If I can’t say that I’ve written a novel, at least I can say I’ve translated one
I posted the remaining chapters of Baccano! volume 8/9 (depending on how you number them) onto Baka-tsuki yesterday. I started translating this in the spring of last year because 1) I needed to do a translation exam to get my MA and 2) I’ve leeched off other people’s work in the anime and manga fan community for way too long, and felt that I needed to make some contributions.
I probably feel more accomplished than I have a right to. The disclaimer on Baka-tsuki tells translators that their translations will be “mercilessly edited” but that hasn’t happened so far – the editor and fellow fans have been remarkably nice when suggesting changes. This was a fun project and standards/expectations aren’t very high (I don’t mean that in a derogatory way). Most people are just happy that there are translations out there, so I haven’t really been picked on, which I’m thankful for. I can’t even say that I’m the best person for the job. I’ve been working from a Chinese translation, and on top of that my English is more academic and I’m not well-versed in how 1930s gangsters would talk. Also, there was another translator who might have picked up on the same volume and probably would have done a better job of it, but I went ahead with it anyway, and sometimes I feel slightly selfish for doing that.
I aspired to be a writer, and had some short work published in high school era contests, but eventually realized that my forte didn’t lie in creative work as much as analytical work. Translation gives me the best of both. I’m spared the work of having to come up with things on my own, but in a way I am also rewriting the story in its translation. I’ve learned a lot in the process, and not just about language; for example, I now randomly know about the beginnings of the FBI and locations of historic hotels in Chicago. I’m not American and I haven’t visited the US that many times and I’m also pop culture deprived, so paradoxically translating from a Chinese edition of a Japanese light novel acculturated me into American history (I will probably post an essay about this in Radical Compounds at some point. There’s also one in the works about Durarara!! with a comparison to Baccano! in the works.).
Another by-product of giving up on creative writing is that I’ve also given up on art, and I’m sure my DeviantART account is very lonely but… I learned drawing from when I was very young (the only reason I’m an Asian who doesn’t play piano is because my parents sold our piano to buy plane tickets to get out of Asia) and would have liked to be an artist too, except again the lacking creativity part. In high school I used to draw fanart a lot but then that sort of petered out, and perhaps it’s because I found that I’d outgrown most anime series and no longer found them captivating enough to draw fanart for. But translating Baccano! has made me draw fanart again, perhaps because it’s more consistently at the back of my mind. I was even thinking of Baccano! when I was embroiled in a fight with one party wielding a giant monkey wrench, when most other people would be first and foremost thinking about self-preservation.
Ladd Russo was my favourite character in Baccano! when I was watching the anime, but during volume 8/9 translations I’ve become fond of Victor Talbot. I think he says 2 lines in the anime in the 1717 backstory and that’s it. He’s a minor character still, but as with most other characters in Baccano!, his distinct personality really shines through – openly arrogant and insulting, self-righteous and a major hardass. I actually mistranslated some of Nile’s comments about him in the colour pages at first (I was working off a really bad Chinese translation at the beginning), but Nile sort of says that Victor is the only immortal who tries to think about how their current presence might negatively affect normal human beings and tries to think about ways to prevent it. He also has a lot of respect for Maiza, despite being an FBI agent himself and Maiza being a Camorrista, and seems to care about his mortal employees despite being a rather nasty boss most of the time.
The lighting didn’t turn out exactly like what I had in mind, and I’m still horrible at foreshortening, but:
