The train came out of the long tunnel
It’s a golden rule of translation to not randomly add or remove stuff.
Or at least in my book it is. This rule applies whether you’re translating a novel, or a poem, or an academic paper, or a slide deck, or a game, or a website. There may be special cases, but the bar should be very high for adding or removing things.
Today, then, let us examine one of the most famous cases of insertion and deletion in the history of Japanese literary translation: the legendary Edward Seidensticker’s rendition into English of the very first sentence of Kawabata’s Snow Country:
国境の長いトンネルを抜けると雪国であった。
Seidensticker gives:
The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.
My goodness, 国境 (provincial boundary), the very first word Kawabata wanted anyone reading the book to see, is nowhere to be seen, and in its stead appears “the train”, completely absent from the original!
Bottom line: there was no compelling reason to omit the “provincial boundary” or insert the “train”, and good reasons to do neither. (Also, “came out” is wrong.)
A caveat. Digging down into a translation is like a CAT scan. You have no idea what you’ll find, and much of what you do will be unimportant. You definitely reach a point of diminishing returns. But it’s fun, and in the case of a translation of the first sentence in a novel from a Nobel prize winner by the leading post-war Japanese literary scholar, does not seem irrelevant.
We don’t need no provincial boundaries
Let’s look first at 国境/provincial boundary. With this single word leading off his Nobel prize-winning novel, Kawabata sets the stage in the reader’s mind for a story occurring somewhere far away, with overtones of long journeys and far-away provinces. This element of the story seems not just relevant, but even central.
Yet Seidensticker unceremoniously discarded this word. Many commentators have noted this, many of whom (often Japanese) have criticized that decision. In “The Idea and Practice of Translation”: An Annotated Transcription of Edward Seidensticker’s Talk at Doshisha University, he defended himself as follows:
But I have been criticized for leaving the word out, for not translating it at all. I don’t translate it. I say, “The train came out of the long tunnel and it was the snow country.” Well, what do you do? Kokkyō. That requires explanation, doesn’t it, if you’re going to include it. You can’t merely say “country border” because that doesn’t make any sense in English. That’s what kokkyō means. “The train came out of the country border, along the country border tunnel. . . ” You have to explain that the tunnel passes the boundary between two old provinces, the province of Kōzuke and the province of Echigo. Are you going to explain it? Well, I chose not to. And I still think it’s the correct decision.
But with all due respect to the eminence grise of Japanese literary translation, this explanation just doesn’t hold water. It is just plain incorrect to say that "country border” is “what it means”, and then claim you can’t use that because it’s awkward. In this case “what it means” is “provincial border”. No reader in any language is going to stop to wonder what a “province” is. It does not require explanation. They will immediately understand (or already know) that it is some kind of administrative region. They don’t need to learn, or be told, that it has to do with Echigo (Niigata) and Kozuke (Gumma). The translations Seidensticker presents to justify his decision to arbitrarily substitute his judgment for that of the author are blatant strawmen; there’s nothing in the original that could be remotely interpreted as “the train coming out of the country border”, or it “going along the country border tunnel”.
The phrase 国境の長いトンネル (kokkyō no nagai tunnel), leaving aside the nagai (“long”) part for now, simply means “the tunnel at the provincial border”, “the tunnel across the provincial border”, or since tunnels run underground, “the tunnel under the provincial border”. We also do not have to necessarily stick with the precise grammar of the original, and so translations such as “straddling the provincial border” or “connecting the two provinces” or “crossing into the next province” or any number of similar permutations also seem possible. If including the “provincial” part is felt to perhaps place too great a cognitive load on the reader, one might consider using “border” by itself, which provides much of the same semantic shading. The point is simply that there were many, many solid alternatives to choose from for translating this. One is loath to accuse the eminent scholar of laziness—could it have been that it was simply too much work to figure out how to render this in English?
Removing this reference to provincial borders in the English translation also violates an important principle which is especially relevant to literary translations. The author (remember him?) is presenting a series of layered, unfolding images and impressions designed to build and refine an evolving scene in the reader’s mind. Doing this skillfully is the hallmark of great authors. Here, the provincial boundary is the most basic, initial scene Kawabata wanted to plant in the reader’s mind, the canvas on which the remainder of the sentence, paragraph, chapter, and book is to be drawn. It certainly takes a great deal of self-confidence to just kill it. Here that self-confidence is misplaced, in my opinion.
This applies all the more if one considers that border here might be a metaphor for the border between the lives of the protagonist Shimamura in Tokyo and in Yuzawa, the tunnel the passage between them.
Seidensticker has unilaterally appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner, or in this case author, translator, and reader.
