Hibbett and Nathan Reading

 In Hibbett writing of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, I was surprised that Tanizaki was described as “Enfant terrible,” but Hibbett also said that Tanizaki was a productive writer, very famous and wildly accepted during the age, and was at the same age as his professor(who sounds quite like Murakami Haruki for us). Though I think his comments on Tanizaki’s personality are kind of subjective, from another perspective, I felt that Hibbett as the translator of Tanizaki’s work, and he actually knew Tanizaki(or Tanizaki as a writer) very well.

The question about Katakana and Hiragana is inspiring and worth spending time thinking about. For me, I couldn’t come up with a perfect solution right now. But what I was thinking was that besides separating them by translating to different tones between women and men, which seems to be necessary, sometimes changing the typefaces may be helpful for a distinction between women and men(but that’s something the editors and the publishing house should consider).

Also, I agreed with his idea of avoiding footnotes in a nonscholarly work that is intended for pleasurable reading. I’m the kind of reader who likes footnotes because I can learn more about the cultural background/history from the footnotes. But I must admit that sometimes footnotes are distracting. I kept thinking about the significance of footnotes recently and realized that there are situations the footnotes should be avoided, which is what Hibbett mentioned.

In Nathan’s reading, I like how he stated on “It asserts that language is intrinsically in flux and stable and incomplete: it is in motion…If the “original” is not fixed, but actually destabilizable, then it’s possible to see an interaction occurring.” There seems to be a momentum between the translation and the original texts, and I think for the translators, the original texts must not be “fixed”. 

Nina