In June 2019 I spoke to Amber Books about doing a new localisation of Miyamoto Musashi's very well known work, 五輪の書 (go rin no sho, AKA Five Rings).
I thought I'd write up a short blog about the whole thing, from my experience to the actual translation decisions I made.
The first section is mainly for anyone who wants a bit of an insight into J-E freelance experiences, and the second section is for readers that want to find out a little more about what makes this translation different. I hope you find it interesting!
Let me know what you think on my Twitter if it tickles your fancy.
How I Came Upon the Job, and How I Went About It (Click to show)
It was very exciting to be asked to do something so monumental shortly after becoming a full-time freelance translator. I had expected to spend a long time building up clients and reputation before any big jobs would come my way, and I'd saved enough money to get by for a good few months without any work. But through a contact of a contact of a relative, I was introduced to Amber Books and their need for a J-E translator.
By and large, contacts and in-person networking has been how I get the bulk of my work. However, most of my contacts are in the board games or digital games industry, which makes this a very lucky, and slightly confusing match of translator to client. I was very excited but also very nervous as I'm not a literary translator by trade... Which turned out to be exactly what they wanted. Amber was particularly interested in having me as their translator for this work because it has been translated so many times before, in the most detailed and faithful way possible with heaps of footnotes and technical language, and keeping the style of the 1600s writing.
It turned out that they were happy to have a game translator because my purpose in life (well, translation) is to make something exciting to read, and easy to understand. Great, I can do that! I had about two months to work on this and make a polished, readable, enjoyable version of a work that is not only incredibly famous, but also has several existing translations. And that was where that feeling of intimidation set in!
So I went to Amazon to buy three different Japanese versions of the book, and two English versions. I read most of the older English version to get a feel for what I was about to undertake. I could tell it was a very early translation, and pretty literal. I then had a read of the first section of one of the Japanese books, cross-referencing the original Japanese with the modern Japanese. It was a long read, but I started to see what the fuss was about. He made some sense!
I then started reading about Musashi and the Five Rings in the second English version I had bought (as well as online). I needed to read a lot around what I was going to be translating because there is so much history wrapped up in the work itself and everything that came of it. This was definitely useful, but also started making me wonder just how liberal I could really be.
Amber requested a draft of the first few pages before I continued on. I wasn't sure how liberal to be at this point, so everything that wasn't exactly as per the source I highlighted in red and told them I had added some flourish to make for a nicer read, but if they thought it was too much to let me know.
They said it was fine with the flourish, so I continued on. I worked out how fast I needed to be to hit the deadline, and how much I would earn per day with that. It all seemed to work well. Except, I hadn't counted on just how much I would think each little sentence through, and by a week in I realised I was slower than I thought. Not too slow that I'd miss the deadline, but slow enough that I needed to be very disciplined to make it work. Which, I suppose is a lesson from Musashi himself; beautiful irony.
I think in the end I was doing about 4 pages a day. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but the sentence structure in Japanese was often pretty hard to work out, and I was using a physical book to translate from, as the digital version I had also bought turned out to be missing whole chunks. Translating from a physical book felt like writing code in Notepad. Retro, but a pain in the butt!
I worked in cafes a lot because I needed the distracting atmosphere to stop my brain wandering. As paradoxical as it is, when I need to concentrate on something, if there isn't a lot going on around me I find the spare parts of my brain get bored and start looking for distractions. If there's already enough noise and visual distraction around me, I don't look for more. So there I was, fighting this book that wouldn't stay open, full of caffeine, staring into space trying to think of a better word for "attack" 90% of the time.
Two things I discovered in this state:
bulldog clips really help keep a pesky book open
freelancers really do live up to stereotypes
Once I finished and handed in the full translation, they actually also asked me for an intro and a bunch of Japanese quotes to put along the sides of the page to make it pretty. This was good fun. I had total freedom with both, so I went with a sort of sales-pitch for the intro, and some of my favorite things to translate for the quotes.
