A Case Study in Translation: The Tale of the Ring

Recently I had the opportunity to read Yubiwa monogatari, the Japanese translation of The Lord of the Rings.[1] The translators are Tanaka Akiko and Seta Teiji, apparently working in tandem the way Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokonsky do in translations from Russian into English. The Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite books and one that has had an enormous influence on my tastes, interests, and even personal relationships (I’ve met more than one close friend through Tolkien fandom) for almost my whole life. The Japanese language is another longtime passion of mine—yes, because I grew up in the stateside anime and manga boom of the 2000s, but for other reasons as well, ranging from its lambent sonic qualities to its astoundingly deep and rich poetry and travelogue traditions. Reading Yubiwa monogatari has thus been a long-term goal of mine for years; I’m enormously glad that I was finally able to. But is the translation any good?

Any assessment of a Lord of the Rings translation should, in my opinion, start with the poetry. This isn’t necessarily the case for all of Tolkien’s work—it would be a lot less relevant with the Silmarillion, for instance—but the poetry in The Lord of the Rings is extensive, controversial, and sometimes confounding. Apparently Seta was an academic specializing in traditional Japanese poetic forms, so when the Tuttle-Mori Agency arranged for the Japanese translation they must have seen this as an important point to get right as well. (The Japanese publisher is Hyōronsha; I’m not sure how exactly the arrangement between them, Tuttle-Mori, and the English-language rights-holders like the Tolkien Estate and HarperCollins works or worked.)

Seta and Tanaka’s translations of the poems—poetry, in general, does not translate easily; I was the only person in my Japanese cohort in college who preferred translating poetry to translating prose, and even then only because my idiomatic English composition was stronger than my actual Japanese reading comprehension—are instructive in understanding how poetry in Tolkien works in general, even in the original. During the period from 1954 until around 2001 in which mainstream literary critics were almost uniformly hostile to Tolkien’s fiction, it was an orthodox view almost the point of being axiomatic that his verse was one of the weakest links in his already weak style. I have always disagreed with this entirely and the translation into Japanese does shed some light on why.

Some of the poems, like (just to name two from The Fellowship of the Ring) the Barrow-wight’s chant in “Fog on the Barrow-downs” and Galadriel’s “I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold” in “Farewell to Lórien” translate fairly well, as does the “Three rings for the Elf-kings under the sky…” rhyme that is so iconic of the story as a whole. (It doesn’t rhyme in Japanese, but then, very little Japanese poetry does.) The Hobbit walking-songs and anything Rohirric also survive the translation process more or less intact. Tom Bombadil’s songs, on the other hand, suffer immensely, and unfortunately “In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the spring” loses something as well. The failures of these translations make it very clear that these poems work in English, to the extent that they do work in English, because of their sonic qualities, whereas something like Galadriel’s lament, or even “The Ent and the Entwife,” can be effective in languages other than English due to relying less on sound and more on meaning. The fact that some of Tolkien’s poems and songs in The Lord of the Rings are much more semantically dense and substantive than others, and that those others are conversely more adventurous in their exploration of the English language’s fundamental sound and feel, for some reason has eluded most Tolkien critics. Even in the twenty-first century when most critics at least grudgingly acknowledge that Tolkien is a major force within this language’s popular literature, one still seldom sees the internal diversity of his diegetic verse acknowledged except in the form of banal observations about, say, Treebeard’s songs being a lot more depressing than, say, Sam’s.

Tolkien’s poetic forms are not the only aspect of his style on which the translation sometimes falls flat due to his deep familiarity with and focus on the rhythms and quirks of English. In the early chapters of The Return of the King Tanaka and Seta preserve or even improve on one well-known scene, but ruin another entirely. To their credit, the improved scene involves an actual translation choice whereas the ruined one is almost unavoidable given differences between Japanese and English. In the improved scene, Pippin’s unusually casual manner when speaking to Denethor, which in English is something of which the reader is simply informed when the appendices discuss the Shire’s informal dialect of Westron, is actually represented using Japanese politeness registers. Pippin’s language with Denethor is not exactly casual—he tends to end sentences with -masu and desu forms rather than -ta and da—but he talks around himself, starts more sentences than he finishes, and in general speaks to Denethor slightly but significantly less deferentially and more like an equal than does anybody else except Gandalf.[2] (Gandalf has probably the most consistently informal and impolite dialogue of any character in the translation.)

In the ruined scene, Éowyn and Merry’s slaying of the Witch-king of Angmar, Tanaka and Seta are unable to adequately represent the prophecy “no living man may hinder me” because Japanese lacks a word with the range of meanings that “man” has in English. In order for the Witch-king’s hubris to make sense the word used has to be at least potentially applicable to any plausible foe, yet in order for Éowyn and Merry to succeed in killing him it also has to have a more restricted meaning limited to male humans. Tanaka and Seta are clearly aware of this problem but resolve it through a brute-force decision to go with “male human” throughout the scene, raising the question of why on earth the Witch-king was so confident given that the Japanese version of the prophecy appears to pointedly avoid any assurances about huge sectors of Middle-earth’s population. Since Japanese simply lacks an English word with the suite of meanings that “man” has in English, Tanaka and Seta could not realistically have avoided needing to make this choice; however, the lack of a translators’ note to explain the scene is difficult to justify, especially since they are unafraid to use translators’ notes elsewhere, like when long stretches of Sindarin or Quenya (which they, correctly in my view, transliterate into katakana rather than actually translating into Japanese) appear.[3]

Some of the language most effective in Tolkien, like the sudden shift into an almost Lovecraftian “ectoplasm gothic” register in the last three chapters of The Two Towers when Frodo and Sam must pass the Witch-king’s stronghold of Minas Morgul,[4] is also effective in Japanese, but not as markedly so as in English. Tanaka and Seta might by conventional standards be “better” or at least more consistent prose stylists in Japanese than Tolkien is in English, since what those chapters are elevated from in the original is an idiosyncratic English that many readers and, infamously, many critics find or used to find repellent. I’ve run into similar problems translating from Japanese to English—the temptation to “correct” stylistic quirks or even replace them with my own. Sometimes a translation is deliberately transformative such that this sort of process is called for. For instance, I’m currently sitting on a translation of Yosano Akiko’s imperialist poem “Citizens of Japan, a Morning Song” that highlights Yosano’s abdication of her reason in her late rightist phase by rendering the original’s canned nationalist clichés as Capitalized Phrases With Trademark Signs After Them™.[5] However, I don’t think Tanaka and Seta have this kind of “vision” for commenting intertextually on what they’re translating, so the “normalized” style is likelier to just be an unfortunate byproduct of the translation process; not much more need necessarily be said about it.

Conversely, one point in the narrative that Tanaka and Seta do seem to feel, correctly, calls for a more heightened and more lyrical style is the very last chapter of The Lord of the Rings, “The Grey Havens.” The chapter in the original has an elegiac swoon to it: revisitations of settings and characters we haven’t seen in almost a thousand pages, an overpowering feeling of evening calm and cool mediated by the color-words “grey” and “yellow,” and the famous last paragraph with its flurry of run-on sentences snapped together with coordinating conjunctions. People have their lives changed by “The Grey Havens,” sometimes even if they weren’t enjoying The Lord of the Rings to begin with; reading the chapter is an overwhelming experience, even thinking about it sometimes reduces serious fans to tears, and if there is true sanctity to Tolkien’s life and writing then I think that much of it can be found in those last nine or ten pages of his best-known work.

So what do Tanaka and Seta do to pay honor to this ending? Felicitiously, for much of the chapter they don’t have to do much other than attempt to replicate in Japanese what Tolkien is doing in English. A happy accident of the development of these two otherwise very dissimilar languages has endowed Japanese with plenty of ways, such as independent clauses ending with unconjugated verb stems and sentences beginning with the word soshite, to parallel the “and” constructions in Tolkien's original English both grammatically and tonally or emotionally. The allusive thicket of Tolkien’s Shire place names—Bywater; Woody End—is also simply calqued into Japanese, which is the case in the early parts of the translation as well but takes on a new resonance of naturalistic imagery here, especially given Japanese literature’s famous sensitivity to seasonal changes within the natural world. Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippin go into Woody End—Suetsumori—and enter into an eschatological end, the end of an era or a way of life, as much as into a geographical one. The double meaning is present in English but in Japanese it is even more strongly asserted.

Does Tanaka and Seta’s translation “succeed,” overall? The professor who taught me basic translation practice, a decade ago now almost to the week, told my class first and foremost that “the purpose of translation is to faithfully reflect the original sense of the text, not to come up with something random and completely unrelated”—a more difficult mandate than someone who’s never tried to translate anything might think, but still broad enough that success or failure of a particular translation is often a matter of opinion. In my opinion, Tanaka and Seta succeed as far as anyone translating Tolkien into a language like Japanese can succeed. Their failures—the scene with Éowyn; the fact that the Japanese color-words haiiroi and kiiroi lack the primal quality that “grey” and “yellow” have in English—are either unavoidable or would have required heroic measures to avoid. Their successes, especially the fact that so many of Tolkien’s poems still work in Japanese, are remarkable.

 ❦

Finally, a personal note, by way of a postscript: One thing I especially appreciated about the experience of reading Yubiwa monogatari was the renewed defamiliarization, the renewed sense of encountering the unalike and, through it, the alike. This was something that Tolkien wanted people to get out of The Lord of the Rings when they first read it, and indeed, as a child, I did; however, now I’m so intimately acquainted with the English text that I find little new to discover within it (although I still think it holds up well when reread). I know the geography of northwestern Middle-earth better than I know that of some parts of the United States. That being the case, it was a rare treat for me to read the text through a new lens, that is, the lens of a new language, and encounter Tolkien’s “secondary world” all over again. I would highly recommend that all bilingual or multilingual Tolkien fans find a good translation of The Lord of the Rings to reread and see if the story communicates anything anew to them as it did to me.

❦

[1] The title means “The Tale of the Ring”—cf. classical Japanese literature’s Genji monogatari, Heike monogatari, Konjaku monogatari, Taketori monogatari, Ugetsu monogatari, Torikaebaya monogatari, Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari—many such cases, obviously being evoked here to “elevate” the text and at the same time cast it as an archaic, heroic yarn of old.

[2] Having said this, Pippin’s way of speaking to Denethor does get more deferential over the course of their scenes together, which reflects the text of The Return of the King proper better than it reflects what we are told in the appendices—itself a more than defensible ordering of priorities, of course.

[3] A comparable issue involving gender in translation, concerning a somewhat “higher” text, appears in Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho into English. Carson makes the, in my view, odd choice, considering what’s at stake with Sappho translation in general, to render παιδός as “boy” in fragment 102. παιδός looks like a masculine noun and is often used that way, but it is the third-declension genitive of a word that at Sappho’s point in the development of Greek could be either masculine or feminine. Moreover, Carson translates the same word neutrally in other fragments. It’s possible that Carson is of the school of Sappho scholarship that actively and deliberately reads her as bisexual, which is frustrating to me because I think that many people adopt that stance for ideological reasons with which I strongly disagree. What I would have done here would have been to translate it as “youth”—or even as “servant,” which would be a daring but defensible choice, particularly since the immediate context concerns domestic work.

[4] I’m indebted to my friend and writing partner Meredith Dawson for the “ectoplasm gothic” shorthand to describe what makes these chapters so spine-tinglingly effective.

[5] Before I publish or post this translation I want also to translate Yosano’s much earlier poem “O Do Not Give Up Your Life” in a more respectful way to underscore the deterioration of her style as she succumbed to socially normative and uncompassionate political non-thinking.