On Paths Unknown discussion

Hello fellow explorers, per request, I am opening this thread for discussion of the stories The Nose, Dragon: The Old Potter's Tale and The Spider Thread. I'll do yet another thread for Hellscreen, and another one for Shifting Gears.

EDIT: Why do these stories have the same "feel" to them than Rubin's t/lation of Murakami's tales? Is it my imagination, or might the translator be leaving his mark. T/lation studies, as far as I know, agree that the translator should be as invisible as possible. Something which, IMPO, Scott Moncrieff did not do with Proust, for example, and that kind of irritates me.

Since this thread shares three stories, let's use spoiler tags, shall we?

For those new to GR /HTML and spoiler tags, this is how you do it:
(spoiler) Hello, hello, I'm a big old spoiler (/spoiler)

Write your text inbetween the two words "spoiler", but write the words 'spoiler' inside sharp instead of round brackets, like this: use only a single < ....> on each side, for example like I bracket this 9 : <9> and then, at the end, make sure to do a / in front of the second word spoiler at the end, like so: [/spoiler] (but in sharp brackets).

I absolutely loved the 'Dragon' story! (view spoiler)[ Perfect for today's conspiracy theory crowds and fake news. I feel like E'in's name could have been X.... Yeah, scary how fake stories can start to put on a life of it's own. I can't remember if it was here on GR or on another site, where we had made a thread for Urban Legends. If it wasn't here on GR, it might be fun to make one in this group, actually. (hide spoiler)]

I loved the dragon story too! And I don't know who was responsible for sequencing this collection, but I thought it was a wonderful breath of fresh air when it showed up! (view spoiler)[it is pretty subtle too; that question at the end, who is the joke on? Or is there no joke at all? A question worth thinking about, as you say, Traveller, in our own world. Also loved the nose theme going on, although I thought Dragon was much more effective than the Nose, which fell a little flat for me. Akutagawa must have read Gogol, no? (hide spoiler)]

Re: translation, I had that very same thought. But honestly, part of me might venture the utterly unsupported opinion that it is not Rubin, but a certain tone of global-literature-in-contemporary-translation, an effort to be both very precise and also very contemporary in terms of the English idiom used, that can make Rubin's Akutagawa not so different from Rubin's Murakami, but also not so different from , say, Pevear and Volokhonsky's Tolstoy - translations for which accessibility to a broad audience in English is, perhaps, more important than preserving the texture of the foreign language (as opposed to say, the various Kafka translations, all of which seem somewhat at pains to broadcast that they couldn't really have been written this way in English, that they were written in conversation with a different set of rules and conventions.) I don't think this is a question of accuracy, not at all, simply one of style. But perhaps this is all codswallop and I should stop making things up :)

Yes, he does seem to have had a fascination/preoccupation with noses for a while there! Interesting also how granular he can get, right down to describing a person's pimple, as in the first story.

Re your remarks on t/lation: I think you have something there, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to say it's the Americanisation of things that makes everything so flat and homogenous. They do a similar thing with films as well, for example the Americanized remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I hate it, it removes all the flavor, all of the entire charm of anything foreign and turns it into just some more Americanized fast food.

And what it reflects of the American mind is a peculiar solipsism that I swear you'd only find in the US of A: not even the Japanese and their insularity can come close to the big Americanizing machine that grinds up the strange, delicate and wonderful, and spews out a tasteless paste, similar to the paste that Mc Donald's chicken nuggets are made of.

There is a certain vocal minority in the US that demands this homogenization, but I wonder what would happen if filmmakers and translators were to stop catering to them, if some people started standing up to them and make them see that they are flattening their world and shrinking their own horizons? Stopped spoonfeeding and suggest that they start adding some crunch to their diets? The best way to achieve this, would be to make it an expensive-sounding fashion touted by reality-show stars or talk-show hosts, ha ha.

I know, get Oprah to talk about it!

Traveller wrote: "Yes, he does seem to have had a fascination/preoccupation with noses for a while there! Interesting also how granular he can get, right down to describing a person's pimple, as in the first story."

The Nose grossed me out horribly even though I liked the story over all. He definitely has a fascination with disgusting details!

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "The Nose grossed me out horribly even though I liked the story over all. He definitely has a fascination with disgusting details!."

Amy, if that grossed you out, I DARE you to read The Pear Shaped Man. If you read that story right to the end, I will take Linda's medal for getting through Autumn of the Patriarch away, and give it to you instead.
Are you up to the challenge? 💪😁

Re The Nose and The Spider-Thread, I found them a bit like fables, just The Nose was told in far more detail, as Amy mentioned!

It was with The Dragon and the Spider-thread stories that I started to wonder if we're not missing out on the lyricism and descriptive power that Akutagawa's prose apparently had.

The Spider-Thread seemed, for me, to point to an uncomfortable truth: (view spoiler)[ some people seem to be born selfish, and some people never change... (hide spoiler)]

Traveller wrote: "Are you up to the challenge? 💪😁"

I don't know if I am or not LOL! I might just take this is as a warning to avoid! (Insert laugh/crying emoji here!) I don't have many squicks but when something hits one I am a total lightweight for the gross, I freely admit.

Just having a bit of fun, I enjoy teasing people re their squicks - I'm not bothered by blood gore and pus, due to having done nursing jobs in a hospital as student holiday jobs, but my daughter is a lot like you, so I always have to clean up the yucky stuff.
...but I do get to tease her with moldy stuff and of course, spiders.

My own phobia is for cockroaches, but no way is she going to go there to try and tease me back, ha ha.

But the yuckiness of The Pear-shaped man is not to do with gore or pus, really, it's a rather unique yuckiness that Martin manages to create pretty well. You'll probably never know what it is, then...😉😏

LOL!

(Also, I see the Goodreads notifications are on the fritz again. That's always fun.)

I just read Dragon and I love the sheer simplicity (through duplicity) of it all! It's pure Magic and in Freudian terms "wishfulfilment"... Will your dreams and desires into life!
Again, I'm making reference to modern day inferences and present day culture but how did Pinocchio not draw from this story??
In modern day parlance "too good"! The protagonist is duped by his own deceit, hoist by his own petard! What better form of schadenfreude is there for the reader? This is the stuff, fairy tales are made of!

Bonitaj wrote: "I just read Dragon and I love the sheer simplicity (through duplicity) of it all! It's pure Magic and in Freudian terms "wishfulfilment"... Will your dreams and desires into life!
Again, I'm making..."

Yes, I think it's also that stories tend to get a life of their own, like happened with X. If the original X were to stand up and say: "Hey, I'm X and it was all a hoax", I'll bet you nobody would believe him.

(view spoiler)[The story is also ambiguous as to whether people just imagined they saw a dragon and it was a kind of group hysteria, or if there really was something. We do know that there was a sort of black thing and a flash of gold, but we can't be too sure if it really was a dragon or not. Point is, thousands of people believed it was a dragon, so... does that make it any the more real ? ...and does it matter? (hide spoiler)]

It's interesting how in modern times, there are many sightings of UFO's and yet hardly anyone still seem to see ghosts - yet at a time in Western culture, and in many other cultures, ghosts are/were a 'real' thing at one time or another.