To Kill or To Have Never Killed

To-day I read what I think is the newest Sirenia Digest, number 214, containing "Night Fishing", a new Caitlin R. Kiernan story. It's a nice blurring of the line between a multiverse story and an unreliable memory story, centring on a narrator menaced by some entity that shifts shape and temporal location in his recollections. It put me in mind of Lost Highway, especially when the narrator talks about whether or not he's a murderer.

Last night I fell asleep watching To Kill a Mockingbird. It's included free on Japanese Amazon Prime with Japanese subtitles I can't turn off. The film's Japanese title is アラバマ物語, literally "Alabama Story". After lousy translated titles for Ghibli movies like "Spirited Away" and "The Boy and the Heron", I guess it's nice to see it cuts both ways. I was sorry I slept through Atticus' closing statement so I went back and watched the last half of the film this morning. I seem to be really sensitive lately because all of the strongest moments in the film hit me really hard. I almost cried when Scout first sees Boo Radley.

There's a movie about perspective. You have two instances of community taking justice into its own hands, first when the racist jury condemns the innocent Tom Robinson, then when the sheriff and Atticus decide they're going to protect Boo Radley. The truth was concealed, some might argue changed, first for a bad reason and then for a good reason.

While I was reading the Sirenia Digest story, I was surprised to find myself thinking of this lecture on Dragons from Gresham College I was also watching this morning. The lecturer, Ronald Hutton, discusses the possibility that some tales of dragons could have been based on actual encounters with snakes, crocodiles, or extraordinarily fearsome people. Perhaps it was the dragons that became snakes, crocodiles, and people?

A lot of the subtitles on To Kill a Mockingbird were wrong, I noticed. Unsurprisingly, there's no translation for "Nigger". "Nigger", "Negro", "Coloured", "Black", are all translated as "黒人", literally "black person". This renders totally different the dialogue in the scene where Atticus tells Scout, "Don't say 'niggers', Scout." This line is translated as "何て言い方だ", which roughly translates as "How can you talk that way?" There are two reasons I can see for this. One is to discourage the dissemination of bad English, the other is the fact that Japanese has no swear words, therefore, no Japanese viewer would understand why Atticus wouldn't want Scout to use any particular word. What the translator ought to have done is rendered the word faithfully and offered a brief note. Or they could have simply translated it directly. An intelligent viewer should be able to glean the cultural meaning from context. A willful mistranslation is symptomatic of the kind of cultural insulation that I believe more and more is at the heart of Japan's failure to learn English. Whatever the motive, though, poor translations like this help create a fantasy "Japanese America" that exists only in the Japanese collective imagination.