You know, I’ve never read that one, but I have it on a list of folktales to read and translate/interpret. On deck is a shorter one about an old man’s encounter with a tengu. I can’t think of the title offhand.
Btw, I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time that the haiku on your website, the one about the moon being left at the window sill, led to a great conversation with my father-in-law. Thanks!
Wow really? It is a good one. I think the best of these folktales for teaching the value of compassion and kindness. Omushibi Kororin might be close, but I never really liked second half with the evil old man and woman. Kasajizo is more pure. Anyway, I look forward to your next translation (all translation is also interpretation, so I'd just say "translation")
Ah is that the one from Ryokan? This one. If so, that is one of my favorites. I really should translate and post some more from Ryokan. He was an interesting fellow.
I'm happy to hear it led to good conversation with your father-in-law. Very cool!
That’s the haiku. I brought that up one night and my father-in-law’s eyes lit up and he couldn’t stop talking. It was great! Based on what my father-in-law had to say, Ryokan sounds like he was an interesting person.
You’re right about translation involving a lot of interpretation. The text I used for this, though, was really spare, which I think is typical of most folk tales, so I really filled it out and created scenes that I thought would make it work as a story. That’s why I wasn’t sure if translation would be accurate or not. I basically took the plot points, characters, and settings and used them as markers to write a story around. I started doing this almost two years ago and then stopped for no reason. It was nice to pick it up again.
It was indeed. I'll write a bit more about him sometime. You've got him on my mind now.
I used to do the same type of translation years ago. When I first came to Japan and was studying Japanese, I had some very basic readers that were simple elementary school level Japanese and traditional folktales. For my website at the time I would translate them to English, adding a lot more detail. That was fun.
You know, I’ve never read that one, but I have it on a list of folktales to read and translate/interpret. On deck is a shorter one about an old man’s encounter with a tengu. I can’t think of the title offhand.
Btw, I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time that the haiku on your website, the one about the moon being left at the window sill, led to a great conversation with my father-in-law. Thanks!
Wow really? It is a good one. I think the best of these folktales for teaching the value of compassion and kindness. Omushibi Kororin might be close, but I never really liked second half with the evil old man and woman. Kasajizo is more pure. Anyway, I look forward to your next translation (all translation is also interpretation, so I'd just say "translation")
Ah is that the one from Ryokan? This one. If so, that is one of my favorites. I really should translate and post some more from Ryokan. He was an interesting fellow.
I'm happy to hear it led to good conversation with your father-in-law. Very cool!
That’s the haiku. I brought that up one night and my father-in-law’s eyes lit up and he couldn’t stop talking. It was great! Based on what my father-in-law had to say, Ryokan sounds like he was an interesting person.
You’re right about translation involving a lot of interpretation. The text I used for this, though, was really spare, which I think is typical of most folk tales, so I really filled it out and created scenes that I thought would make it work as a story. That’s why I wasn’t sure if translation would be accurate or not. I basically took the plot points, characters, and settings and used them as markers to write a story around. I started doing this almost two years ago and then stopped for no reason. It was nice to pick it up again.
It was indeed. I'll write a bit more about him sometime. You've got him on my mind now.
I used to do the same type of translation years ago. When I first came to Japan and was studying Japanese, I had some very basic readers that were simple elementary school level Japanese and traditional folktales. For my website at the time I would translate them to English, adding a lot more detail. That was fun.
Did you ever publish them anywhere other than your blog, or hear of anyone publishing books and/or making money from translations like this?