that at that time attracted a lot of attention for the clean, objective treatment it gave to the material, and also because it allowed for the purification of the poetic language, which was something that many authors were looking for at that time. In fact, Junoy was of a very French-speaking culture and spent a good part of 1918 in that country, and during those months he joined groups of poets who met to write haiku.

Your interest in poetry, however, does not end with the relationship between Catalan authors and Japanese forms. In 2008 you published your first poetry collection, Autoretrat amb esfinx , and since then you have been creating a poetic work with which you have been winning prizes and making a place for yourself in the Catalan literary scene. With Febrer , for example, you won the Premi Octubre de poesia 2015, and from there you have been publishing quite consistently ( El crit i l'eco , 2016; La destral del vespre, l'aixada de l'alba , 2018; Brida , 2019). Is your knowledge of Japanese poetry reflected in any way in your poetic production?

From the beginning, everyone told me that it was very noticeable that I was a translator from Japanese, because in general I have tended to say things in the shortest and most stripped-down way possible. I translated Japanese poetry before writing my own, and I think that shows in me, although in the last one I wrote, which is not yet published, I have tried to use a more developed type of diction. At first, I rather avoided using Japanese forms because I was lazy to be classified as a “poet-translator of Japanese”, but in the third book I used tanka and haiku, and in the next two, haiku, either alone, as in The Cry and the Echo , or combined with prose, as in February . In Brida , which is the last one I published, there are some haikus and also my own version of the Japanese chain poem, which is the mother form of haiku.

Translator, Japanese teacher, poet, scholar of the influence of Japanese poetry on Catalan... do you think that any of these facets will end up eating away at the others or, precisely, the trick is to maintain balance?

I hope to be able to maintain a balance between all these activities, which I see as complementary. I like them all, but I think I would get bored and overwhelmed if I could only do one. The ideal, for me, is to alternate them. For example, when I am not very inspired to write, I try to do some translation that interests me, and from time to time it is also good for me to do an article in which I examine what other people have done, because I find it very refreshing. And it often happens to me that one thing leads me to another. For example, I did an article about a book by Salvador Espriu , Per al llibre de salms d'aquests vells cecs , in which he argued that it was not a collection of forty haikus but his own version of a Japanese chain poem. This made me realize that in Catalan we needed to have some translated chained poem and I translated Tres veus lligades a Minase , by Sôgi, Shôchô and Shôhaku (the chained poem was a form that was cultivated collectively). And, once we got going, I ended up writing a chained poem of my own called Brida and it appears in the book of the same name.

Well, let's end the interview talking about balance and how poetry can be approached from different points of view. Translation, creation and analysis, different ways of dealing with it. Thank you very much, Jordi, for everything you've explained to us. Surely, from now on, more than one person will look at Japanese and poetic production in a different way .

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HAPPY TRANSLATION DAY EVERYONE!