The Twelve Kingdoms: Interview with the Translator, Poseidon & Book Titles

Kate: Why did you choose Poseidon--a Greek reference--for the title of the first book (chronologically)? What goes into creating a title?

Eugene: Much of what goes into a title comes down to prosody and poetics. You do want to keep the literal meaning in mind, but not at the expense of comprehension and aesthetics and marketing. This is especially true with the titles of light novels and anime, which have grown much longer over time (don't ask me why).

So "A Corpse is Buried Under Sakurako's Feet" is titled Beautiful Bones in English, taking advantage of the main character's similarities to Temperance "Bones" Brennan in Bones. On the other hand, I think the original Twelve Kingdoms TokyoPop titles truncated too much and ended up sounding clunky (though I understand wanting to wedge in a series title).

Here are a few more examples.

I explain the title of A Thousand Leagues of Wind in the Introduction and wrote a post for Hills of Silver Ruins on the subject. There are good ideas in the comments too. I used "Poseidon" instead of the generic "sea god" because I thought "Poseidon" better portrayed the idea of a larger-than-life guy like Shouryuu embarking on a Homeric adventure.

Overall, I think I've managed to stay pretty close to the original meanings.

Kate: Speaking of long titles (which often seem very nineteenth-century in vibe--I'm currently reading the manga The Seven Princes in the Thousand-Year Labyrinth)--

Are titles like I Want to Eat Your Pancreas deliberately exerting dark humor? That is, is the title humorous in Japanese? Am I missing something? Is it not as tongue-in-cheek as I think it is? Or more so?

Eugene: In Natsuyuki Rendezvous (published before I Want to Eat Your Pancreas), Rokka says to husband Shimao (dying of an incurable disease), "I wish I could eat all of your bad cells." I don't know how common an expression this is.

With the amount of light novel, manga, and anime material being acquired, especially when a sub-genre like isekai blows up in popularity, a challenge for the writer is coming up with a title that sets that work apart from the rest. As TV Tropes explains

in order to stand out from the deluge of new titles being published every day, authors entice fickle readers by explaining exactly what the gimmick of their series is at the earliest opportunity.

In other words, the title is the book blurb. Japanese publishers probably don't worry about it much when it comes to fiction because fans regularly condense long titles to acronyms, initialisms, and portmanteaus anyway.

Now that I think about it, non-fiction books have long taken this approach. The top new release on Amazon is Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch by David Mamet. Edward Seidensticker's omnibus edition of High City, Low City and Tokyo Rising gets two colons: A History of Tokyo 1867-1989: From Edo to Showa: The Emergence of the World's Greatest City.