Hey everybody.
So don't get me wrong, I love it here at Wednesday Afternoon Picnic. I fully intend to keep posting here. But I got this crazy idea that I would start a site where you could find the latest information about Japanese literary news. And I just couldn't get it out of my head. And I liked what I had going here so I didn't want to change it into something else. So I actually started a new site.
junbungaku.wordpress.com
That is going to be the news site. I want to do this seriously. Like I said, this is going to stay my personal blog. I'll still be posting little translations when I feel like it, doing little speculative analysis and reviews of books that I've read, all that sort of stuff. So don't worry. I'm not going anywhere.
Definitely check out the new site. I hope you'll find it super informative and interesting and you will love it and then everyone in the world will love it and I'll be super famous and fly around in jet planes all the time because I can. (Just kidding on that last part. That will never happen.)
Thanks for hanging around here! You'll still be hearing from me. But also, seriously, check out Junbungaku. I think it's going to be something really great.
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Happy 1-Year Anniversary, Wednesday Afternoon Picnic!
Huzzah! As of today, I've been (fitfully) doing my blog for exactly one year!
I started Wednesday Afternoon Picnic partly as a means to stave off boredom, partly as a means to help my Japanese, and partly because it seemed like a fun thing to do anyway. This time last year, instead of being at school like I am now, I was waiting for my study abroad to Japan to start in late March. My girlfriend was still in school and I mostly worked nights at a movie theater trying to desperately save up for the trip, which meant that many of my daytimes were actually spent alone in our apartment, and when my girlfriend did get home she had to get through her homework.
Lonely and bored, The Kumozaru Project was the way for me to give myself weekly assignments that would be fun and help me improve my Japanese and get some experience in literary translation, which is something I see myself doing at least as part of my future career. For those of you who don't know, the Kumozaru Project was a weekly translation of Haruki Murakami flash-fiction from his collection Yoru no Kumozaru, which has not been published in English. Once a week I posted a translation and also a commentary on the process and any problems I had.
The amazing thing was, I actually kept up with this self-imposed assignment. I was on schedule for 6 weeks and well into the 7th installment when I got an email requesting on behalf of Murakami's rights management company that I not only stop but take down all the translations I had posted or face some serious consequences. A quick look through my archives will show you that I obviously complied.
Since then, it's been harder for me to keep the site active and regular without a clear goal like I had with the Kumozaru project. I've done the best I can to keep up with content that was diverse and (somewhat?) interesting, but there were certainly many dry spells, which was exacerbated by the fact that once I was in Japan, and back to school, I became incredibly busy. Looking through the posts, even without the Kumozaru posts those first three months had a lot more regular content that they do now.
I can't promise a complete turn-around in terms of frequency of posts, but I do love my little blog and will continue to add to it, with my New Year's resolution to always have a post at least within a two-week period. I know I've focused a lot on Murakami in the past, and I will tell you that I probably will continue to do so. He has so much unavailable in English, especially essays in little bite sized pieces, that as far as translation projects go, they're the perfect size for me to handle regularly on this site. I will also keep up with posts about Genichiro Takahashi, because of my misguided attempts to give him something akin to buzz - I really think he is one of today's most interesting active writers that English-readers would respond to. And since I've never gotten a comment about him that said "Hey! This guy sucks and no one cares!"I see no reason to stop. :)
But, for not just you anonymous members of the Internet, but also for myself, I want to diversify my writing and expand my knowledge of Japanese contemporary writers. At this very moment I'm formulating a new project to kick off the New Year that will help me achieve such a goal, so expect very soon an announcement regarding this new project. And although I've started projects that went nowhere and posts I wanted to do but couldn't get off the ground, I'm pretty excited about this one and really want to do it - so before I say anything more I'm going to figure out the logistics of it exactly so I don't regret anything down the line and have to drop it.
In the meantime, to all you out there who have started following me or just discovered an article or two by accident, thanks for coming and I hope you come back again! I hope to make this year bigger and better.
I started Wednesday Afternoon Picnic partly as a means to stave off boredom, partly as a means to help my Japanese, and partly because it seemed like a fun thing to do anyway. This time last year, instead of being at school like I am now, I was waiting for my study abroad to Japan to start in late March. My girlfriend was still in school and I mostly worked nights at a movie theater trying to desperately save up for the trip, which meant that many of my daytimes were actually spent alone in our apartment, and when my girlfriend did get home she had to get through her homework.
