Meet author Helen Dewitt. She’s the writer of The Last Samurai, a story of a single mother and her precocious son who goes in search of a father using the heroes of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai as his benchmark; author of Lightning Rods, a satirical look at corporate America; and co-author of Your Name Here, a work of Internet-inspired meta-fiction. She is a woman whose past addresses (see question one) exceed the number and exoticism of languages typed in her first novel (English, French, Greek, Old Norse, Inuktikut, Japanese among them), and below, Miss DeWitt offers us 3,000 words on language, Japan, and our new literary culture (now in hypertext?).
It seems you are a bit nomadic. Where have you lived?
Well, I will just go through the list (which is pretty long). I was born in a suburb of Washington, DC. My father was in the Marine Corps, so we lived for my first three years in Chincoteague, where there was a base. He joined the Foreign Service in 1960. We went to Mexico for 2 years; Washington, DC, 3 years; Gainesville, Florida, 1 year; Rio de Janeiro & Brasilia, Brazil (2 years); Cali, Colombia, 2 years; Guayaquil, Ecuador, 2 years (but I was sent away to school in the States for the second year, 12th grade). Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts – off and on from 1975-78 (I hated it, kept taking leaves of absence). Oxford, 1979-1988 (BA, DPhil, Junior Research Fellow). 1988-9, travelled around the US (Washington, D.C., Vermont, Virginia, Florida) trying to write my first novel (about 100 attempts before The Last Samurai). 1989-90, Oxford (living with my British husband). 1990-98, London (working various jobs while trying to finish a novel). 1998-2000, Chesterfield (quit job, moved somewhere cheap to try to write lots of books). 2001, Washington (staying with my mother, crazy after publication of book). 2001-3, London (trying to see a psychiatrist on the NHS). 2003-4, New York (on fellowship at New York Public Library). 2004-present, Berlin. (Came here planning to stay a month . . .) [I would rather have travelled more widely in the last several years, but it's hard to combine that with dealing with publishers.]
Pretty long, indeed! Is there any place you consider home?
I’m not sure what I consider home. I love going back to Britain. If I could live anywhere I would live in Paris. It always feels very good, though, going somewhere where I don’t speak the language at all – so I sometimes think I should go to Budapest, or Istanbul, or Tokyo, or Beijing… It feels good, always, to be someplace where I am a foreigner, so I am not expected to be in sync with the cultural norms.
So, Japan is a place you’d like to go?
I longed to go to Japan, and thought I would do be able to do so when the book [The Last Samurai] was published – but unfortunately dealing with publishers turns out to be so horribly time consuming that there was never a time when it was possible to do so. That is, while I had the money I did not have the time, and now I don’t have a lot of money, so I just have to hope it will happen some day.
How did you come to base your book on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai?
My ex-husband had introduced me to the work of Kurosawa. He first showed me Ikiru; then Seven Samurai; we then went to Potomac Video, while visiting my mother in Washington, DC, and borrowed everything they had by Kurosawa. I had an idea for a story about a single mother, who decides to use the film Seven Samurai to provide male role models for her fatherless boy. He teaches himself Japanese, and eventually takes an unintended lesson from the film: he decides to go in search of a better father than the one fate provided.
While immersing myself in the oeuvre of Kurosawa, I read his Autobiography. This has many wonderful scenes, including an account of his first meeting with Mifune Toshiro. I felt that if I could read the actual words of Kurosawa, or some of them, I would somehow be closer to this director of genius. There was a Japanese bookstore, Nippon Books, across the street from St. Paul’s Cathedral. I went in and asked if they could get me the book, and they said they could, and soon it was mine. I then labored through various favorite passages of the book, with my dictionaries and translation.
I heard that your novel The Last Samurai is to become a film of its own. Can you tell us about that?
Over the years different people have wanted to make a film of the book. At the moment the director, Tom Dey, has an option on it and is sending out a screenplay. I’m not sure how this is going; people tend to sign a contract and then disappear.
How was your decision to incorporate Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, to address non-Western art in such an intimate way, into The Last Samurai received?
