Flowers and Metonymics in the Translation of Narutaru

A metonym is a figure of speech in which you refer to A with a different word B which is closely associated to A or is a part of A.  For example, in the expression “counting heads”, the word “head” is a metonym for “human being”.

Translation is shockingly hard!

Since every word in a language sits in a web of relationships with other words, so that every word we use is already a metonym whether we like it or not, we can call metonymics the study, or just simply the awareness, of this fact.  Metonymics is a huge issue in translation, I’d almost call it a dangerous issue.  Say that you want to translate a text from Language 1 to Language 2, and you find a close match between Word x in Language 1 and Word y in Language 2.  You cannot automatically just substitute y for x without looking at the metonymic reality of the two words involved!

Spanish “porcelana” can very accurately be translated as “china” in English, but you can see how the word “china” has a very obvious association with another concept (China the country) that you may or may not want in your translation. It might be better in the end to translate “porcelana” as “porcelain”.  Then again, this will raise the register of your translation, because “porcelain” sounds more polite than “china”, and depending on the context of the translation you might not want to do that.  In conclusion: every word in a language comes with its own unique baggage, and this makes translation a big headache.

Narutaru Chapter 39 is a beauty of a chapter, one of those 100-page plus cinematic chapters in this series that I love so much.  It’s the chapter where Satomi Ozawa decides to kill Shiina Tamai once and for all, and Takeo and Norio do their best to thwart her.

Banda Academy, which is closely associated with flora as I wrote in an earlier post, separates the girls into groups with flower names.  Girls that enter Banda in the Junior High become either Cherry Blossoms, Violets and Camellias.  Later on the groups get changed around, so a Violet this year could become a Camellia the next.  But the girls that enter Banda only in High School belong to a single flower group that never gets changed.  The flower in question is not the same in the original and in the official English translation.  In the original, it is the Lily.  In the English, it is no longer a flower but a tree, the Pine.  Here metonymics comes into play big time.

Immediately the question of why was Lily changed to Pine surfaces, and I don’t really have a good answer.  One of the girls in the English dialogue says that the high school-entry girls are called Pines because Pines are Trees, and we are left wondering what’s the point of this statement, unless it is that Pines are Trees instead of Flowers, and so the High School-entry girls are different from the other ones [also, trees are taller than flowers].  But this solution only defers the question, since that explanation in the dialogue is not in the original at all.  Why was the name changed then? I’m not sure, but let’s look at the metonymics of the matter.

Pine in Japanese is Matsu 「松」.  The tree shows up all the time in puns in Japanese poetry, because it sounds just like the verb “to wait for” 「待つ」 and in Japanese poetry a lover is always sitting by the door waiting for his or her lover.  By a stroke of luck the English word Pine also sounds just like a verb (“to pine for”) that is quite close to the essence of “waiting for a lover”.  Translators have put this metonymic similarity between the tree in Japanese and in English to great use in recreating the puns in the original Japanese poems.

Lily in Japanese is Yuri 「百合」.  To a foreign anime fan the word “yuri” immediately brings to mind the genre of lesbian manga.  I think it’s at least possible that the English translators of Narutaru might have feared that some of their readers would make the connection:

“lily → yuri → lesbian”

Since Satomi, who is the girl being discussed, is heterosexual through and through, the translators might have chosen to steer clear of this association.  In any case, Lily and Yuri have different associations in the two languages, beyond the small issue of the manga genre.  Lily in the West connotes the beauty associated with Purity, and is linked to Mary the mother of Christ.  In Japan it is said that a beautiful woman stands like a Chinese Peony, sits like a Tree Peony and walks like a Lily.  The Lily is equated with the beauty of Grace or Elegance.  The Lily is more active than passive here.  Just as in the case of homosexuality, it would not do for an English-language reader to start associating Satomi in Narutaru with Purity.

I like the Pine translation too, because it reflects Satomi’s school history, and I imagine that of many other “Pine girls” at Banda.  Satomi tried and failed to enter Banda Junior High.  As such, she had to wait (=Jp. matsu) for 3 long years to enter at age 15.  I bet you Satomi pined and pined for Banda.  The Pine tree fits in here perfectly!

 

 

~ by Haloed Bane on November 20, 2011.