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sh00's review against another edition
4.0
Казалось бы, 2003-й - это так далеко, и биография писателя, который с тех пор написал много чего ещё, попросту устарела морально, но нет.
Тренды, которые показывает исследователь, абсолютно верны и именно так и продолжаются в современность. И пусть Мураками и не получил Нобелевскую (которая в современном мире начинает всё больше и больше напоминать такой же фарс, как и всё остальное), лично я дал бы ему две. Конечно, я подарил весь свой раздел библиотеки из его ранних произведений, а кто-то (на самом деле мы знаем, кто) взял наш с женой экземпляр "Подземки" (вряд ли мы его увидим теперь, надо купить новый), так что Мураками дома есть только в цифре... Да, подарил. Да, потому что перерос.
Мураками многосторонен и явно сложнее устроен, чем кажется тем, кто читает его вещи, как сборник "тоси-дэнсецу", городских легенд (у меня лично тоже такие есть, например, о Белом Нищем в метро, который ни разу не взял у меня подаяния). Насколько - можно понять, прочитав эту книгу, кое-что тут разжёвывается. Но думать, как всегда, лучше самостоятельно, потому что исследователи нет-нет, да и перегибают.
Иногда вулкан - это просто вулкан.
Тренды, которые показывает исследователь, абсолютно верны и именно так и продолжаются в современность. И пусть Мураками и не получил Нобелевскую (которая в современном мире начинает всё больше и больше напоминать такой же фарс, как и всё остальное), лично я дал бы ему две. Конечно, я подарил весь свой раздел библиотеки из его ранних произведений, а кто-то (на самом деле мы знаем, кто) взял наш с женой экземпляр "Подземки" (вряд ли мы его увидим теперь, надо купить новый), так что Мураками дома есть только в цифре... Да, подарил. Да, потому что перерос.
Мураками многосторонен и явно сложнее устроен, чем кажется тем, кто читает его вещи, как сборник "тоси-дэнсецу", городских легенд (у меня лично тоже такие есть, например, о Белом Нищем в метро, который ни разу не взял у меня подаяния). Насколько - можно понять, прочитав эту книгу, кое-что тут разжёвывается. Но думать, как всегда, лучше самостоятельно, потому что исследователи нет-нет, да и перегибают.
Иногда вулкан - это просто вулкан.
benrogerswpg's review against another edition
4.0
This was a great book!
Having read every Murakami book, I found this book did a great job at detailing all of his books.
I especially enjoyed learning about Murakami's writing process.
It was also interesting to learn about his writing influences, and his life outside writing.
Would recommend for Murakami fans.
3.8/5
Having read every Murakami book, I found this book did a great job at detailing all of his books.
I especially enjoyed learning about Murakami's writing process.
It was also interesting to learn about his writing influences, and his life outside writing.
Would recommend for Murakami fans.
3.8/5
ngominh's review against another edition
3.0
Ban đầu đọc vì tò mò xem Jazz có cái gì hay mà Toni Morrison, Michael Odaantje hay Zadie Smith ai ai cũng có 1 tập tiểu luận (hoặc tiểu thuyết) dính tới nhạc Jazz. Nhưng mà không ngờ cuốn này nó như 1 cuốn phê bình văn chương của Murakami vậy.
Cũng hay khi Jay Rubin khai thác song song giữa đời sống cá nhân và quá trình sáng tạo của Murakami. Qua đó biết thêm những dòng chủ lưu trong cách viết, quá trình đưa ông đến với nghề văn, nghề dịch và viết truyện ngắn.
Tuy nhiên điểm không thích là nó quá dài. Với một người không thích Murakami, việc tìm những sự kết nối cũng như định hình thế giới Murakami là rất cần thiết cho người hâm mộ của ông, nhưng với mình là không. Mình chỉ không thích những chỗ dù cho rằng Murakami chủ ý tạo ra sự vô lý, rằng ông thừa nhận đó là ứng tác, là khoảnh khắc dẫn đường như những feelings của jazz... thì Jay Rubin vẫn tiếp tục phỏng đoán và phân tích (!?) không biết để làm gì. Chính những điều này làm cho mình thấy cuốn sách này ít tính trung thực, nó như của 1 fanbouy viết về idol, có phần bợ đỡ, cho nên nếu để đọc kỹ hoặc đọc lần 2 lần 3, thì mình sẽ không đọc lại.