Although I was the only translator on this project, I definitely wasn't without help. I ran sections by friends to check the flow, I reached out to my translation Discord server for help with terminology ideas, and I Googled the crap out of everything. I had an editor at Amber, and they also had someone I could ask about sword-related things. I'm very glad I have all these resources, and thankful to those of you that helped me :)
I've always wanted to write a Special Thanks, so I'm going to! Thank you to Michael Neve, Irina Matti, Chris Higgins, Gary Smith, Beverley Hatchard, Ali McKinlay, and Perch Coffee, where I did most of my translation.
How I Translated the Work Itself
I have to say I learnt a lot about the balance between faithfulness and readability while working on Five Rings. My mission was to create a read that would be more accessible to everyone, not just those really into Japanese history or martial arts. But at the same time it was very difficult to stray too far from the original text. And on top of that, trying to find a tone that was both Musashi's and a storyteller's led me down a whole path of looking into translation theory on the author's "voice".
I settled for formal writing, but without the long and winding sentences Musashi often trailed into. I broke the structures of his sentences often, sometimes for flow, sometimes for impact. That was the voice I decided to go with.
Amber asked me to make sure I didn't use any footnotes. If you've read other versions of this book, you'll know that footnotes are abundant! For just the casual read, hardly anything really needed footnotes. Where there were some places that didn't make a lot of sense without context, I added directly to the writing. One example of this is on page 70, where Japanese uses the imagery of mountains and sea, but the two characters for can also be read as "three times", which is how many times you shouldn't try the same move. In English this double meaning wouldn't come across without a footnote, so I added a short explanation into the text. The idea being that you get the full Japanese meaning without having to refer to something separate and break out of the reading experience.
Another thing I feel is important to avoid breaking the reading experience is readability for everyone. Anyone that reads something should be able to identify with it in some way or other. I don't like it when language bias gets in the way of someone connecting with a text. There were a lot of occasions where the first term that popped to mind was male-oriented (swordsman, gunman, etc), and of course, the samurai in Japan are usually pictured as male.
As a board game translator, I often see the use of "he/him" in instructions. When I play a board game and the instructions say "He draws a card" or "on his turn", I am left out of the text by default. I wanted to do better than that.
I consciously chose to use the neutral "they" instead of "he", and looked for words that wouldn't exclude the many non-male participants in history. I did use male-oriented terms if I felt they had more linguistic impact, but rarely could I not find something equally as interesting in neutral terms.
Something that was a real challenge for this book is something that any J-E translator comes across regularly, but on steroids. Japanese can happily repeat the same word, or the same variation of a word, over and over without it sounding unnatural. Trying to figure out how to make something like "Cute, adorable, sweet cuddly toy" in English without sounding silly is often a J-E translator's life. In Five Rings, Musashi wants to impress upon his pupils the necessity of contemplating his teachings, and training his techniques. For every. Single. Section. I have never had such fun trying to think of a hundred different ways to say "Study this well", and "Train this repeatedly"! And by fun, I mean several hours spent whispering to myself while staring off into the distance, or typing "study" into a thesaurus again. If you find a doubled up section ending, please forgive me! I was so busy studying it thoroughly that I didn't train well. Or something.
Having said that, there are an awful lot of parts that I really loved working out how to translate with the 'glory' still in mind, or the epic feel of the phrase. After all, this was a load of handwritten scrolls passed from a samurai master to his pupil in medieval Japan. This book needed to feel legendary.
To do that, I used as much imagery and word play as I could without being over the top. I used phrases that we have in English that are equivalent to what he used in Japanese. I went with alliteration when the Japanese used endless onomatopoeia that we just don't have.
I want to highlight some of my favourites for you.
I think my most "Yasssss!" moment was with a section in The Scroll of Water. In Japanese it is 無念無相 (munen musou), and I very much wanted to reflect the construction of the Japanese; using the 無 as a prefix both times. Something about using "no X, no Y", although accurate, didn't strike me with the same punch as the Japanese. I actually took some inspiration from Luffy's drunken technique when I was thinking of words to describe this move. If you're not consciously thinking, you cant be predicted. You can stick 'un-' on both of those things! And thus, "Unconscious, Unpredictable" came to mind.