I don’t think the concern was so much about bringing in non-Western art. Publishers were concerned that readers might think you needed to have detailed knowledge of a work of art outside the book to understand the book. So when they marketed it they downplayed that side of the text – you would never know, from any of the covers, that Kurosawa was integral to the book. (Which meant, of course, that most Kurosawa fans are not aware of the existence of the book…)
Even beyond incorporation of the film, you use a lot of Japanese language—among many others—in your book. Have you studied?
Many years ago, in London, I came across a book by Murakami Haruki whose English title is “A Wild Sheep Chase” (Hitsuji o meguru boken). I loved this book. I read somewhere that Murakami had translated many hardboiled detective novels into Japanese. His translator had translated the book back into hardboiled English. I wondered what this would be like in Japanese (I did not know a word of the language).
I especially liked a chapter in which the narrator, his girlfriend and a driver debate the naming of cats (they are appalled that he has not given his cat a name). I decided I would like to see what some of this book was like in Japanese.
I went to Nippon Books (this was before I went in for the Kurosawa Autobiography) and asked whether they had the book in Japanese. They said they had volume 1 and could get volume 2; I asked them to order this, and eventually I had both volumes of the book. I bought a kanji dictionary and a romaji dictionary and blundered around through one passage and another, using my dictionaries and the translation. (The first kanji I learnt was the one for “cat.”) And I did manage to read various bits of the book. A passage where the narrator talks about feeding his cat. The passage where they talk about naming cats, and which kinds of things get named. (One theory: a subway station, for instance, gets a name to compensate it for the fact that it is stuck in one place.)
I hoped that I would have the chance to study Japanese properly before finishing my book, but I didn’t. (My language study was focused on Latin and Greek at Oxford.) Still, it probably includes more Japanese quotations than any other novel in English (at the end I quote a scene from Seven Samurai in Japanese, with transliteration and translation, for the benefit of non-Japanese-speaking readers).
In reading portions of A Wild Sheep Chase in both English and Japanese, did anything strike you as different?
The thing that really struck me was the way the texture of the text made the American influence visible in a way it couldn’t be in translation. If you read a page, say, where the narrator is feeding his cat, there will be many, many words in katakana, because they have been taken over from English – that is, Murakami’s love of jazz, or just familiarity with American culture, comes through in all these words that are brought into the Japanese text. But in English, of course, they’re just part of the English environment they came from. So you lose the sense of these things being appropriated.
How does Japanese compare to your other languages—English, Greek, Latin?
Some things I love about the language: I am a classicist, and Japanese is wonderful in one of the ways Greek is wonderful, in being very rich in particles. It is hard not to love a language with a wealth of particles.
This isn’t a very original observation, but in English we don’t have many grammatical markers for degrees of formality and intimacy, or for other aspects of social position (such as gender). So it’s completely enchanting to discover a language where there are (for example) many different forms of the first person pronoun. What do we have? Well, ‘y’all’ or ‘you all,’ a second person plural, would be perceived as informal, colloquial, Southern. Writing ‘u’ for ‘you’ would be perceived as informal, mainly used by the young . . . We don’t have honorifics. We have a much more limited range of moods and tenses. For example – I take down a Japanese grammar and it has a chapter for “The Form of an Auxiliary which Suggests a Rumor.”
Or here is an explanation of ORAREMASHITA from O’Neill’s Reader of Handwritten Japanese:
The combination of a humble verb (here ora = neutral-level iru, “be”) with an honorific passive/potential ending (-ra(re)ru) is used when the speaker wishes to express both respect for both the third person, the subject of the verb, and the person he is addressing: the use of the humble verb indicates respect for the person addressed, and the honorific ending shows respect for the third person . . .
[You might occasionally get a description of an English verb which linked grammatical form to the speaker's epistemological position with relation to the facts, but you would never get a description linking grammatical form to social position in relation to thing talked about or person addressed. And as the discussion of emotional expression makes clear, a statement that is epistemologically dubious (e.g. one about somebody else's feelings) would not be grammatically wrong in English - so if one has studied philosophy it is extremely appealing to discover a language where this is actually grammatically wrong.]
Here is another lovely quotation from O’Neill:
-GATTE IRU To avoid being dogmatic about other people’s emotions and sensations, the Japanese use the verbal suffix -garu in such direct statements (when they do not avoid them by the use of a final desho, ka mo shiremasen, etc.). It is possible to use it after the stems of some hundred adjectives, including ita(i), “painful,” kowa(i), “fearful,” and omoshiro(i), “enjoyable”; but the most common use is, as here, after the desiderative suffix -ta(i), “wish/want to.” The use of the suffix in Japanese does not in fact affect the translation which would here be simply “they want to know.”
[to avoid being dogmatic about other people'e emotions and sensations - well, you see, surely we SHOULD avoid being dogmatic about other people's emotions and sensations, but in English grammar does not encourage us to respect this principle]
Do you have a favorite kanji character?
I like this one:
峠
because it reminds me of a poem by Christina Rossetti:
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men
(what I mean is, it’s terribly nice to have the radicals for mountain, up and down form the character)
I’m very fond of
競
because it makes me think of two men skating with their arms behind their backs in a Dutch painting, wearing black frock coats and breeches
明
is not very exotic, of course, but it’s nice to have the word for ‘bright’ represented by the sun and moon – this is a bit like certain German words, where the elements of a phenomenon are put together for the word: there’s Morgengrauen (morning grey) for the sky lightening to grey just before dawn, and Morgenröte (morning red) for the sky when it first turns red, similar sort of thing.
There are lots of others (so there is not just one favorite, but one could go on and on. (There is a section in my book where the boy starts to learn kanji, and he always picks the most complicated, obscure ones he can find – which is always so tempting.)
Ah, yes, I enjoyed those sections. On that note, in your sort of encyclopedic style of writing—drawing from such a wide range of art, language—what are your expectations for your audience?
I think the idea was that the book might expose people to things they happened not to have come across. When it was published, of course, the Internet was in its infancy – people now have access to a much wider range of material than they did in the late 90s/2000. But even today . . . the thing is, when I’m feeling a bit low, it cheers me up to go to the shelf and take down Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar and read about consecutive waw. (Or, of course, Expressive Japanese.) I think many other people might feel the same way, except they don’t happen to have Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar lying about. So it seemed nice to have this in the book.
It’s clear from your writing, and from your Murakami anecdote, that you have a hunger for firsthand knowledge. Do you think that the sort of curiosity you have is alive in many others?
I think the hunger for other languages is much more visible now that we have the Internet. There are obvious reasons why it is hard for a publisher to bring out books in a wide range of languages, and hard to include extensive quotations from original texts in another language from that of the market of book buyers. But people can publish anything they want online and build up a readership, and the readers, of course, then realize that there are other people out there like themselves.
So would you say that the future of literature, and of readers, is broadening—culturally speaking?
It seems to me the Internet will reverse trends toward uniformity. For one thing, it’s a lot easier now to be more adventurous in what you read; it’s partly that we are not dependent on what happens to be stocked locally in a bookstore or library, partly that we have so many tools to facilitate trying out a bit of a book in a language we don’t happen to know.
Suppose you have read an author in translation and love the glimpse you get of the author’s world. One thing you can do very easily is order the original online – so you can read at least a passage, if you want to, in the original language. And you can also order other books by the author, even if they haven’t been translated. You can read reviews online in other languages, so you can hear of books that haven’t yet been translated (and may never will be). So you are not confined to the books someone in the publishing industry decided were worth translating, there is more of a sense that a translated book is also a gateway to something much larger and more diverse. (I once came across a paperback in English of Van Gogh’s letters, and the bookstore also carried the book in Dutch- that was very unusual. But now you can go to Bol.com and order the letters – and even if you don’t know Dutch, it’s very moving to have the actual words of Van Gogh. Who wouldn’t want to have that?)
But also, it really is much easier to grapple with a language you don’t know. To take a few examples:
1. There’s a website, the Perseus project, that has large numbers of Greek and Latin texts online, free, in both the original and translation. You can click on any word and get the definition and grammatical analysis. This is MUCH faster and easier than the business of sitting with the text and a dictionary, going through, looking up every single word.
2. There are various online dictionaries which make it easier to look up words quickly. One lovely example is pons.eu, which not only offers, say, German-English English-German, German-French French-German and so on, but also English-French French English and so on (that is, you don’t have to have German as your starting point to use the service). And the site also offers the chance to set up your own personal vocabulary trainer, so you can save the words you looked up and practice them.
3. There’s something similar at Rolomail for kanji, kanjicafe – you can build up your own list of kanji to practice and drill.
