Ry Beville
2.3K posts
@RyBeville
UC Berkeley lecturer, author, translator, publisher, entrepreneur, Haikuism app creator. バイリンガルの出版会社のボス。Notre Dame, Cal grad
For over a century people have been accurately translating the Japanese language into English. We’ve done it for literature, business deals, government treaties, and all manner of things. Now a bunch of crappy lazy translators claim it’s impossible. As I’ve mentioned before my best friend from childhood has been doing this for 50 years. He informs me that yes there are words in Japan that cannot be translated into English with a single word. But you can still translate them. Just takes a fee more words.
That Sacks came to be a professor at Columbia & NYU and the most famous neurologist in the world makes you wonder just how common it is for socially pleasing fabrications to be laundered through academic prestige networks.
I think people read too fast--and it is rewarded, but it is not recommended. We should read as slowly as the author wrote the book. Marguerite Duras pointed this out long before. nytimes.com/1985/06/23/boo…