On page 11, I tried to create an alliterative sentence that matched the repetition in the Japanese. "Of all the Ways in the world, each and every practised path is followed as its practitioners please." This was the first creative bit of language play I messed around with, and Amber approved it. I enjoyed thinking of a way to make this stand out in a semi-poetic way. Maybe my Year 5 English teacher will be proud.
On page 13, Musashi talks about showing off being like a flower, whereas actual knowledge is like the fruit. I tried to keep this imagery throughout, using words like "reap", and "yield" in the same paragraph. I do similar on page 14, using "industriously" as an adjective for how one should train, after an explanation about different jobs and carpentry. This was something I tried to do throughout, to give a solid theme to each section. While it felt cheeky as a translator to insert extra wordplay, I think it makes for a more interesting read, which is what the aim was. So if you notice any words that are even subtly punny, they're definitely not a coincidence!
On page 19, it was fun to come up with a way to translate 風 (fuu) as it is used in Japanese to mean xyz-'like', or a style/trend of doing something, but was also for the name of the Scroll of Wind. I went with a well-known English phrase to describe the same thing that Musashi went for, using "winds of change".
Translating the fifth scroll name, 空, was fun. This character means all sorts of things, from empty, to sky, to clear, to nothingness. And of course Musashi used it in all of those ways. The point of the Way is to reach a state of being so aware of everything that you are in a perfect state of clarity, with nothing to cloud your mind. I didn't want to borrow the terms from the English translations I had seen, though I did like the term Ether from Alexander Bennett. I went with Expanse, as I feel it captures the feeling of vastness and nothingness all at once.
Early on in the Scroll of Fire, there is a section in Japanese called 枕を押さえるということ, or literally "holding down the pillow". Obviously we know this type of thing as a way to kill someone in English as well, but the whole section actually talks about stopping something before it starts, and the 枕 in this case can also mean "introduction" for something (like a story). So to an English speaker, I didn't think a title about pillows would help anyone understand what was meant here. Instead, I chose the phrase, "Nip It in the Bud" as my title, and added a quick nod to the pillow in the first sentence. This was a tough decision because it strays quite far in terms of one-to-one translation, but to make for a section that makes sense in English, it was needed. Further down it talks about cutting off the Attack at the A, and that doesn't make much sense if I went with smother. What's a samurai to do, grab some bedding? Use a spare sleeve? Why do that, when you have a nippy sword already?
Another, similar title comes slightly after this, with Jumping the Gun. In Japanese, it says to stamp on the sword, but for a title this sounded a little obscure. The titles need to be easy to understand so the reader knows what's coming, and the section can meander instead. The first part of the section talks about dashing in before bullets are fired, and the second part talks about trampling the enemy's sword. Having a section heading about sword stomping that leads right into running under fire wouldn't have flowed as well, so I went for a creative title.
The very last section, Expanse, has this beautiful ending in Japanese. I wanted to keep this as close to the original as I could while keeping its poetic flow and its meaning. I'm quite pleased with it.
Overall this was a real joy to translate. There is so much detail, and so many little things to think about that he brings up. He asks you to see without looking, move without thinking, win without being overconfident, and I loved working out how to make all these seem like a matter of course. I enjoyed bending English around to make it sound both serious in its disapproval of slacking samurai and encouraging of budding pupils all at once. I reveled in using my athletic background to describe body movements, but at the same time enjoyed being out of my knowledge comfort zone when it came to writing about parts like sailing. The way he hearkens back to things he has said earlier in the scrolls, and the way he builds the teaching up through the chapters makes it a well-rounded read. There's a lot of "Oh, I remember this!" moments, and I love that in a book.
If you enjoyed my waffle, let me know! I think my personal ramblings are about as winding as Musashi's, but hopefully they were even a little bit as interesting!
If you are interested in getting a copy of the book, please check out the following sites: