The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 6 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translator’s Notes

The Apothecary Diaries Diaries

Vol. 6

All in Good Pun

Throughout these notes we’ve looked at the translation process and considered questions of what makes a good translation. As I’ve suggested, generally speaking, a successful translation is one that recreates the reading experience of the original text in the target language. From that perspective, translation is rarely more challenging—or more interesting—than when puns and wordplay are involved.

As a case study, let’s look at the conversation between Jinshi and Basen from the prologue of this volume. The conversation essentially breaks down into three “phases,” each of which turns on a different ambiguous word.

I.

“Yes, Master Jinshi?” Basen replied, using Jinshi’s assumed name. That was easiest for Jinshi. If Basen wasn’t going to call him by his true name, as he had when they were children, then this was the next best thing.

“Have you ever succeeded in bringing someone around?”

Frankly, Basen was not a very good choice to talk to about such matters, but Jinshi wasn’t looking for a serious response. He could answer his own questions; he just wanted to talk out loud so he didn’t sit there with his mind going in circles. Basen didn’t need to understand exactly what Jinshi meant; he just needed to offer a yes or no or a grunt here or there.

In the first part of the conversation, Jinshi asks Basen: “Kake-hiki ga umaku itta koto wa aru ka?” or literally, “Do you have the experience of kake-hiki going well?” If you look kake-hiki up in the dictionary, you’ll probably find a definition like negotiations or maybe arguments. Those two words alone should suggest the range of meanings this term can cover. More germane to our scene here, those negotiations could be political—or they could be romantic. Jinshi is seemingly thinking of “negotiations” with one particular lady, but Basen can’t be sure if he’s talking about his various potential prospects, or perhaps one of the political matters he has to deal with in the western capital.

When you’re dealing with a situation like this, as the translator, you start trying to think of expressions that have a useful range in the target language. So for example, I might start with negotiations (“Have you ever managed to make negotiations work out?”), but outside of some very specific circumstances, like maybe a match that involves an intermediary or matchmaker, negotiations generally doesn’t have a romantic aspect. A word like talks has a similar problem. Then I start thinking of maneuvering—kake-hiki can be either aboveboard or a bit underhanded—but here, too, the romantic side of the word is a little hazy. Part of the humor of this scene is that Jinshi and Basen both think they’re completely clear on what the other person is saying, so we need words that would seem natural to use from each character’s perspective, yet are subject to unexpected ambiguities or misinterpretations.

For this first part of the conversation, Sasha and I ended up using the expression to bring someone around. This may not have an explicitly romantic aspect, but if Jinshi is thinking of Maomao and wondering how he can convince her to accept his proposal, he might well speak in terms of winning someone over.

II.

“Er, how so, sir? You’ve spoken to so many people since we got here that I don’t know whom you might be referring to...”

It was true: a great many women had spoken to Jinshi since his arrival in the western capital. How many? One wouldn’t wish to say.

“You don’t have to finish that thought,” Jinshi said.

[...]

“What brings this on, Master Jinshi? Did something happen with you?”

“No. It’s simply that there’s someone I would very much like to triumph over,” Jinshi said, although he had to struggle to get the words out. He was nowhere near smooth enough to handle “so many” women at once, and he wanted to avoid inflating Basen’s opinion of his abilities any further.

He went on: “I’d gotten the idea that I knew how to play this game. This someone can be rather elegant, but in practice I’m supposed to be the superior—and perhaps I trusted too much to that. That illusion was thoroughly shattered tonight, and it’s left me feeling quite pathetic.”

[...]

Basen was looking at him with a hint of amazement. “This person must be quite skilled, sir, to make you say that.”

“Yes...” At least Basen didn’t seem to realize whom Jinshi was talking about. Thankfully. “We fought over something minor,” he said. “I started the fight...and I lost it.”

The second part of the conversation, which begins with “Er, how so, sir?” turns on the word aite. This is an infamous term among translators because it has a seemingly endless number of potential synonyms in English, most of which often don’t sound quite right. It represents a relatively simple concept that we might sum up as another party, someone else involved in a situation.

Unfortunately for us, terms like another party or the other party only really show up in English in legalese, and are rarely helpful in fiction translation. Thus we turn to that cornucopia of synonyms: aite can be variously translated as opponent, partner, buddy, the other person, the other guy, the other player, and more besides, depending on the context. Perhaps most importantly for this passage, aite can refer to a romantic partner. So when Jinshi says “There’s an aite I would very much like to triumph over” (“Doushitemo kachitai aite ga dekita”), it’s clear to him that he means someone he wants to vanquish in the game of love. Basen, however, not unreasonably takes the term in the sense of an opponent or perhaps even a romantic rival—an impression fostered in part by Jinshi’s use of aggressive, even martial language to describe the relationship.

In this case the solution turned out to be one of “less is more.” Because Jinshi speaks of triumphing (katsu, here conjugated in the -tai form showing a desire, means to win or to achieve victory), we figured the notion of an opposing person or force was already implied. Rather than restrict ourselves to a translation for aite that made that explicit, such as opponent, we simply went with someone I wish to triumph over and let the verb do the heavy lifting. Throughout the rest of the passage, we wrote around the need for any pronouns (“this person”... “I’m supposed to be the superior”) so there wouldn’t be anything to tip Basen off that Jinshi might not have a male aite in mind.

