Some Remarks on the Perspective of Translating Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Kagi from Japanese to Polish

Abstract

This article aims at presenting and discussing problems and difficulties that a translator of Kagi – a novel written in 1956 by the Japanese author Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) may face in translating from Japanese to Polish. By providing specific examples from the Japanese text, decisions that sometimes the translator must take are explained; these decisions derive from situations when the translator is confronted with the problem of untranslatability or cultural context of two such distant cultures as the Japanese and Polish ones. Operating between two such different cultures, the translator in fact intentionally becomes an intercultural intermediary – as Soliński suggests, and a cultural advisor – as Jabłoński claims. While focusing on lexical, grammatical, contextual and technical (distinctive features of the Japanese language e.g. writing systems) aspects of untranslatability, some excerpts of the Japanese text are analysed and examples of Polish equivalents are provided. It should be added that it is difficult to analyse the translation of a text that has not been published yet and officially does not exist. However, it seems the comments and solutions suggested here might be helpful or useful for those who will translate Japanese literature in the future in general, as some of these observations can be applicable not only to Kagi. The proposed solutions are certainly not perfect, thay can be a starting point for further discussions. Finally, the approach described above also provides an opportunity to consider certain technical aspects of the translation in order to demonstrate problems encountered by translators of literature in general.