Comparing multiple English versions of the Ryōsuke Akutagawa short story “Rashōmon” (1915) helped my class and me explore some fundamental translation questions associated with context.
The nameless main character is referred to by means of two kanji that Japanese readers pronounce as genin. One means “under” or “below,” and the other means “person.” The designation itself is significant, as the character, whose perspective is primary, undergoes multiple internal transformations in the course of the short story. And the word repeats rather insistently throughout the story, making it clear that we should pay attention to it.
In the course of four translations — by Glenn W. Shaw (1930), Takashi Kojima (1952), Seiji Lippit (1999), and Jay Rubin (2006) — we get “lackey,” “servant,” “lowly servant,” “commoner,” “menial,” and “servant of a samurai.” The last gives the most context, which is perhaps helpful in filling us in on what’s missing from 下人, but amounts in effect to what translators sometimes call a hidden footnote or stealth gloss. There’s nothing about a samurai in the two kanji, but readers of the text need to know something about Japanese culture of the time in question to understand what being a “lower/under person” might have meant in the time the story was set (approximately the twelfth century); hence that “of a samurai.” It’s worth noting that the story doesn’t specify who the character’s master was, only that he was dismissed from long service.
All the selected words make the situation more or less clear, but each makes the situation slightly different, especially as the individual in question transforms from an underling or subaltern, discarded by an upper class, to something like his own master, though on a different, less socially acceptable scale, by the end of the story. What exactly has happened depends to a great extent on who we think he was at the start. It’s an excellent example of the nuances of translation choices at the level of interpretation.
Towards the end of our session, one student noted that the article of clothing worn by the old woman became less specific as the translations came closer to our own time. The oldest had her wearing (a) kimono — some of my Japanese translator friends insist there should be no article before the word –, while the most recent was simply clothes. So when the subaltern, or underling, or whatever we might decide to call him takes what she is wearing from her, the word needs to be specified.
At first we collectively wondered if maybe the more recent translators were somehow going easy on English readers in rendering the Japanese costume in a more generic fashion. But then another theory won out, and I think this is what’s in fact happening.
In 1930, using “kimono” would have simply been a distinctive term for national dress. The broad English readership of the time would have had few if any associations with it, and it could moreover have played something of an ethnographic role as well, introducing readers to an article of clothing they might not have been especially familiar with. Using the same word in 2006 would have conjured quite specific associations with elaborate and expensive traditional clothing.
Yet the character in question is poor, haggard even — she is there to rob the dead, she’s nothing but skin and bones, she’s trying to keep herself from starving. So the associations contemporary readers are likely to have with the word “kimono” would clash with the use of the word in the source. The word of course, and the concept in its home context, can simply designate clothing. It’s what a woman would have worn; there’s nothing special about it in the source context. In other words, today we’d mostly say that he steals her clothes.
And one more, because it’s worth keeping in mind for anyone who wants to get the details right (and translators are sticklers for details). The old gate itself is clear enough, and it’s probably the most essential detail of Kurosawa’s film adaptation, which otherwise doesn’t use much from this particular Akutagawa story, borrowing instead from the author’s “In the Grove” (Yabu no naka).
But the gate functions as something like a stage set, with several different spaces in which the action takes place. And here the translations vary quite a bit in giving us a picture of it. The area above, where the corpses are spread out, is sometimes a room, sometimes a loft, sometimes an open floor; and how the servant/menial/commoner/servant makes his way up there is perhaps a stairway and perhaps a ladder. So when he climbs “like a lizard,” it’s possibly because he’s creeping on hands and feet up the stairs, or possibly because he’s using both hands and feet to climb a ladder.
Jay Rubin (Penguin, 2006) offers a contextual note about the structure itself, describing its historical layout, which supports his interpretive choice of making it a “stairway,” which we all found very helpful. But, like kimono, this might also give the wrong impression to contemporary English readers.
Akutagawa repeatedly uses hashigo, and a Japanese dictionary will most commonly give “ladder” as the first English meaning, with staircase as a possibility, as long as it’s properly qualified. The sense seems to be steep and narrow, at least to the extent that, if it’s a ladder, it doesn’t offer much room to move.
So, if it’s more like a ladder, when the author qualifies it with the word “wide” (hiroi), he seems to be trying to suggest that it’s not quite as narrow as what one usually thinks of as a ladder, which is probably more in keeping with a massive stone gate, even if it’s seen better days. But if it’s something more like a stairway, “wide” gives a completely different impression: a wide stairway is not cramped at all, someone climbing up would be able to move about quite freely, and there might even be room for more than one person to go along, or pass in the other direction.
In terms of the story’s setting, mood, and themes, thinking of him as a lackey or menial makes his transformation social and psychological, while emphasizing that he’s a commoner brings out the class associations of his status. I’m sure we could find synonyms to bring out politics or morality, should we see the story in such terms. And doing so might also encourage imagining him as climbing up a stairway (to heaven) or slithering up a ladder into a space of (infernal) transformation.
Translators choose words in the context of their understanding of what it is they’re translating.
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