Educator Note:
Kalau Almony
J PREP, Tokyo, Japan
I teach in a juku, or a cram school. Juku are a well-established part of the educational landscape in Japan. They’re most closely associated with intense preparation for entrance exams (college, high school, junior high school, even elementary school), but the term can be used to refer to any extracurricular educational service. My class is a combination creative and academic writing class for teenage students with high English proficiency. Think 9th or 10th grade English and Language Arts, but with only two hours on a Tuesday evening.
Outside of my work as an educator, I am also a literary translator. Drawing on this experience, I often try to incorporate small translation exercises and activities into our writing class. Since most of my students are effectively bilingual, it’s a quick way to get students to think about some of the more nuanced aspects of language like tone. I’ve also had students choose their own texts to translate in the past, something that helped get them motivated and really invested in the project as they were working on something they really cared about.
When I learned about Young Radish and discovered this opportunity to let my students share a translation project through publication, I was very excited. I knew translation was a great tool for learning reading and writing, and I thought the opportunity to publish something they picked would motivate them even further. But part of the equation worried me.
Earlier in the year, when announcing to my class that we’d be doing a lesson on poetry the following week, there was a collective groan. One student laid their head onto their desk, asking, “Why do we even read poetry?” The following week they all went through the motions for me. They were very capable readers of poetry, but there wasn’t much enthusiasm. There were also many questions about the meaning behind the activities. Who cares about these metaphors? Is the repetition of this word actually important? What does any of this mean?
So I was a little concerned, but my hope was that translation would help bring more fun to poetry. I planned a four-week poetry translation unit. We spent about a half hour each week in the first three weeks practicing translation. We read short poems in English and Japanese and annotated them as a class on the whiteboard. We’d look for all the normal things we had practiced before—rhyme patterns, rhythms, metaphors and other rhetorical devices—but this time, when we were done, we translated. Then we’d share our results and talk about what was hard. Sometimes we’d look at others’ translations as well, like this translation of Misuzu Kaneko’s “Are you an Echo” and this collection of Japanese translations of Emily Dickinson’s Poem 260.
We found that some things that work in one language (like rhyme in English) are basically impossible to carry over into the other language. We learned that the succinctness of Japanese often gets lost in English. We found tons of expressions, even in these short poems that couldn’t really be translated one-to-one into the target language. And maybe most importantly, we saw a variety of translations. Seeing all these different versions—many good, a few kind of silly or dated—was really liberating for students. I could see the gears turning. They were finally realizing there was something playful and goofy in poetry, and they could be playful and goofy when writing and reading too.
I found students connecting with poetry in a different way through these exercises. Thinking about translation gave them a specific goal to work towards, something they could focus on. I’m not sure that it answered any specific questions about why we do these things in poetry, but I’m not sure there are answers to those questions. Translation let them have fun with the material and enjoy playing with language rather than fretting and analyzing a poem to death just for the sake of analyzing it. For students who were struggling to “get into” poetry, it provided them a doorway.
After three weeks of practice, our day had arrived. I asked my students to bring a poem of their choice in either English or Japanese to translate. We took a moment to read each of the pieces as a class and each student gave a short presentation on why they chose the particular work they did and what they thought the challenges of translation would be. Then the fun started.
In class, we conducted a translation relay. Each student translated the piece or pieces they brought in, and then, when they finished, they passed their translation to the next person. The next person would then translate the previous student’s translation, and so on.
Outside of my usual writing class, I also held a two-hour poetry translation workshop for other students who expressed interest in this project. I gave them the compressed version of what we did in the first three weeks of class for homework, and we spent the first hour discussing poetry translation, and the second workshopping their translations individually. We didn’t have time to do a translation relay, but instead everyone received a little feedback from the group.
I was shocked by the difficulty of the pieces students chose—Shakespeare, Hemmingway, Sei Shonagon. I was even more impressed by the bold translation choices they made. Shakespeare translated into ten syllable lines of Japanese, Sei Shonagon speaking a laconic, deadpan English. And all of this done with a renewed enthusiasm for both poetry and for writing.
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Kalau Almony is an English writing instructor based in the greater Tokyo area. He is also a literary translator working between Japanese and English, and has translated the works of authors such as Tahi Saihate, Fuminori Nakamura, and Nao-cola Yamazaki.
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