Writer as Translator: Haruki Murakami’s Novels and his own Translations

• Main Authors: Wu, Pin-ru, 吳品儒
• Other Authors: Lai, Tzu-Yun
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/b46djq

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 翻譯研究所 === 104 === Literature translation is one of Haruki Murakami’s pastime well developed way before he becomes a novelist. When looking for the right style for his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, Murakami wrote the opening in English and then later translated his writing into Japanese, thus the birth of his foreign writing style. By translating Raymond Carver’s short stories, Murakami learns how to tell stories in his styles and reaches the peak of short stories in his writing career. In the same way, Murakami borrows the necessary devices to tell war stories from his translation of Tim O’Brien. As a novelist/translator, Murakami’s translation style diverges from his contemporaries: he prefers to keep the source text’s foreignness by following its sentence order and through the use of katakana. What sets Murakami aside from ordinary translators is that he tries to figure out story characters’ undiscovered emotions through “the imagination of a novelist”. While many other translators are expected to eliminate their styles to represent the originality of source text, Murakami’s novelist manipulation exerts significant effect on his translation.