Cũng hay khi Jay Rubin khai thác song song giữa đời sống cá nhân và quá trình sáng tạo của Murakami. Qua đó biết thêm những dòng chủ lưu trong cách viết, quá trình đưa ông đến với nghề văn, nghề dịch và viết truyện ngắn.
Tuy nhiên điểm không thích là nó quá dài. Với một người không thích Murakami, việc tìm những sự kết nối cũng như định hình thế giới Murakami là rất cần thiết cho người hâm mộ của ông, nhưng với mình là không. Mình chỉ không thích những chỗ dù cho rằng Murakami chủ ý tạo ra sự vô lý, rằng ông thừa nhận đó là ứng tác, là khoảnh khắc dẫn đường như những feelings của jazz... thì Jay Rubin vẫn tiếp tục phỏng đoán và phân tích (!?) không biết để làm gì. Chính những điều này làm cho mình thấy cuốn sách này ít tính trung thực, nó như của 1 fanbouy viết về idol, có phần bợ đỡ, cho nên nếu để đọc kỹ hoặc đọc lần 2 lần 3, thì mình sẽ không đọc lại.
tronella's review against another edition
4.0
A biography of Murakami focusing on his fiction, but also discussing his translations and his love of jazz, among other things. Now I want to reread all his books... and in fact after reading this I think I may not have actually ever read A Wind-up Bird Chronicle, so I'd better get on that!
The book is a little repetitive in its choice of quotes somehow and I found it a little weird when the author (Rubin) spoke about himself in the third person in one part, but otherwise it was a good read. But if you aren't already quite familiar with at least most of Murakami's novels, this would probably just be an incomprehensible spoiler party.
The book is a little repetitive in its choice of quotes somehow and I found it a little weird when the author (Rubin) spoke about himself in the third person in one part, but otherwise it was a good read. But if you aren't already quite familiar with at least most of Murakami's novels, this would probably just be an incomprehensible spoiler party.
huangv's review against another edition
3.0
If you're a fan of Haruki Murakami's work, this is the book for you. Jay Rubin walks through Murakami's body of work (translated and untranslated) to flush out the author.
Did you know that he had a website where he openly answered reader questoins? (Questions ranged from material from his book to relationship advice).
His books have been translated out-of-order. Learning the timeline for his books was insightful in understanding how he has evolved as a writer.
While reading the book, all I wanted to do was reread his body of work.
It's a good thing, because I just ordered his "newest" book--After Dark--which was written back in 2004.
Did you know that he had a website where he openly answered reader questoins? (Questions ranged from material from his book to relationship advice).
His books have been translated out-of-order. Learning the timeline for his books was insightful in understanding how he has evolved as a writer.
While reading the book, all I wanted to do was reread his body of work.
It's a good thing, because I just ordered his "newest" book--After Dark--which was written back in 2004.
spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
2.0
I cannot say I am myself a "fan" of Murakami Haruki's writing, nor particularly of the man himself. I've read a handful of his books, mostly in French or in English, and selected passages from the original Japanese, mostly for the purposes of translation comparison. But I don't particularly care for his writing style, his characters, his when-in-translation idiolect—a certain amount of this can be traced back to the fact that I've met more than the acceptable amount* of Westerners who have read one or two Murakami books in translation and are apparently under the impression that Murakami's writing is emblematic of the entirety of Japanese literature. (I find this particularly ironic because Murakami's popularity in the core anglosphere is far greater than his popularity in Japan.) But also I just don't think he's an exceptional writer, despite occasionally beautiful prose or compelling ideas. So it should come as no surprise that I didn't really spend much time on the hagiographical parts of this book. Sorry, did I say "hagiographical"? I meant "biographical." No I didn't.
