Most songs about snow are also about Jesus, or about Santa, or cozying up in a toasty cabin. They’re not all like that though, there’s Belle & Sebastian’s “Fox in the Snow” (here in a choral version from Vancouver and here in a delightfully dark version by the great Kiki & Herb), and let’s never forget Marvin Gaye’s “Purple Snowflakes”, which seems ripe for a cover by well-known syzzurp aficionado Justin Bieber. There’s Kate Bush, who recorded an entire album about the ethereal white crystals. Inspired by the widespread idea that ‘Eskimos’ have hundreds of words for snow, Bush created her own list of 50 snow-white synonyms, coming up with delightful terms such as “Zhivagodamarbletash”, “sorbetdeluge”, or “swans-a-melting”, and recorded them with the help of Stephen Fry (rather obsessed with the vagaries and varieties of language). As for ascertaining just how many Eskimoan terms there really are for snow? READ MORE…
Language: Japanese
Today’s post is a selection from Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat, translated from the Japanese by Eric Selland. A bestseller in France and the winner of the Kiyama Shohei Literary Award in Japan, the novella concerns a couple in their thirties living in a small rented cottage in a quiet section of Tokyo. They work at home and have reached a point in their relationship where they no longer have much to say to one another. The arrival of a cat changes things. Hiraide is a poet, and his writing is at once fast and delicate, attuned to the finest details in his characters’ lives. The Guest Cat will be published by New Directions on January 28.
We give you the ten most popular articles published this year at Asymptote:
Nao-cola Yamazaki’s first published work, 2004’s Don’t Laugh At Other People’s Sex, won the Bungei Award, was adapted into a major motion picture, and was nominated for the Akutagwa Award, a prestigious honor given annually to a promising Japanese writer. “I believe that the mission of contemporary Japanese writers is to express ambiguity,” she says, as an introduction to the following piece, an excerpt from her novel The Beginning of the Long End. Yamazaki was a participant in the 2013 Writers Omi at Ledig House Translation Lab, along with the translator of this piece, Takami Nieda. Yamazaki, who has in the past been skeptical that her work would be translatable, found her views altered by her time at Ledig. “The Japanese have always had a tendency to celebrate ambiguity as a virtue,” she writes, and “the Japanese language itself seems to be suited for expressing ambiguity… For example, it is possible to construct sentences without a subject, there are many passive expressions, and sentences can be written without specifying an object. These are some of the characteristics of Japanese that differ from English and perhaps many other languages.” Though she recognizes how her work takes advantage of the nuances of her native tongue, Yamazaki completed her stint at Writers Omi believing that a translation that conveyed her fascination with vagueness would maintain some of its distinct qualities, and “perhaps those reading the translation might enjoy those elements as a kind of ‘Japaneseness.’”
A new story by Haruki Murakami was published in the October 28th issue of The New Yorker. The story is called “Samsa in Love” and is translated by Ted Goosen, who often translates Murakami’s Canadian releases. The story concerns someone who wakes up as a man named Gregor Samsa.