4. There’s something called Quizlet: members put together their own collections of virtual flashcards and make them available for the public (not just for languages, but for other things too). So you have the chance to learn something using a resource someone else put together, initially, for private use.
5. Manga are becoming wildly popular in the West. They are published in translation, yes, but it seems many hardcore fans also want to read them in Japanese – so it is really not the case that the form is being assimilated to English, it’s more that English makes them accessible to begin with and gives readers the desire to see the original form.
So our access to new information is seemingly endless. I wonder, with the kind of hunger you have, and the profusion of information to be digested: Are you often overwhelmed?
Not overwhelmed, exactly, but not disciplined enough about putting this wealth of possibilities aside every day and working systematically to finish a book while it is clear in the mind. The problem is, though, that I discover things that transform my understanding of what I’m working on – it’s not so much facts as new paradigms. So I like to think when I finally do finish something it will be intellectually richer than it would have been if I had shut everything out.
I imagine it must be difficult for those who endeavor to translate your work to grasp it all. I saw that you set up a wiki for the sake of opening correspondence between you, publishers and translators. Could you tell me a bit about that?
Argh.
Well, when The Last Samurai was published translators would ask detailed, interesting questions. So the translator who asked the question would get the answer, but no other translator would get the answer, because I did not have a list of all the translators working on the book. Or a typesetter would ask for help with the Greek and get an answer, but this answer would not help anyone else because I did not have a list of all the typesetters.
I thought it would be better if such correspondence was publicly available, and also that translators could pool resources. And also that the existence of such a resource would raise the visibility of translators, encourage respect for what they do, because the intelligence they bring to their work is normally invisible.
Is it common for such communication to occur between authors and translators?
It’s very common, I think, for very dedicated translators to contact the author. In my experience, though, many don’t bother. That’s why it seemed a good idea for correspondence with the most dedicated translators to be made public – others also benefit from the answers to those questions.
We have to bear in mind, I think, that some publishers have a very small budget, which is presumably passed on to the translator. So some translators can probably spend more time on the project than others. It seemed as though it might be helpful for translators with limited time to benefit from work done by those who came before them.
This is a bit of a jump, but: Is there a particular facet of Japanese culture that interests you?
Well, I love the films of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. Around the time I was reading the Kurosawa Autobiography, the British Film Institute had a Mizoguchi season, so I was also able to discover the work of this wonderful director. The Renoir, another London cinema, had an Ozu season, so I was able to go to that. From time to time films by Kitano Takeshi would come out in London and I would go to those. I also very much like the work of Yamada Yoji. But I can’t really claim to have an extensive knowledge of Japanese cinema, I am somewhat dependent on what cinemas decide to show (I now live in Berlin, but the situation is pretty much the same).
There’s such an extraordinary versatility, it’s still inspiring.
How would you describe the Japanese aesthetic? What can be learned from it?
I don’t think one can say there is a single Japanese aesthetic. (And of course I am not very well qualified to comment, since still merely longing to go to Japan.) There is a capacity to take things to extremes which one certainly doesn’t see in America or Britain. One can find extreme simplicity, austerity, restraint – an aesthetic which is almost shockingly self-contained, with an absolute absence of the anxiety to please. And then one can find extreme silliness (I hope I am not offending anyone whose childhood was brightened by Pokemon). And many other extremes as well, of course. Perhaps what one finds is that life is more interesting if different people do radically different things obsessively.
As a writer, I’m dazzled by Japanese book design, which is extraordinarily good – clean, strong, elegant, endlessly inventive. When I was working on my book I assumed it would have Japanese production values; I assumed my publisher would either find a Japanese typesetter or find someone who knew that tradition. But they didn’t, so whenever I look at the book I have a mental image of the glamorous object it would have been had a Japanese typesetter done the job. (It is a good way to feel miserable, so I try not to look at it too often.)
You described in your blog Paperpools the Japanese tea ceremony, and how each guest would recite a poem as he enters the room. This may be a bit backwards, but would you mind closing with yours?
I think it would be this poem by Dryden:
Happy the man, and happy he alone
He who can call today his own
He who, secure within, can say
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine,
The joys I have possess’d, in spite of fate, are mine;
Not heav’n itself upon the past has power
And what has been has been, and I have had my hour.
For more, check out Miss DeWitt’s website: helendewitt.com
