For six years, I have had a tradition: right around the beginning of December, when the Florida heat finally cools off, I slip my copy of Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen off the shelf and allow it to rekindle a warmth within my being. Translated in English by Megan Backus, the light, intricate, and mouth-watering prose of the novella has delighted me endlessly.
Its plot reads splendidly (perhaps saccharinely, at times), following college-age kitchen-lover Mikage Sakurai’s search for family and love in the Tokyo of a not-so-distant past. And this slice of life is bursting with a wonderful multitude of thoughtful meditations on the mundane, the modern, and the mortal that, sprinkled throughout its pages, make it luminescent. I am a moth to its glowing text. I am an acolyte of Kitchen’s bliss. And, indeed, it has become something of a liturgical book for me. Consider, for example, a sudden interruption to Mikage’s retelling of the death of her grandmother and her mourning:
However! I couldn’t exist like that. Reality is wonderful! (5)
In so few words, we read a note on grief and the narrator; we almost immediately come to see the brightness that underpins this piercingly clear narratorial voice of remarkable range. Later on, after a conversation with her semi-adoptive mother, Eriko, Mikage remarks:
But if a person hasn’t ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. (41)
Almost effortlessly, an instant, deeply informative glimpse into the perspectives that guide Eriko and Mikage as characters. It also doubles as an accessible and richly pensive philosophy of happiness.
These form only a sample of their entries.
There comes a time, however, when even the most faithful of regulars may go off in search of new flavors. This year, after a bout of summertime craving, Kitchen tasted quite different, prepared alla italiana by Giorgio Amitrano. The classic I had come to know and love was still there, but in every other bite, there was something unexpected. In fact, I became quite certain that sentences had been added to the Italian text, words I had never recalled reading in the English. Try this flight:
Quella donna che in fondo era un uomo mi sorrise. Un sorriso che mi ricordava quello timido dei gay di New York che avevo visto spesso alla tivù. Ma c’era in lei una forza ben più grande. Era stato il suo fascino troppo profondo, spendente, a portarla dov’era. (trans. Amitrano, 22)
She beamed. Her power was the brilliance of her charm and it had brought her to where she was now. (trans. Backus, 19)
For those wondering, and for those who can read Japanese (as I cannot), the original reflects the added clauses in the Italian:
彼であるところの彼女は、にこにこしていた。よくTVで観るNYのゲイたちの、あの気弱な笑顔に似てはいた. (29).
The texts simply do not match. It appears that at least a full sentence has been left out of the English translation, as well as a dubious reference to the fact that Eriko is trans. Both the Japanese and Italian invalidate Eriko’s gender expression and frame her current identity in terms of her former self. Backus’ Eriko does not suffer this onslaught; she beams. Elsewhere:
…quando vidi all’entrata del negozio Eriko e alcune ragazze del locale, naturalmente erano ragazzi… (47).
…and there was Eriko, just off work, standing in the doorway with ‘girls’ from the club… (46).
Wherein, the same message takes two different routes: one, rather transphobic, and the other, almost coyly implicit. And:
Avevo pensato di scrivere questa lettere al maschile, e mi sono sforzata di farlo… (52).
Just this once I wanted to write using men’s language, and I’ve really tried. (52).
Wherein, a letter written by Eriko with a very specific intent becomes slightly garbled. And perhaps a much more palpable effect:
“Diventare donna è terribile, sai?” (40).
“It’s not easy being a woman… (41).
Wherein, things become tricky. Again, the English edition seems to erase, or at least deliberately avoid, an aspect of Eriko’s identity as a trans woman: the psychosocial experience of transition. Instead, they are masked behind a more normative category and a drive to “pass” in an attempt to – as she does in this line – relate to Mikage and, more broadly, the woman reader. The Italian, conversely, directly addresses the fact that Eriko is not just a woman, but a trans woman; an individual who has undertaken significant effort to make themselves into their own image. And still, it remains widely appealing: diventare una donna [becoming a woman] is not only a description of gender transition, but could also be a general metamorphosis into womanhood. It becomes a verb of affirmation, allowing both transitioning and aging to be possible paths to this meeting point of identity, woman. It becomes the process of growing, the aftermath of change, be it genetically encoded or socially constructed. Both the English and Italian translations take on a complex interpretive potential that may communicate contradictory notions: here, affirming; there, invalidating.
I am relatively uninterested in the reasons behind these differences, and most likely they are the product of the infinitely many and deeply unconfirmable idiosyncrasies of the publishing process. It is, fortunately, impossible to know why these gaps in the English are present. What interests me is the effect these omissions have: Kitchen, without references to the gay subculture of NYC or trans identity, becomes much less involved in the issues and characters it depicts. A Kitchen that lacks visible engagement with potentially controversial themes becomes a less articulate portrayal of its zeitgeist. Yet both of those Kitchens can, at some moments, read as much more caring in their treatment of Eriko, and at others, not.
In the same manner, a Kitchen that has no place for the onomatopoetic “ting! ting!” (3), “ぴかぴか” (9), banishes the phonetic qualities of such a device to welcome the semantic clarity of “scintillano” (9). Likewise, a Kitchen that sets all Japanese words in italics – as both the English and Italian do – flavors the text with otherness, with unbelonging, with a vocabulary that is markedly foreign and implicitly located outside of the reading language’s literary tradition.
All of this is to say that there seems to be something to gain from reading these translations and referring to the original text simultaneously. Aligned with the argument against “untranslatability” made by Jahan Ramazani in Poetry in a Global Age, these readings indicate that “the help of a language-sensitive comparative poetics … [can] render visible both the translatables and the untranslatables” of a given form (238). Moreover, a comparative dialectic of translation – in the spirit of this journal – reveals a degree of humanity in the translational process that both enriches and confounds its practice.
As I have been trained as a translator, I have often heard that translation is negotiation. And here, at the discursive crossroads of three globalized cultures, that essential maxim rings true. For a given idea, emotion, or concept, each attempt at rerepresentation through language reveals the connective tissues that resonate within knowledge. Each version also reestablishes the limits of (written) language and its communicative capacities. As Yoshimoto writes in another of her novels, N.P. (about a translator! and a supposedly untranslatable text!):
I had only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one lost control of words once they are spoken or written. It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity. (20).
Here, in the world of words, something may be gained, but something will almost always be lost in translation.
Harrison Betz is a master’s student of Spanish Literature and Linguistics at Florida State University. Working in both Spanish and Italian, his research interests include film and visual culture, adaptation studies, and global literatures.
Works Cited
Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry in a Global Age. Chicago University Press, 2020.
Yoshimoto, Banana. Kitchen. Translated by Giorgio Amitrano, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1993.
———. Kitchen. Translated by Megan Backus, Grove Press, 1993.
———. N.P. Translated by Ann Sherif, Grove Press, 1994.
———. キッチン. Kadokawa Group Publishing, 1988.