Lonely and bored, The Kumozaru Project was the way for me to give myself weekly assignments that would be fun and help me improve my Japanese and get some experience in literary translation, which is something I see myself doing at least as part of my future career. For those of you who don't know, the Kumozaru Project was a weekly translation of Haruki Murakami flash-fiction from his collection Yoru no Kumozaru, which has not been published in English. Once a week I posted a translation and also a commentary on the process and any problems I had.
The amazing thing was, I actually kept up with this self-imposed assignment. I was on schedule for 6 weeks and well into the 7th installment when I got an email requesting on behalf of Murakami's rights management company that I not only stop but take down all the translations I had posted or face some serious consequences. A quick look through my archives will show you that I obviously complied.
Since then, it's been harder for me to keep the site active and regular without a clear goal like I had with the Kumozaru project. I've done the best I can to keep up with content that was diverse and (somewhat?) interesting, but there were certainly many dry spells, which was exacerbated by the fact that once I was in Japan, and back to school, I became incredibly busy. Looking through the posts, even without the Kumozaru posts those first three months had a lot more regular content that they do now.
I can't promise a complete turn-around in terms of frequency of posts, but I do love my little blog and will continue to add to it, with my New Year's resolution to always have a post at least within a two-week period. I know I've focused a lot on Murakami in the past, and I will tell you that I probably will continue to do so. He has so much unavailable in English, especially essays in little bite sized pieces, that as far as translation projects go, they're the perfect size for me to handle regularly on this site. I will also keep up with posts about Genichiro Takahashi, because of my misguided attempts to give him something akin to buzz - I really think he is one of today's most interesting active writers that English-readers would respond to. And since I've never gotten a comment about him that said "Hey! This guy sucks and no one cares!"I see no reason to stop. :)
But, for not just you anonymous members of the Internet, but also for myself, I want to diversify my writing and expand my knowledge of Japanese contemporary writers. At this very moment I'm formulating a new project to kick off the New Year that will help me achieve such a goal, so expect very soon an announcement regarding this new project. And although I've started projects that went nowhere and posts I wanted to do but couldn't get off the ground, I'm pretty excited about this one and really want to do it - so before I say anything more I'm going to figure out the logistics of it exactly so I don't regret anything down the line and have to drop it.
In the meantime, to all you out there who have started following me or just discovered an article or two by accident, thanks for coming and I hope you come back again! I hope to make this year bigger and better.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Introducing: Summer of the Re-Read
Now that I'm back in the States again, I have a lot of free time until school starts back up. A LOT of free time. And besides the time I've wasted since discovering my family started using Netflix (instant streaming...fuck and yes), I've started really reading again.
This summer I have a massive reading list I want to but ultimately will fail miserably at completing, which can be divided up into three sections: (1) new, unread books, (2) unread "classics", and (3) stuff I want to read again.
The thing is, I don't often re-read books, besides Murakami (surprise, surprise). Some fun facts: Sputnik Sweetheart is probably the most read at 3, possibly 4 times, and Hardboiled Wonderland... is the one that I've started and put down the most times, though I have finished it once and thoroughly enjoyed it; for some reason, it's just the unluckiest book in that I just start it at bad times or get distracted by something newer and shinier. I have a pretty good memory, so I more or less remember what happened and how I particularly felt about any particular book, and there's just so much out there to read I usually give preference to something unknown (except in the cases where I find myself in an irrepressible Murakami mood). Contrast this to my TV habits, in which my favorite shows are constantly being cycled through and re-marathoned, though this is usually done in conjunction with something else, since I don't have to be focusing on it 100% to enjoy it. In fact, the only book in semi-recent memory that I recall re-reading is Koushun Takami's Battle Royale. (Oops, wait, that's a lie; the last Harry Potter was also re-read, though only just a month or two after I had initially read it in the first place.) And books have to be particularly crappy for me to give up on them before the end (i.e. Higashino Keigo's "Naoko". For such a fucked up concept, boooooooooring.)
But this summer, I really want to re-read a bunch of books. Maybe it was because I was in Japan and didn't have access to my collection, or maybe because I didn't have easy access to English-language books. Not really sure. And since I like doing book reviews on this blog anyway, I thought I'd chronicle my exploits.
Here's the list so far:
1) Genichiro Takahashi - Sayonara, Gangsters
2) J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
3) F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
4) (tentative) Ryu Murakami - Coin Locker Babies
5) (tentative) George Orwell - 1984
6) (tentative) Haruki Murakami - South of the Border, West of the Sun
7) (tentative) Albert Camus - The Fall
I guess in general, I want to see if each of these books still "hold up" since the last time I read them, though the reasons for why I want to see depend on each book. For example, South of the Border, West of the Sun was by far and away my absolute least favorite Murakami book when I read it, but paradoxically, it also has one of my favorite quotes by any author ever. So on and so forth.
