Books and baths.

I am currently reading, because I have been lent, Haruki Murakami's 'Hard-boiled Wonderland and the end of the World'. This is an interesting book, but I read a description of the internet in it as though it was not yet fully in existence, so I looked to see when the book was written, nothing else in the story had tipped me off. It was written in 1985, translated in 1991, but not published in Great Britain until 2001.
Why was this of interest to me? Well, when I did my MA, the psychologist du jour was Lev Vygotsky, a Russian born in 1896. Now, if memory serves me correctly, and be reminded I don't have a good memory, his work was mostly done in the late twenties. It wasn't published in translation however until 1974 or thereabouts. When I read his 'Thought and Mind' though, it was like coming home, it just made so much sense and not just to me, it was as though everyone who read it was hooked in, much of the research and writing that was being done at Kings College was based on his theories. Neo-Vygotskyists to a person.

I'm not sure whether I find it more incredible that the thought, the ideas survive the time gap or that it ever sees the light of day.
Descartes in his own 'Méditations' says that reading is like having conversations with people from the past, and it is of course, it's an amazing thing to be able to read the thoughts of Cervantes or Rabelais, Plato and Hesiod.

But what of translation? It throws up two red flags for me. What is the mechanism that sparks translation? Who read Murakami's books and decided that they were worth putting into English and how many other Murakamis are there whose work is read and enjoyed by Japanese speakers, but may never be available to us ? Who finally decided that Vygotsky's theories were worth showing to the English speaking world? And then, how much is lost in translation?

I can remember my mediaeval lecturer being involved in a debate about how the book of Genesis had been translated. It seems that where the English translation had given us 'God created Adam and then took a rib from him and created Eve' the original language more accurately stated that God took a rib and created two beings from this rib. Each new 'translation' of the Bible was really just an updating of previous English texts but finally someone had gone back to the Old Hebrew.
Likewise on my Air Canada flight I was reading the in-flight magazine. The English version of some article referred to something or other 101. Now I take this to mean basic, foundation. The French version however, said something or other 'pour les nuls' which I take to mean 'for no-hopers'. If you are 'nul' at something you are rubbish at it.

How many conversations have I forgotten I wonder. Murakami's character refers at some point to the work of Somerset Maughm. I remember having a Maughm phase myself, must have read everything the man ever wrote, yet the only thing I can remember from it is a picture of rain falling constantly onto a verandah.

But I have found it a great thing that people lend me books and I have been able to have many Cartesian conversations that I would not otherwise have had. I do have to take more care of other people's books however. My own books look as though they have been read by at least 38 street people. The truth is I take them in the bath with me and I stuff them in my bag so that I am never caught out for a second without a book. This isn't so much of a problem here because the bathtubs aren't as relaxing as in Europe. In England I would take a long relaxing bath with my book every night. I think I'd worry Kevin sometimes, I'd say, 'I'm just taking Alistair Reynolds into the bath.' Here the bathtub, like the one in the previous house, seems wider and shallower than in England, the end doesn't slope, it just doesn't work so well for me, so my books don't deteriorate so quickly.

Many years ago I enjoyed being read to, not by my parents, although I'm sure I enjoyed that too, but by the BBC. I 'read' Hugo's 'Les Misérables' -albeit in English, EF Benson's 'Mapp and Lucia' books and Anthony Powell's 'Dance to the music of time' by listening to Radio 4. In my head therefore I always pictured Powell's name as 'Pole'. One of his works was called 'Books do Furnish a Room' and I guess they do, there is something lovely about a beautifully bound book, even a battered, well-read book, but I'm looking forward to those little tablets, downloadable books that fit snugly into your bag or pocket and that you never have to find space for on the shelves, conversations straight into your head through the eyes instead of the ears then deleted or stored on a hard-drive. One-way conversations? Well I guess that's what translation is about, even if it's the translation we make ourselves, the visualisations, the meanings we impose. As I said before,quoting Barthes, 'every decoding is another encoding'.