![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losSomeone finally got the English rights to and translated “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (the book the Ghibli film is based on), only like, literal decades after the point where doing so would have been a smart and very natural business decision (say, any time after 1989). It’s a good thing they used all that extra time to—produce a somewhat careless and uninspiring translation. Ah. Whelp.
I’m discussing the 2020 version. This had previously been attempted in 2003 (with the fugliest Harry Potter knock-off cover imaginable), but the circulation and print-run seem to have been minuscule, with a library uptake on the same scale. It was nigh impossible to source a copy of the 2003 translation. And don’t get me wrong, this is serviceable. It’s hardly a Seven Seas scenario, where engaging with the book causes me both consumer rage and physical pain. The novel is, however, consistently clunky. There’s no way I’d listen to or read this book and ask myself, “oh, is this a translation?” That’s simply never the question, and the text gains nothing in particular from the friction. Reading this book feels like you’re trying to listen to a song but going ‘what is that?’, and realising that Youtube has somehow directed you to a cover where one significant instrument has been replaced by a kazoo. Like Miss Clavel, you are constantly aware that something is not right.
Someone who’s read the original in Japanese told me that the 1985 book was lovely, and specifically that it was charmingly written. We, however, read Kiki leaving on her grand flight to a chorus of townspeople shouting “congrats!”, which sounds—just a couple degrees off? I don’t actually care if the original version featured Japanese people using a truncated, casual way to wish people well: no one would say ‘congrats’ in this context (especially not people a couple generations up from Kiki, who, judging by the portable radio, is a child living in a ‘mid-century’ sort of era). Where is your loyalty sitting? It’s the target language that matters, here.
Like the Southwark Playhouse’s 2016 staging of this story (and unlike the 1989 film), the book mentions that witches are losing their power over time, on a generational scale. I’m not quite sure how to read this queer, melancholy element in the context of the text as a whole. There is, however, no particular sign in the book of one of the film’s most troubling elements—Jiji losing his ability to speak, and with it his human-level sentience. Generally, the film seems to have introduced far more conflict to the book’s material (notably in terms of Tombo, throughout). The book doesn’t really feature a tight arc, as such. It uses the thematics of the bildungsroman to give shape to its ‘slice of life’ events. The clock-tower thus plays a different role in the original novel, and the sequence involving it isn’t really the book’s climactic set-piece. The play, meanwhile, inextricably influenced by the film as well as the original source material it nominally adapted, chose to make this original, unblimped version of the clocktower sequence into more of a conflict.
I’m discussing the 2020 version. This had previously been attempted in 2003 (with the fugliest Harry Potter knock-off cover imaginable), but the circulation and print-run seem to have been minuscule, with a library uptake on the same scale. It was nigh impossible to source a copy of the 2003 translation. And don’t get me wrong, this is serviceable. It’s hardly a Seven Seas scenario, where engaging with the book causes me both consumer rage and physical pain. The novel is, however, consistently clunky. There’s no way I’d listen to or read this book and ask myself, “oh, is this a translation?” That’s simply never the question, and the text gains nothing in particular from the friction. Reading this book feels like you’re trying to listen to a song but going ‘what is that?’, and realising that Youtube has somehow directed you to a cover where one significant instrument has been replaced by a kazoo. Like Miss Clavel, you are constantly aware that something is not right.
Someone who’s read the original in Japanese told me that the 1985 book was lovely, and specifically that it was charmingly written. We, however, read Kiki leaving on her grand flight to a chorus of townspeople shouting “congrats!”, which sounds—just a couple degrees off? I don’t actually care if the original version featured Japanese people using a truncated, casual way to wish people well: no one would say ‘congrats’ in this context (especially not people a couple generations up from Kiki, who, judging by the portable radio, is a child living in a ‘mid-century’ sort of era). Where is your loyalty sitting? It’s the target language that matters, here.
Like the Southwark Playhouse’s 2016 staging of this story (and unlike the 1989 film), the book mentions that witches are losing their power over time, on a generational scale. I’m not quite sure how to read this queer, melancholy element in the context of the text as a whole. There is, however, no particular sign in the book of one of the film’s most troubling elements—Jiji losing his ability to speak, and with it his human-level sentience. Generally, the film seems to have introduced far more conflict to the book’s material (notably in terms of Tombo, throughout). The book doesn’t really feature a tight arc, as such. It uses the thematics of the bildungsroman to give shape to its ‘slice of life’ events. The clock-tower thus plays a different role in the original novel, and the sequence involving it isn’t really the book’s climactic set-piece. The play, meanwhile, inextricably influenced by the film as well as the original source material it nominally adapted, chose to make this original, unblimped version of the clocktower sequence into more of a conflict.
