The Gondolier in Japanese

 To start the year off, here's one of my new translations of The Gondolier:

ゴンドラ

 ギャレス-D-ジョーンズ著

私のゴンドラの黒い船首は、運河の穏やかな海を通ってスムーズに切断しました。 洗練された工芸品は、長年にわたって私によく役立っていた、私の祖先の世代の指導の手の下 で街の水路を通って乗客を運んだ。

太陽は古代都市の上に沈んでいて、優雅な砂岩の建物の間の真っ黒なリボンラインに水を回し ていました。 /涼しげな夜の風を深く吸い込んだ",

この不思議な運河の街よりも美しい場所はありましたか？ ボートが係留に楽になったので、私は火星の暗くなる空に満足して凝視するのを止めました。 

終わり

 

Book Review: All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

‘Groundhog Day with aliens,’ is how one might describe the Tom Cruise film Edge Of Tomorrow. Based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel translated by Alexander O. Smith as All You Need IS Kill, it was an intelligent and entertaining slice of military SF. As you might expect, the film didn’t follow the book exactly, but it did a fair job of reflecting the main ingredients of the plot.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: Ghost in the Shell by Andrew Osmond

Probably in common with a lot of the audience who have seen the 2017 live action film Ghost In The Shell starring Scarlett Johansson, I was aware that the story originated as a Japanese anime title, but otherwise I had no idea about its background. In fact, my knowledge of the genre is rather paltry and this became evident as I read through Andrew Osmond’s fascinating history of the film.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: The Best Japanese Science Fiction

This anthology of Japanese science fiction was first published in 1988 and is comprised of stories dating back to the 60’s, so in terms of my interest in comparing SF from other cultures, it doesn’t really give me an idea of what contemporary Japanese SF is like. What I did find interesting is that, similar to Anglophone SF of the same period, the protagonists are all male, and female characters play little, if any, active roles in the stories. I can only assume that this has changed with time as it has done to some degree in English SF.

 

 

Many of the stories are set in contemporary or near-future Japan, and even where aspects of society are obviously futuristic, the settings themselves are not startlingly different from today. I found several of the stories to be rather, I don’t know, naïve? They told stories of things that were intended to be amazing, but were not at all surprising.  Again, I’m assuming this is due to the age of the stories, and to the fact that I’m very well read in SF.

One thing that stood out is that the stories are often narrated in the style of a parable rather than from an individual point of view. Another thing that particularly struck me is that none of the protagonists have names. They are always referred to as ‘the young man’, ‘the father’, ‘the boy’ etc. In fact the only characters who are named are the non-humans. Again, I wonder if this is typical of Japanese fiction, or just of that time period?

Two stories: ‘The Road to the Sea’ and ‘Fnifmum’ stood out among the collection, the kind of tales that leave you feeling satisfied at have read them. Then I came to the final entry, ‘The Legend of the Paper Spaceship’, a novelette by Tetsu Yano, described as ‘the dean of Japanese SF writers’. For this story, ignore everything else I have written. This is a classic in any time and place.

Science Fiction in Translation

It’s generally recognised that far more English SF is translated and published in other countries than SF written in other languages is translated and published in English. I’ve now been published in 26 languages, and at the same time I’ve been on the lookout for translated science fiction.



There are occasional translated stories in some magazines, and there are equally rare anthology. Two years ago I reviewed The Anthology of European SF for SF Crowsnest, in which I discovered that, although written by authors from several countries, there was nothing startlingly different from what I usually read. To be fair, one story from each country doesn’t really give me a basis to judge an entire culture.



There are a few anthologies available from particular countries and I’m currently reading The Best  Japanese SF. There are also some novels in translation, notably the recent translation of the hugely popular Three Body Problem trilogy from China, which I’ve added to my ‘to read’ list. I’m planning to get hold of as much translated work as I can, and I’ll be interested to see how SF from around the world compares and whether geographical culture outweighs SF culture enough to be recognisable.