The indefatigable Bathrobe has sent me a couple of good links I hereby share with you:
1) Arthur Waley’s “Notes on Translation” (The Atlantic, November 1958; archived) has lots of discussion of translations, both his and others; some samples:
Almost at the end of the Bhagavad Gita there is a passage of great power and beauty in which, instructed by the God, the warrior Arjuna at last overcomes ail his scruples. There is a war on, he is a soldier and must fight even though the enemy are his friends and kinsmen. This is what various standard translations make him say:
1. O Unfallen One! By your favour has my ignorance been destroyed, and I have gained memory (of my duties); I am (now) free from doubt; I shall nowdo (fight) as told by you!
2. Destroyed is my delusion; through Thy grace, O Achutya, knowledge is gained by me. I stand forth free from doubt. I will act according to Thy word.
3. My bewilderment has vanished away; I have gotten remembrance by Thy Grace, O NeverFalling. I stand free from doubt. I will do Thy word.
4. My bewilderment is destroyed; I have gained memory through thy favour, O stable one. I am established; my doubt is gone; I will do thy word.
In addition to being totally without rhythm No. 1 has the disadvantage of a pointless inversion of word order and of quite unnecessary explanations in brackets. If any reader has got as far as this in the poem and yet still needs to be told what it is that Arjuna now remembers and what it is that he proposes to do, he must be so exceptionally inattentive as not to be worth catering for. No. 2 is better; but as the title Achutya will convey nothing to the mind of the reader, it seems better to translate it, as the other three translators have done. And is there any point in trying to preserve, as all the translators do, the Sanskrit idiom “get memory” for “to remember”? In No. 3 the rhythm would be better without the “away” after “vanished,” and “away” adds nothing to the sense. But I think No. 3 (by Professor Barnett) is the best of the four. No. 4 is spoiled by “I am established,” which, though a correct etymological gloss on the original, is not a possible way of saying “I have taken my stand” — that is to say, “I am resolved.”
After examples from The Tale of Genji and a No play (“I must confess that when recently I read Sam Houston Brock’s translation of Sotoba Komachi […] I felt at once that my translation was hopelessly overladen and wordy and that it tried in a quite unwarrantable way to improve upon the original”), he goes on:
There is a wonderful passage in the Chinese novel Monkey where Tripitaka after his Illumination sees his discarded earthly body drifting downsteam: “Tripitaka stared at it in consternation. Monkey laughed. ‘Don’t be frightened, Master,’ he said, ‘that’s you.’ And Pigsy said, ‘It’s you, it’s you.’ Sandy clapped his hands. ‘It’s you, it’s you,’ he cried. The ferryman too joined in the chorus. ‘There you go,’ he cried. ‘My best congratulations.’ ” In her paraphrase of the book (1930) Helen Hayes says, “A dead body drifted by them, and the Master saw it with fear. But the Monkey, ever before him, said: ‘Master, do not be alarmed. It is none other than your own!’ The Pilot also rejoiced as he turned to say ‘This body was your own ! May you know joy!’ ”
Vital (in the original) is the repetition of the two simple words shih ni, “It’s you,” and if one gets bored with the repetition and represents the words as only having been spoken by two people, it seems to me that one spoils the whole passage. The second thing to note is that when the ferryman says “My best congratulations” (k’o ho) he is using the ordinary everyday formula of congratulation that one would use if one met an official who had had a rise, and that it is with whimsical intention that it is applied to Tripitaka’s advance from ordinary human status to Buddhahood. Helen Hayes’s “May you know joy!” so far from being a banal formula (which is what is required) is something that no one has ever said to anybody.
And he has a long account of Lin Shu, whom we talked about in 2017.
2) Keiko Nannichi, “Japan firms hit back at customer abuse with steps like body cams” (Asahi Shimbun, August 31), begins:
Companies big and small across Japan say instances of customer abuse have markedly increased with the cost of living crisis, forcing a range of measures to protect employees. […] The Asahi Shimbun recently surveyed 100 leading Japanese companies to ascertain what they are doing to tackle the issue. Eighty-seven said they are either taking measures, or are planning to take steps, against “kasu-hara” customer harassment.
Bathrobe says: “I found it a very confusing usage. I would have thought customer harassment (kasuhara, in typical Japanese style) would refer to harassment OF customers, not BY customers.” Thoughts?