![]() ![]() ![]() All this provided a broader sense of what the man's work might be like, even when - especially when - filtered through the sensibilities of other translators. A spate of newly translated or re-translated material has emerged in just the past couple of years alone - his novella Schoolgirl, his anthology of sardonic fairytale retellings Otogi-Zoshi, his final unfinished novel Goodbye, his previously untranslated novel Pandora's Box, and so on. First was coming into contact with a larger selection of Dazai's work being rendered into English: Dazai's other major novel The Setting Sun, his travelogue collection Return To Tsurugaru, stories in various anthologies, Phyllis Lyons's study of his life work (with more translations within), Ralph McCarthy's Self-Portraits, and so on. Over the almost two decades since I first encountered the book, several things happened that brought all this into both focus and relief. Since I encountered the book before making any real headway with learning Japanese, I had to take Keene's word for it - that the fact he called out such things meant he probably had gone through some pains to preserve them along with everything else that was Dazai's. Keene himself praised this aspect of the book in his introduction to his 1959 translation, released a decade or so after its original publication. Much of that is due to Dazai's style - he's focused, to the point, cutting right to the parts that hurt the most or show the most. Every step forward in his life is accompanied by two more steps backwards, until he finally slides into the abyss he's been skirting all along.Ī synopsis doesn't do justice to the book's emotional power. ![]() All but disowned by his family, he shacks up with different women who all take pity on him, seeking a home but never finding it anywhere. In college he is befriended by an exploitive fellow student, runs around with would-be revolutionaries, becomes involved in a love suicide with a waitress. He compensates by assuming the attitude of a prankster and a comedian, but that mask is not able to fully protect him. His character, Yozo, the son of a well-off politician, has since childhood felt alienated from and unable to connect with the rest of humanity. Now we have an entirely new translation of Dazai's masterwork by Mark Gibeau, entitled A Shameful Life and published by Stone Bridge Press, and through it I think I can see all the more what was Dazai's.ĭazai's story has been generally accepted to be at least partly autobiographical - not in the sense that he was describing his life as it had played out, but in that he drew on things that did happen to him to infuse his story with the power of something lived. I had to confront this with Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, beloved by me since the first time I read it in the late Nineties or so: how much of my love was with Dazai himself, and how much was with the translator, Donald Keene? It took reading more of Dazai in translation, and more of Keene's other works (translations and otherwise), and finally encountering Dazai in his original Japanese, to better suss out where all those boundaries lay. A hazard of one of your favorite books not being in your native language is how much of what you fell in love with might well be a product of its translation and not the book itself.
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