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Traveller

Traveller

Currently reading

Swann's Way
Marcel Proust, Lydia Davis
Snow Country
Yasunari Kawabata, Edward G. Seidensticker
Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time
Roger Shattuck
The Mind At Night: The New Science Of How And Why We Dream
Andrea Rock
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann, John E. Woods
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Advances in Semiotics)
Umberto Eco
Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima
Naoki Inose, Hiroaki Sato
The Inquisition of Climate Science
James L Powell
State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?
The Worldwatch Institute
Media Studies: Texts, Institutions and Audiences
Lisa Taylor;Andrew Willis
Rashomon - Ryūnosuke Akutagawa I think I somehow missed the point of the Yam gruel story. I found the Rashomon story rather cruel and unsympathetic. I think I'll reserve judgment until after we've discussed these in our Brain Pain group.

Something that I definitely did notice, is that quite a bit of the original seems to be lost in translation, which might be partly the fault of the translator, but almost definitely also due to the fact that English and Japanese are two languages that seem to be difficult to translate mutually.

From all accounts that I've heard, it seems that there are some words and expressions that are almost untranslatable from the English to the Japanese, and I daresay vice versa too.

In any case, I do know of cases where certain single words in Japanese have no equivalent in English, and have to be "explained" via entire paragraphs or sentences. That doesn't really lend itself to elegance in the translated work. :(