January 22, 2006

SWET Newsletter, Number 110

Contents

Translating Japanese Literature

The Next Generation · ATJ Seminar
In an age of dubious support from readers, publishers, and the academy, literary translators face numerous extraliterary obstacles. In a roundtable discussion at the Association of Teachers of Japanese (ATJ) Seminar in San Diego on March 4, 2004, six eminent translators of Japanese fiction (Anthony H. Chambers, Philip Gabriel, Van C. Gessel, Charles Inouye, Stephen Snyder, and Eve Zimmerman) identified some of the issues affecting their craft.

SWET Events

New Venue and Policies Prove Fruitful (Book Fair)
The SWET Book Fair 2005 was held on October 22 at the RBR Center for Creative Arts in Moto-Azabu. SWET had use of the center’s spacious front-entrance room,a bright,airy space where tables were covered with books. The sale’s proceeds came to ¥148,840, more than double last year’s total of ¥72,000.

Fond Remembrance of Things Past (25th Anniversary Party)
SWET ’s twenty-fifth anniversary was marked on October 22 with a party and commemorative lecture by Ruth Stevens, founding member of SWET, with speeches by guests of honor Janine Beichman, Ito Misako, Donald Richie, Edward Seidensticker, and with remarks by Becky Davis, Susie Schmidt, Jiho Sargent, and Doreen Simmons, who received special recognition for their long-time contributions to SWET activities.

Structuring and Promoting Your Business (Ruth P.Stevens)
Ruth P. Stevens writes frequently for the marketing trade press and is author of two books, The DMA Lead Generation Handbook, published in 2002,and Trade Show and Event Marketing, published by Thomson in 2005. She teaches marketing to graduate students at Columbia Business School and serves on the board of directors of Edmund Optics, Inc. Her services are outlined at her website.

Kyoto Journal Inspires (John Einarsen and Stewart Wachs)
SWET’s November 20 lecture featured founding editor John Einarsen and associate editor Stewart Wachs of Kyoto Journal, who made the trip to Tokyo for our final public event of the year. Sharing the podium from their different perspectives and showing a lively collection of slides of KJ covers and pages, they explained the secrets they hold to keeping an all-volunteer quarterly journal coming out for nearly 20 years.

SWET Kansai

Favoring Curry in Kobe
The annual end-of-year gathering for SWET in Kansai on December 11, 2005, at the cozy Indian restaurant Gautam, saw a dozen of the SWET-Kansai set settling in for good food and drink and discussion of topics ranging from Eijiro (great as a thesaurus), the sort of work we take on as well as when and how to reject work, billing for work, nagara-zoku (people who do one thing while—nagara—occupied in doing another, through dozens of others during an evening of professional camaraderie.

Threads on SWET-L

Words in Action, Action in Words
by Torkil Christensen
In the heat of the summer of 2005, SWET-L discussed the impact and structural merits of adding and removing word spaces, signs, letters, and sundry words. We were also helped with correctly naming things and thinking about mistranslations.

Book Review

Bibliophile Frank Hawley’s Life in Japan
by Higashizono Tadatoshi
Higashizono Tadatoshi introduces the fascinating story of British japanophile and lifelong book collector Frank Hawley, from the recently published Shomotsu ni miserareta Eikokujin [An Englishman Enchanted by Books] (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2003; 197 pages. Hardcover. ¥1700).