I'll talk about all this stuff more specifically for each book when I get to it. Anyway, that's something that you can look forward to (I originally wrote "one more thing" you can look forward to, but I haven't written anything in months, so you haven't been looking forward to anything for a while) very soon, since I've already finished reading Sayonara, Gangsters and am halfway through The Catcher in the Rye.
(P.S. New books will be reviewed either separately or, more likely, in a "Recently Read Round-up" column.)
(P.P.S. That translation I'm working on that's non-Murakami? Totally starting to work on that again. I spent most of my time in Japan just trying to read as much Japanese as possible, and practicing the art of getting as much out of a text as I can without checking the dictionary every10 5 seconds, which was actually really awesome. Newest record: 40 consecutive pages that I can thoroughly summarize to you, that I did with little dictionary-consultation. Very proud of this.)
(P.P.S. I'm now on The Twitter. There should now be a doohicky on the side of this here thing-ama-blog.)
This summer I have a massive reading list I want to but ultimately will fail miserably at completing, which can be divided up into three sections: (1) new, unread books, (2) unread "classics", and (3) stuff I want to read again.
The thing is, I don't often re-read books, besides Murakami (surprise, surprise). Some fun facts: Sputnik Sweetheart is probably the most read at 3, possibly 4 times, and Hardboiled Wonderland... is the one that I've started and put down the most times, though I have finished it once and thoroughly enjoyed it; for some reason, it's just the unluckiest book in that I just start it at bad times or get distracted by something newer and shinier. I have a pretty good memory, so I more or less remember what happened and how I particularly felt about any particular book, and there's just so much out there to read I usually give preference to something unknown (except in the cases where I find myself in an irrepressible Murakami mood). Contrast this to my TV habits, in which my favorite shows are constantly being cycled through and re-marathoned, though this is usually done in conjunction with something else, since I don't have to be focusing on it 100% to enjoy it. In fact, the only book in semi-recent memory that I recall re-reading is Koushun Takami's Battle Royale. (Oops, wait, that's a lie; the last Harry Potter was also re-read, though only just a month or two after I had initially read it in the first place.) And books have to be particularly crappy for me to give up on them before the end (i.e. Higashino Keigo's "Naoko". For such a fucked up concept, boooooooooring.)
But this summer, I really want to re-read a bunch of books. Maybe it was because I was in Japan and didn't have access to my collection, or maybe because I didn't have easy access to English-language books. Not really sure. And since I like doing book reviews on this blog anyway, I thought I'd chronicle my exploits.
Here's the list so far:
1) Genichiro Takahashi - Sayonara, Gangsters
2) J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
3) F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
4) (tentative) Ryu Murakami - Coin Locker Babies
5) (tentative) George Orwell - 1984
6) (tentative) Haruki Murakami - South of the Border, West of the Sun
7) (tentative) Albert Camus - The Fall
I guess in general, I want to see if each of these books still "hold up" since the last time I read them, though the reasons for why I want to see depend on each book. For example, South of the Border, West of the Sun was by far and away my absolute least favorite Murakami book when I read it, but paradoxically, it also has one of my favorite quotes by any author ever. So on and so forth.
I'll talk about all this stuff more specifically for each book when I get to it. Anyway, that's something that you can look forward to (I originally wrote "one more thing" you can look forward to, but I haven't written anything in months, so you haven't been looking forward to anything for a while) very soon, since I've already finished reading Sayonara, Gangsters and am halfway through The Catcher in the Rye.
(P.S. New books will be reviewed either separately or, more likely, in a "Recently Read Round-up" column.)
(P.P.S. That translation I'm working on that's non-Murakami? Totally starting to work on that again. I spent most of my time in Japan just trying to read as much Japanese as possible, and practicing the art of getting as much out of a text as I can without checking the dictionary every
(P.P.S. I'm now on The Twitter. There should now be a doohicky on the side of this here thing-ama-blog.)
Saturday, July 10, 2010
I live!
Tomorrow I return to America. The study abroad is over.
I wanted to keep up with regular posts over the last few months, but I decided (unconsciously really) that I wanted to use the time I would've spent organizing posts and writing them with going out and experiencing Japan as much as possible.
So, expect new content coming very soon and much more regularly. I have a few translations lined up, and I'll go back to explore my experience as well as other things about my time here that I enjoyed too.
