Hibbett and Nathan

 Hibbett's ideas on resistances and some of the futility in translation was interesting to me, I agree with being stumped on the idea of katakana vs hiragana and trying to translate those two diary entries. I would have no clue how to translate that since it's kind of like having two alphabets, accents/ dialects is another interesting topic he brought up though, in my mind it seems easier than Hibbett envisions but our standards are different, it's interesting how he finds that to be one of his resistances since I'd imagine just translating some country dialect into another country dialect, but in doing so you might lose some sort of background or context to it so maybe it's not as easy. He also mentioned around this part of the two diaries, that he has looked at some Italian novels for inspiration and used that as a reference for his diary translation. Italian seems like it would use a completely different system of translation for Italian to English but the fact that he still uses it for reference is interesting and furthermore impressive that he even managed to find a reference. 

I think this second reading was more interesting, from the anecdote of the baby sea urchin all the way towards Oe's style of writing. The anecdote felt quite humanizing, I didn't think translators would make such errors and am impressed it managed to slip the eyes of both editor and author alike. Especially since the reading also says that Oe draws inspiration from various languages as well as in particular William Blake, it seems like that would be quite a rare mistake. Reading about the different writer's styles in this reading was also quite interesting, how Oe's language "has been judged to be an assault on the traditional mode of intention..." makes me want to try reading a bit to see the difference and compare it perhaps to the other author Mishima that from the little passage included seems to have quite a elegant use of language. It seems like it would be really hard to translate Oe's work without losing the flavor. There was also a part of the reading that dealt with "in between" translation which was quite interesting, I'm not sure how Japanese today would feel about it and whether it would be the same, but I think that if you were to read something half-translated in English, it just wouldn't feel nice to read, so personally I'd rather not read it, unless the original was meant to be like that.

Jon