III.

Basen looked puzzled for a second, but then he said, “Ah!” as if it all made sense to him. “You lost, sir? Ahh, so that’s what you mean... A sparring partner, sir? What a boor they must be!”

He could be perceptive at the most surprising moments. Perhaps it would sound insulting to suggest Jinshi was startled to realize Basen even knew what it really meant to be rivals in love. But that Rikuson—that was his name, right?—he might look like just another pretty face, but he wasn’t to be underestimated. He was a direct subordinate of the strategist, Lakan—but he wasn’t the one Jinshi was worried about.

The conversation isn’t over, though: the wordplay becomes even more complex in a virtuosic third segment which leaves the reader snickering delightedly and the beleaguered translation team digging ever deeper for a solution. In the final “phase” of the talk (starting with “Ahh, so that’s what you mean”), the word at issue is saya-ate.

Saya-ate literally means a bumping of scabbards; the term ostensibly originated from the time when two samurai might get into an argument because the ends of their swords’ scabbards bumped against each other. From this background, the word came to mean an argument over something trivial, and our reading is that Basen comes up with the expression because Jinshi has just mentioned a fight over “something minor” (sasai na koto).

However, nowadays the main meaning of saya-ate is actually a romantic rival, and this is the sense in which Jinshi seems to take it. He’s impressed that Basen even knows the meaning of the word, but it so happens they each have a different meaning in mind. Obviously, to translate saya-ate as something like romantic rival in Basen’s line would be incorrect, because that’s not what he means by it and anyway, it would undermine the confusion and the humor of the moment.

Partly by association with the martial-ish language of the immediately preceding part of the conversation, we went with a sparring partner, as the expression could refer to anything from a literal partner for engaging in physical combat practice to a lover with whom you have a tiff.

It’s this sustained series of misunderstandings that leads to the two men’s differing ideas of what Basen is offering when he suggests he might be able to “help” Jinshi. The entire scene builds to and pays off in that comedic moment, so a successful translation needs to set up how Jinshi and Basen talk past each other in the same way as the original. As you can see from this discussion, there is often a way to conjure an equivalent experience in the target language through the careful consideration of synonyms, but it’s also necessary to pay attention to the larger flow of the text.

Speaking of the larger flow of the text, because this is The Apothecary Diaries, the author isn’t content to let this string of jokes lie at the end of the prologue. Later, when Basen and Maomao encounter each other in Chapter 1, Basen remarks that Jinshi has been acting strangely and asks if she’s aware if he’s engaged in any kind of shoubu-goto. Literally meaning competition, this word is often synonymous with gambling (kakegoto). However, some J>J dictionaries define it as “events involving winning and losing,” and it seemed likely to us that his line is a reference to the prologue—that is, he’s wondering if Maomao knows anything about this mysterious aite with whom Jinshi is (in Basen’s understanding) locked in battle. Our final translation for this line, “Have you heard about him...I don’t know. Being under pressure from anybody?” takes a somewhat broad approach to the pun, but we thought this gave the widest latitude for interpretation.

IV.

Just so we don’t leave you with the impression that every pun in J>E translation is a riddle box that takes endless thought and discussion to unpack, let me highlight a joke that occurs in Chapter 2. When the uncle of the “floating bride” wades into the lake and grabs a fish, we have him saying: “Gorgeous! I love it! I wish this were snapper, but I won’t carp about it!” In the Japanese, the line is: “Medetai, medetai. Kore ga tai de nai no ga zan’nen da.” Literally, “What a happy occasion, what a joyous occasion. It’s a real shame this isn’t red snapper [tai].” It’s a dad-joke-level pun that plays the Japanese word for “red snapper” off the last couple syllables of medetai (lit. joyous, an expression of approval and happiness). In English, “to carp about something” means to complain about it...and there are carp in the lake. This was a joke that practically wrote itself. Granted, correspondences that close are few and far between—but they do exist, and you accept them with a grateful heart when you get them.

With these examples from both ends of the difficulty scale, you can see that translating humor, even language-based humor, can be difficult but is by no means impossible. Admittedly, when you’re on a tight deadline and you find yourself banging your head against this kind of passage, there can be a temptation to exclaim, “Really, Author-san?! Must you?” But when you do come up with an effective solution to this kind of puzzle, it’s one of the real joys of translation. Hopefully, you can at least figure out something functional, and if you’re thoughtful, careful, and a little bit lucky, you might even produce something elegant enough to make a target-language reader laugh just like a reader of the original. It’s those sublime moments, when a reader who doesn’t speak the original language is able to enjoy what the author is doing in a way comparable to a reader of the source text, that translators aspire to; those are the moments that foster real pleasure and real understanding.

We hope you enjoyed this survey of one of the most frustrating and most rewarding elements of translation. Thanks for joining us—have fun, read widely, and we’ll see you in the next volume!