よろしく！
I wanted to keep up with regular posts over the last few months, but I decided (unconsciously really) that I wanted to use the time I would've spent organizing posts and writing them with going out and experiencing Japan as much as possible.
So, expect new content coming very soon and much more regularly. I have a few translations lined up, and I'll go back to explore my experience as well as other things about my time here that I enjoyed too.
よろしく！
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
A Slow Flight to Japan
In less than a week, I'll be on a flight to Narita Airport to start my study abroad. This will be my first time to Japan. It's pretty nerve-wracking.
In a way, I'm really not sure what I'm expecting from this trip. It's only for three and a half months, and although I'm going to better my Japanese language skills, I know i'll be hindered in some ways by the fact I'll be studying and learning and exploring with other gaijin. For this I'm kind of thankful, knowing that I won't be totally alone in a country that has a fierce sense of national identity, and yet I know I need to push myself out of my cultural and linguistic comfort zone, if I want to get the most out of my time abroad.
At any rate, I have probably one more post in me before I leave, as I still have a lot to do to prepare. It might be quiet for a bit while I get settled, but after that expect a lot of posts as i'm gonna be posting everything cool that I'm up to. Of course, even though those of you already in Japan have probably long discovered what I'm about to experience, I'ma gonna be talkin' bout it anyway! (For posterity, as it were.) I promise a smattering of translation stuff too (if the Kumozaru project were still around it would be easier for me...*grumble grumble*), so don't think I've forgotten the purpose of this site. But I do concede it will be lookin' very much like a travel blog around here for a while...
Anyway, stay tuned loyal readers. I hope my radiant charm and personality will keep you around a little while longer!
In a way, I'm really not sure what I'm expecting from this trip. It's only for three and a half months, and although I'm going to better my Japanese language skills, I know i'll be hindered in some ways by the fact I'll be studying and learning and exploring with other gaijin. For this I'm kind of thankful, knowing that I won't be totally alone in a country that has a fierce sense of national identity, and yet I know I need to push myself out of my cultural and linguistic comfort zone, if I want to get the most out of my time abroad.
At any rate, I have probably one more post in me before I leave, as I still have a lot to do to prepare. It might be quiet for a bit while I get settled, but after that expect a lot of posts as i'm gonna be posting everything cool that I'm up to. Of course, even though those of you already in Japan have probably long discovered what I'm about to experience, I'ma gonna be talkin' bout it anyway! (For posterity, as it were.) I promise a smattering of translation stuff too (if the Kumozaru project were still around it would be easier for me...*grumble grumble*), so don't think I've forgotten the purpose of this site. But I do concede it will be lookin' very much like a travel blog around here for a while...
Anyway, stay tuned loyal readers. I hope my radiant charm and personality will keep you around a little while longer!
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Some Updates
Some minor changes added to the site. I added a tags section so you can find or limit yourself to certain articles (like the Kumozaru Project). I also added a few links of places I go to online pretty much everyday. I'm new to this whole blogging thing, so I don't know if there's some sort of etiquette involved when linking to others' websites, so, um.... hope we're cool, you guys!
Also, new story up below. For this story, I tried to be a lot freer in translating, which lead to sentences that, you know, aren't word for word. I approve of this kind of translating (I was recently comparing Alfred Birnbaum's A Wild Sheep Chase to the original, man does he do so some amazing work!), because translating across any language really cannot be word for word. It just doesn't work that way. There are many schools of thought on translation, and many different kinds of views on what's to be considered "faithful" to a text. I won't get into these ideas anymore (at the moment), but story #2 was an exercise in colloquial constructions and cultural readability. So I stand by the choices I made. Of course, I'm always up for a conversation on alternatives for comparison, so those of you who have the text and would've done something differently, hit me up in the comments. I'd love to know what you think.
Also, new story up below. For this story, I tried to be a lot freer in translating, which lead to sentences that, you know, aren't word for word. I approve of this kind of translating (I was recently comparing Alfred Birnbaum's A Wild Sheep Chase to the original, man does he do so some amazing work!), because translating across any language really cannot be word for word. It just doesn't work that way. There are many schools of thought on translation, and many different kinds of views on what's to be considered "faithful" to a text. I won't get into these ideas anymore (at the moment), but story #2 was an exercise in colloquial constructions and cultural readability. So I stand by the choices I made. Of course, I'm always up for a conversation on alternatives for comparison, so those of you who have the text and would've done something differently, hit me up in the comments. I'd love to know what you think.
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