Another interest of mine is the potentially independent existence of characters away from any particular single text. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight seems to play with its audience’s uncertainty about whether its Gawain is the Gawain of the English tradition (Arthur’s primary knight, a master of public courtesy) or the Gawain of the French tradition (a master of charming-ladies’-knickers-off courtesy who can be found, in the words of one editor, ‘pursuing consummation through an unremitting onslaught of magic swords and flaming arrows’). It turns out to be the English Gawain, but he later turns up at a castle only to find that its inhabitants seem to have heard of the wrong version and expect a masterclass in flirting.

. . . digressing again. Sorry.

I have to agree with Ubiquital here: I think visual and narrative disparity probably account for some of the change of experience, but honestly I believe the difference can be better attributed to linguistic disparity.

ToraDora, after all, is written in Japanese for Japanese audiences foremost, and as a light novel no less, implying some sort of simplified or easy reading. I mean, the English equivalent would likely be something like young adult fiction.

But even then the similarity is hard to draw – written Japanese is very different from written English, being pictographic rather than phonetic, so a “complex” sentence in Japanese might be comparatively very different in terms of reading difficulty to English. Furthermore, what might sound good in Japanese might not sound so great in English, and vice versa.

The ToraDora anime adaptation, on the other hand, suffers a little less from this “lost in translation” idea, I think. Sure, there are subtitles for the spoken dialogue, but we don’t need subtitles to perceive body language and movement. On the other hand, English words for similar looking actions are very nuanced with their own slight meanings – “sprint” versus “run”, for example – which makes a completely written medium, such as a book, more mutable in translation.

The issue I’m raising here of course only really applies to literal translation, but I believe that’s what is usually done in regards to fan translation

. . . that’s probably not a very helpful digression, but the post touched one of the things I’m curious about: this curious double status of medieval stories, both very physically grounded in manuscript culture and strangely free floating (so that Chaucer describes the Trojan legend as a massive, heavy object born up on the shoulders of those who’ve written about it, rather than something in a book, and Malory writes of his tales as places he can ‘leve’ from and ‘go’ to). I’m sure some element of oral culture’s mixed in there somewhere, too.

That was all digression too, wasn’t it? Erm . . . I guess I can say that I see similar issues in Old, Highbrow and Native texts that you’ve picked out in a text that’s New, Lowbrow and Foreign?

Funnily enough, I don’t read many translations either.

On the other hand, translations of Murakami’s novels and stories tend to be quite good, so I think there is a way of capturing enough of the original flavor while making up for what’s lost. Translation is almost certainly a factor here, but I’m not willing to blame it entirely — there are good translators and bad translators, and I imagine the multiple-translator nature of Baka-Tsuki might make things difficult.

This is why I don’t read many translations. Except for Dostoevsky . So much of the style, alliterations, and maybe a few proverbs or allusions are lost over this immense cultural gap.

Translations don’t work. Period.

I suppose I’m not as interested in making conscious comparisons between adaptations as I am in charting the involuntary connections made during reading. Lately I’ve moved away from examining minutiae and more toward considering reading itself and trying to figure out how literature functions as a body. Comparisons, it seems, tend to be a byproduct of all that, or maybe a necessary stop along the way — and in any case I just have a tendency to make a lot of comparisons.

I’m watching both Toradora and Clannad right now, and Toradora’s melodrama is pretty tame in comparison, so it doesn’t seem that bad to me (not that I don’t like both shows).