Only trains come out of tunnels
Now on to the gratuitous insertion of the “train” as the new first word in the novel. Seidensticker also is aware of the criticism on this point, and responds as follows. I quote him in his entirety:
The other thing that people complain about is that the original sentence has no subject but the translation does. Well, here all I can really say is that English and Japanese are not the same. A sentence is almost required in English to have a subject. It’s not absolutely required, but it’s almost absolutely required. And I don’t think there’s any way that you can render this sentence into English without a subject. “Came out of the long tunnel, it was the snow country.” “Came out of the long tunnel between the provinces of Ko ̄zuke and Echigo and it was the snow country.” That would be a literal translation, with no subject. But the reader in English would immediately say, “Well, who or what came out of the long tunnel?” Well, I say it was a train. People have criticized this, saying there is no subject in the original, to which my retort is, what is going to come out of a long railway tunnel except a train? The only alternative I think is a rat. It would be either a rat or a train. So I say a train. But lots of people say that this is wrong, that there is no subject in the original and therefore there should be no subject in the translation. Here we face a very fundamental problem, that Japanese and English make different demands, and in my case the demands of English have to be accommodated. So I said it was a train, and I thought I was being perfectly safe in saying so and I still think so. I still think the meaning is very clear, that a train came out of the long tunnel.
It is not even remotely the case that “a sentence is almost required in English to have a subject”. For example, the sentence I just wrote does not. To say that “there’s [no] way to render this sentence into English without a subject” reveals a damning lack of imagination. Actually, there are manifold ways of doing so. In any case, subject is a mere grammatical construct, entirely separate from the semantic notion of a topic. Here, Kawabata made the explicit or implicit decision to write the sentence without a topic (that is what the sentence is without, not “subject”, as Seidensticker would have it, which does not even exist in Japanese). In this case, we have merely a tunnel, a long one which crosses a provincial boundary, being traversed and coming out into snow country. Until it came out into snow country we don’t even know that what is being described lies in the past—there is no tense to 抜ける/nukeru. The temporality is not revealed unless the very end of the sentence. We don’t need to know what is going through the tunnel or even if something specific is going through the tunnel right now. Introducing the train here, for the feeble reason that “it must be a train” (Kawabata, intentionally, does not introduce the train until two sentences later), is an active, unwarranted intrusion into the way the author has chosen to structure his narrative.
After the translator’s botched surgery on this poor sentence, it reads “the train came out of the long tunnel”—squarely in “it was a dark and stormy night” territory.
Seidensticker continues:
But people don’t like it. Japanese people don’t. No American has ever complained; this is Japanese entirely.
This is a strange comment, to put it mildly. Really makes you stop and wonder. When people critique his translation they are not “commenting”, they are “complaining”? Is he saying that Japanese just don’t understand translation, or basic facts like English sentences absolutely positively having to have subjects, or that the only thing that could possibly come out of a tunnel is a train, or that you can’t just keep Westerners waiting to learn that it’s a train, requiring even the prose of the man who arguably invented the modern Japanese novel to be fixed up by smart folks like him?
In case I was unclear, adding “train” at the beginning of the first sentence was not just unnecessary but highly undesirable.
Going through, and coming out
The 抜ける/nukeru here was translated as “coming out”. There can’t be anything wrong with that, can there?
Actually, it’s a mistranslation. 抜ける has a number of senses, many of which are related to coming out, like a loose tooth coming out, or getting out, like getting out of a meeting. But there is a meaning specific to situations involving traversal (like, uh, tunnels). In this particular sense, the word 抜ける refers not just to coming out at the end, but also the traversing, the passing through. Clearly, the two are related: if you traverse something, at the end you come out, and if you come out, it’s because you’ve traversed it. This meaning could be made explicit by saying 通り抜ける/toori-nukeru (go through and come out), but doesn’t have to be. 抜ける as applied to this situation means that all by itself.
In this case, Kawabata’s focus is not coming out of the tunnel, emerging from it, exiting it, or popping out from the end of it, but the process of going through it, coming out of it being merely the result of that process. Given that, the translation of “came out” (besides introducing the past-tense temporality not present in the original), is just, well, wrong. It should be some suitable variation of “having gone through the tunnel”.
Picky picky
I’m pretty sure it’s not “the snow country”, but just “snow country”.
If you’re so smart, how would you translate it?
Once through the long tunnel under the border, it was snow country.
We did not discuss the grammatical construct involved in 抜けると/nukeru to. What is the nuance of this to? There are many grammatical alternatives for connecting some action or event and what comes after it or has it as a condition or results from it. Why did Kawabata choose to here?
Although to used in this way has many senses, the one applicable here is to present an immediate result of an action. In other words, the minute you’re through the tunnel, it is instantly snow country. Snow country instantly unveils itself. The Japanese reader would read the part of the sentence ending in the word to as the introduction of a kind of general statement about something that is going to pertain when you’ve gotten through this long tunnel; then, and only then, the past tense of “it was snow country” jerks them into a specific setting in the past. It is this dynamic that I have tried to replicate in the translation above, specifically with the use of “once”.
Moving right along
We will put our foot down and not continue on with any discussion of the translation of
夜の底が白くなった。Yoru no soko ga shirokunatta.
as
The earth lay white under the night sky.
at least not now.