Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, the Beginning

Eugene Woodbury is currently translating the most recent of Fuyumi Ono's Twelve Kingdoms' novels, Hills of Silver Ruins, a Pitch Black Moon. 

The interview covers all currently translated books and short stories. It goes in roughly chronological order, starting with Poseidon of the East, Vast Blue Seas of the West.

The interview questions mostly focus on the mythology of the books with additional questions about contemporary Japan and occasional questions about a specific book. 

Here we go! 

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Kate: What interested you in The Twelve Kingdoms?

Eugene: In the late 1990s, I discovered JWPce and online tools like Eijirou. And Honto. Unlike Amazon, Honto offers SAL shipping, which makes ordering books much more affordable. Then Windows 2000 and Window XP debuted with full Unicode support.

I used to peruse the manga section at bookstores to try and pick out titles and authors that I might want to read in Japanese. I started translating manga just for the heck of it and a couple of light novels. A girl at work asked me to do a chapter of Fruits Basket for a scanlation site she contributed to.

And then I saw the NHK anime series, and that turned out to be a deep well to draw from. (At the time, the books hadn't been licensed.) It certainly helped that the books turned out to be even better than the anime.

The entire Microsoft customer support team I was working on was getting transferred to India, so we were getting paid to sit around for hours without anything to do. So that's when I started emailing myself scans of the novels to give myself something to do at work.

And since I was translating them already, and was teaching myself HTML and website hosting, I decided to post them online. And I actually got feedback on the material I posted. So I kept on going.

Kate: The series is influenced by Chinese mythology. Are the Japanese interested in Chinese mythology the way us Americans are continually drawn to British folktales and art?

Eugene: Given China's long history, you could say that as Rome was to the rest of Europe, China was to the rest of Asia. More specifically, as medieval Europe was to England, China was to Japan.

Christianity arrived in England around the same time that Buddhism arrived in Japan via China and Korea. Both religions were from the start entwined with political rule. One difference here is that the native religion of Japan (Shinto) persisted as a folk religion and thanks to the patronage of the imperial family.

During the Edo period, the shogunate commissioned Buddhist temples to handle the census and placed Shinto shrines under Buddhist control. The equivalent of the English Reformation took place when the imperial family assumed power in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration and Shinto again rose to prominence.

Confucianism from China played a prominent role in organizing both society and government. Many calendrical festivals such as Tanabata and O'Bon originated in China. Japan imported science and architecture from China. And, of course, its kanji orthography. As Latin (the Romance languages) is to English, Chinese is to Japanese.

The same way English, a Germanic language, is littered with Latin, Japanese, in a completely different family of languages, is suffused with Chinese cognates that can be read based on the on'yomi (Chinese pronunciation) or kun'yomi (Japanese pronunciation), and depending on the part of speech and when the kanji was adopted.

Thus a character that is pronounced only one way in Chinese can be read a dozen different ways in Japanese. Another metaphor for how culture mutates when it travels. This was certainly true of the classic novels Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, which had a profound influence on literary traditions in Japan.

Those influences can show up in unexpected places, like the gleefully trashy Ikki Tousen.

On a higher brow note, post-war historical novelist Eiji Yoshikawa credited The Tale of the Heike, Tale of Genji, Water Margin, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms as major inspirations. The former two are Japanese classics, the latter two are Chinese. As with Shakespeare, these are deep wells of story material that promise to never run dry.

Kate: I’ve noted how often the text will skip between the current action and past events/explanations. In Poseidon, the emperor’s back story is delivered in parts with no warning.

Western literature makes a huge deal out of flashbacks, even when done (or especially when done) in a literary way. Since manga will often skip back in time with no warning, I’m assuming that this quilt of past and present is a function of Japanese literature, rather than specific to the author. Yes? No?

Eugene: What you call the "quilt of past and present" is indeed a function of Japanese discourse in general. The mix of the past tense and the "historical present" or "non-past" tense has long intrigued linguists. The following post (and related links) and the thesis abstract explain what is going on grammatically.

Historical Present Tense

Tense in Oral Narratives

More to follow!