The most interesting part of this book for me was the appendices regarding translation. Jay Rubin is himself a longtime translator of Murakami, among other Japanese authors, into English. Regarding The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Rubin writes:
This whole mess raises the question of what, precisely, is the role of the translator. Is it a translator's job to edit the work, correcting errors and tightening confusing areas? I would argue that it is not: a flawed work in one language should not be "upscaled" or "retrofitted" in another language, even if it would make the work arguably "better." Rubin claims that the "amount of 'adapting' [he] did was small in the overall context," but I would argue that the minor changes add up: in his translation of Norwegian Wood, for example, Rubin omits a "no smoking" sign** on an aeroplane, invents a new line of dialogue, halves certain sentences' word count, and changes "BGM" (background music) into "soft music." These changes all take place within the first six paragraphs. None of these details are unique to Rubin, however: Japanese novels are frequently published as multiple volumes, something atypical to Western fiction markets, usually resulting in abridgement by either the translator or the publisher; publishers responsible for publishing translations of foreign works almost always encourage substantial changes to the original text in order to make the translated product more palatable to an Western audience. Of Murakami's œuvre this is probably most obvious in regards to 1Q84 which, in its English translation, is around 920 pages—and doesn't even come close to the length of the original three volumes, which are 550, 400, and 470 pages, respectively. Around 500 pages are lost.
I also don't care for Rubin's (and, by extension, Murakami's) view on "re-translation," which is the process of using a "pivot language" to translate not from language A to language C but rather from language B to language C. For example, the first and most popular German translation of one of Murakami's novels used the prior English translation as a pivot, translating not from Japanese → German but from [Japanese →] English → German. Think of this practice as a game of telephone: the more times a text is "processed" through different languages, the less it will resemble the original. If you've ever fed song lyrics into Google Translate, forced them through various languages, and gleefully read the near-incomprehensible result, you know exactly what I mean. Any mistakes present in the Japanese-English translation will then be replicated in the English-German translation, which will then inevitably make its own errors of varying size (because translation is an inexact science and human translators are faillible). The "re-translation" phenomenon (personally I refer to these works as "palimpsests") is fascinating from an outsider's perspective, because all transformative art is fascinating, but endlessly frustrating from the perspective of a translator who is keenly aware of the slippery slope this trend is skiing. When I'm reading a work that was originally in a language I don't know, I want to read something that's as close to the original as possible. But that's just me.
*The acceptable amount, i.e., none.
**To his credit Rubin does address this: "No one reads a book as closely as a translator, which is why the bracketed part of the following sentence was removed from the first page of the translation of Murakami’s bestseller: 'Once the plane was on the ground, [the no smoking sign went out, and] soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of The Beatles’ "Norwegian Wood."' This may help prove Murakami’s point that the details are less important than the story." Well, I'm a translator.
The most interesting part of this book for me was the appendices regarding translation. Jay Rubin is himself a longtime translator of Murakami, among other Japanese authors, into English. Regarding The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Rubin writes:
With regard to abridging the translation, I [...] would never have considered cutting it if the US publisher, Knopf, had not stipulated in Murakami’s contract that the book should not exceed a certain length. Concerned at what an editor might do to the text, I took the initiative to make cuts based on my knowledge of the novel, leaving in more than the specified number of words. Knopf accepted my edited version without a whimper (which suggested to me that I probably could have left more in). [...] The cuts occur primarily at the end of Book Two and the beginning of Book Three. Books One and Two were published in Japanese as a single unit and were accepted as complete by many Japanese readers. Much of the end of Book Two, however, involving Tôru’s indecisiveness about whether or not to go to Crete with Creta Kanô, was rendered almost irrelevant by Book Three, so I did not feel too bad about leaving that out. I still think the translation is tighter and cleaner than the original, but I suppose that very tightness can be viewed as a distortion of the original, an Americanization of a Japanese work of art. I had a great time doing it, though it turned out to be a much more complex process than I had imagined.As Rubin mentions, what was published as a singular novel in English was released in Japan as several volumes, a common practice not only in Japan but in many other countries. In this respect the US/UK market is the outlier. Rubin goes on to explain that he rearranged certain scenes in order to remedy "several chronological inconsistencies which were not deliberately placed there by the author," noting that Murakami himself "contributed many minor cuts that have since been incorporated into the Japanese paperback edition of the novel."
This whole mess raises the question of what, precisely, is the role of the translator. Is it a translator's job to edit the work, correcting errors and tightening confusing areas? I would argue that it is not: a flawed work in one language should not be "upscaled" or "retrofitted" in another language, even if it would make the work arguably "better." Rubin claims that the "amount of 'adapting' [he] did was small in the overall context," but I would argue that the minor changes add up: in his translation of Norwegian Wood, for example, Rubin omits a "no smoking" sign** on an aeroplane, invents a new line of dialogue, halves certain sentences' word count, and changes "BGM" (background music) into "soft music." These changes all take place within the first six paragraphs. None of these details are unique to Rubin, however: Japanese novels are frequently published as multiple volumes, something atypical to Western fiction markets, usually resulting in abridgement by either the translator or the publisher; publishers responsible for publishing translations of foreign works almost always encourage substantial changes to the original text in order to make the translated product more palatable to an Western audience. Of Murakami's œuvre this is probably most obvious in regards to 1Q84 which, in its English translation, is around 920 pages—and doesn't even come close to the length of the original three volumes, which are 550, 400, and 470 pages, respectively. Around 500 pages are lost.
I also don't care for Rubin's (and, by extension, Murakami's) view on "re-translation," which is the process of using a "pivot language" to translate not from language A to language C but rather from language B to language C. For example, the first and most popular German translation of one of Murakami's novels used the prior English translation as a pivot, translating not from Japanese → German but from [Japanese →] English → German. Think of this practice as a game of telephone: the more times a text is "processed" through different languages, the less it will resemble the original. If you've ever fed song lyrics into Google Translate, forced them through various languages, and gleefully read the near-incomprehensible result, you know exactly what I mean. Any mistakes present in the Japanese-English translation will then be replicated in the English-German translation, which will then inevitably make its own errors of varying size (because translation is an inexact science and human translators are faillible). The "re-translation" phenomenon (personally I refer to these works as "palimpsests") is fascinating from an outsider's perspective, because all transformative art is fascinating, but endlessly frustrating from the perspective of a translator who is keenly aware of the slippery slope this trend is skiing. When I'm reading a work that was originally in a language I don't know, I want to read something that's as close to the original as possible. But that's just me.
*The acceptable amount, i.e., none.
**To his credit Rubin does address this: "No one reads a book as closely as a translator, which is why the bracketed part of the following sentence was removed from the first page of the translation of Murakami’s bestseller: 'Once the plane was on the ground, [the no smoking sign went out, and] soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of The Beatles’ "Norwegian Wood."' This may help prove Murakami’s point that the details are less important than the story." Well, I'm a translator.
laplaine's review
4.0
An excellent analysis of Murakami works through 2003, it reminds me how much I'm missing out on by not being able to read Japanese. The essay on translations and re-translations in the appendix provides a capstone to an intimate look at Murakami's efforts as both an author and a translator.
jossarian4's review against another edition
5.0
It took me a little longer to finish this book, and I admittedly skipped a small portion as they were covering Murakami novels I have yet to read, and I wish to read Murakami's words first. I have to say while Jay Rubin can sometimes be melodramatic here, he does a phenomenal job summarizing, analyzing, and at some points defending Murakami's work. He also provides, alongside the analyzes, a sort of biography of Murakami. Any fan of Murakami that is looking for information AND readings of his work, look o further - Rubin's work here is the perfect introduction to Murakami criticism and a wonderful tool for anyone looking to understand him better.
bearpolar's review against another edition
4.0
Comprehensive introduction to Murakami's earlier works and themes, plus biographical details and interviews that put the works into context. Even though Rubin is a self-proclaimed fan, he does not shy away from printing criticism of Murakami’s fiction, both his own and other people's.