Is een boek op komst nieuws? Doorgaans niet. Maar in dit geval wel. Niet omdat het Haruki Murakami betreft – al wordt het verschijnen van zijn titels zo groots gebracht dat het nieuws lijkt – maar omdat het de vertaling van twee titels betreft – Luister naar de wind en Flipperen in 1973 – die door Haruki Murakami zelf lang niet goed genoeg bevonden werden om in al die landen te verschijnen waar hij inmiddels naam gemaakt heeft.
Er bestaat wel een Engelse vertaling van de eerste twee boeken die Murakami schreef, maar Hear the Wind Sing (1979) en Pinball, 1973 (1980) waren bestemd voor de Japanse markt.
Wat Haruki Murakami heeft doen besluiten om alsnog in te stemmen met een vertaling? Ik weet het nog niet. Ik heb de vraag gesteld aan zijn Nederlandse uitgever. Ik wacht het antwoord af.
Misschien omdat hij verspreiding van Hear the Wind Sing en Pinball, 1973 niet langer kon tegenhouden. Wie ze wil downloaden, vindt wel een weg.
Ik heb het altijd raar gevonden dat van de Trilogie van de Rat in Nederland alleen het derde deel – De jacht op het verloren schaap – beschikbaar was. Nog negen maanden wachten en dan zijn ze er – Luister naar de wind en Flipperen in 1973, eindelijk.
Terwijl ik het antwoord op mijn vraag waarom nu wel afwacht, zoek ik naar wat Haruki Murakami nu precies als reden opgaf om Hear the Wind Sing en Pinball, 1973 niet voor de internationale markt vrij te geven. Ik dacht dat ik daar in Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2003) van Jay Rubin iets over gelezen had. Niet dus. Maar Jay Rubin neemt Hear the Wind Sing en Pinball, 1973 wel mee in de analyse van Murakami’s oeuvre:
‘If the impetus to write Hear the Wind Sing seems to have come out of thin air, the book also has an unpredictable, almost random quality. Murakami has said that he didn’t write it in chronological order but “shot” each “scene” separately and later strung them together. “There is a lot in Wind that I myself don’t understand. It’s mostly stuff that came out unconsciously … almost like automatic writing… I said just about everything I wanted to say in the first few pages, zo the rest has virtually no “message” as such.. I would never imagined it would be published – or go on to become part of a trilogy.”
‘The overall tone of the book, as a result, is far more sombre than that of Hear the Wind Sing, but rather than having Boku return on the most agonized chapter of his past, when his beloved Naoko died, Murakami has him embark on a self-consciously non-Arthurian quest for, of all things, a pinball machine on which, until it disappeared with the closing of a Tokyo arcade three years earlier, he spent many mindlessly happy hours – as he had on a similar machine in J’s bar.’
En over de totstandkoming van de vertaling zegt hij ook iets:
‘He [ Alfred Birnbaum, lw] had been translating art books for Kodansha International, but really wanted to do fiction. He brought in his translation of Murakami’s short story “The New York Mining Disaster” as a sample of what he could do, and mentioned A Wild Sheep Chase as a novel he particularly liked. After a month of so of indecision, however, the company concluded that A Wild Sheep Chase was “too thick”, but the liked his suggestion and gave him Japanese editions of Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 to read.
Birnbaum decided to do Pinball, 1973 first, and handed in the manuscript, assuming Kodansha International would promote and distribute the book in the United States. He was disappointed to find that the parent company Kōdansha, published it in the English Library series instead, complete with grammar notes by somebody else.’
Misschien als ik het dan in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: on the tracks of The Great Railway Bazaar, waarin Paul Theroux Haruki Murakami in Tokyo niet geheel toevallig tegen het lijf loopt.
Ook niet, maar daarin vertelt Murakami wil hoe hij besloot schrijver te worden
‘A thought came to him (as he told me): “I’m going to write something. I’m going to be a writer. I had a feeling I was blessed.”
He had never written a word. His major at WasedaUniversity had been theater arts.
“I went home and started a novel.”
And in time he finished it. Called Hear the Wind Sing, it was published in 1979. The story of the epiphany at the baseball game is one that he had told many of his interviewers. It has the elements of a traditional creation myth – a suddenness of spontaneous combustion, a vastation of utter certainty. But its mystical quality is in keeping with the mood of Murakami’s fiction, which often has an ungraspable serenity in the narrative shifts, his characters with one foot in Eden, the other in Japan, their motives enigmatic. The other aspect of this story is inspiration in the bleachers – the downdraft of afflatus, a diamond sutra in the baseball sense – is that Murakami believes it.
“The book is – what? – not the best. Then I wrote Pinball. And then my first good book, A Wild Sheep Chase. After that, I’ve never stopped. It’s my passion. It’s my love. I have never had writers’s block. I’ve never wanted to do anything else.” ’
Ik heb me dus niet verbeeld dat Murakami zijn eerste twee boeken niet zo goed meer vond.
Nog steeds geen antwoord van de uitgever.
In plaats van de reden van het mogen, hier het begin van het eerste hoofdstuk van Hear the Wind Sing:
“There’s no such thing as perfect writing. Just as there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”
A writer I chanced to meet when I was in university told me this once. It was only much later that I caught on to the real meaning of those words, but at least I was able to find some consolation in them. That there is no such thing as perfect writing.
Leave a Reply