Memorial Day Musings

   Living as long as I have in Japan, I can no longer remember when certain holidays, such as Presidents’ Day or Columbus Day, are held. It usually isn’t until Tuesday or Wednesday morning when I can’t download my favorite podcasts that I realize that Monday had been a public holiday.

   The same is even true with Memorial Day and Labor Day which should be easy enough to remember. The former is, of course, the last Monday of May, while the latter is the first Monday of September. Four years ago, however, when I was vacationing in Hawaii, it puzzled me to find so few people on the beach, when only a day earlier the beach had been packed. Then it dawned on me: the Labor Day weekend had come to an end and all the kiddies were back in school.

   This year I came across the above cartoon on a friend’s Facebook wall and was reminded that the Memorial Day weekend was just around the corner. Not that it will mean much to most American expats living in Japan: there'll be no happy Monday for us.

   Anyway, I was struck by a number of things when I looked at that cartoon.

    First of all, it reminded me of something Kurt Vonnegut wrote in, I believe, his novel Hocus Pocus (1990), something to the effect that the more the U.S. started outfitting its soldiers to look like the Reichswehr with coal scuttle helmets and all, the better we got at winning wars.

   In Vonnegut's next and final novel, Timequake (1997), Kilgore Trout had this to say about the way American soldiers were dressed:

   “I wouldn't have missed the Great Depression or my part in World War Two for anything. Trout asserted at the clambake that our war would live forever in show biz, as other wars would not, because of the uniforms of the Nazis.

    “He commented unfavorably on the camouflage suits our own generals wear nowadays on TV, when they describe our blasting the bejesus out of some Third World country because of petroleum. ‘I can't imagine,’ he said, ‘any part of the world where such garish pajamas would make a soldier less rather than more visible. ‘We are evidently preparing,’ he said, ‘to fight World War Three in the midst of an enormous Spanish omelet.’” 

   The second thing that caught my attention was how much the weapons of warfare have changed.

   Today, the US Army uses among other rifles the M16, a semi-automatic that fires three-round burst of 5.56x45mm NATO cartridges. During WWII, however, your average grunt was accoutered with an M1 Garand or M1 carbine. Both were semi-automatics. The M1 Garand had an 8-round “en bloc” clip that let out a metallic “klang” as it was ejected. The carbine originally had a 15 round detachable box magazine. Both were big improvements over the bolt action Springfield. The rifle, which was equipped with a 5-round clip, remained a standard issue infantry rifle during the Second World War due to the shortage of M1s. While the M1903 Springfield could fire at a rate of only 10-15 rounds per minute, you could get as many as 50 rounds off a minute with a Garand. By comparison, today’s M16 can shoot at a rate of up to 950 rounds per minute.

   The point that I would like to make here is that the United States was able to defeat Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Japanese Imperial Army armed with rifles that today’s gun nuts would not be comfortable with when and if they ever have to revolt against their own government, as 44% of Republicans now believe.

   And finally, why the hell is Ronnie's coup de grâce Grenada not included in the line-up???

Vonnegut, translated

   A friend recently posted an interview of Kurt Vonnegut on Facebook.

   Vonnegut is one of my . . . no on second thought, he is my favorite author. Gabriel García Máquez is a close second but for very different reasons.[1] I am also a fan of Phillip Roth, David Sedaris, Joseph Heller, Frank McCourt, and others. Haruki Murakami used to be up in the top five, but since his agency told me, in not so uncertain terms, to take my translations of his essays off of my website immediately, the Japanese author has dropped in my esteem to about tenth place.

   Watching the video of Vonnegut got me to wonder how many of his books I had lying around the house. So, I climbed out of my futon, cleared the dining room floor and started laying the books out. The above photo is the result. Twenty-five books. There are still some that are missing from my collection—a conversation about writing between Vonnegut and Lee Stringer, called Like Shaking Hands with God (Read it!) must be in the closet somewhere.

   Vonnegut often said that he was one of the few living authors lucky enough to have his entire body of work still in print. He also argued that the success of his or any author’s works translated into another language depended to such a large extent upon the talent of the translator that the translators themselves should receive a greater share of the royalties. As examples of good translators, he offered two women—his Italian and Russian translators—noting that his books had been well received in those two countries. In Germany, too. In France, however, his books never managed to do very well.

   I would say that Vonnegut could also add his Japanese translator to that list of good-for-nothings.

   While it is not hard to find one of Vonnegut’s translations in major bookstores here—there’s a whole shelf dedicated to him at the local Village Vanguard—you won’t come across many people who have heard of, let alone read anything by, the author. Those who have read him seem to have only done so because they had to, simply because Murakami is such a fan (and dare I even say plagiarizer) of Vonnegut and, of course, whatever Murakami-sama[2] says, his loyal Japanese fans dutifully obey.[3]

   Oh, but what dreadful translations they are!

   Many years ago when I was first dating my wife, I bought her several of Vonnegut’s novels translated into Japanese. I had been reading Timequake[4] at the time and, every time I came across a particularly funny scene, I would translate it into Japanese which would invariably cause her to laugh, sometimes so hard she cried. When she actually got round to reading the Japanese translations, however, she was disappointed.

   Incredulous, I took a look for myself and, reading the Japanese version of some of the choicer sections of Timequake, I could see what the problem was: the translator had succeeded so thoroughly in taking all the fun out of the book that it had become a dry shell of the original. It was as if he were adding warm tap water to champagne and, were I Vonnegut, I would have sued the translator for criminal malpractice.

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[1] Follow my Gabo tweets! Over 60,000 followers and counting!

[2] Sama (様) is a title of respect added to the end of names. San often denotes some familiarity with the person.

[3] Were Murakami to publish his used toilet paper, it would surely sell 300,000 copies overnight.

[4] Still one of my very favorites. Highly recommended if you have also read Breakfast of Champions.