Two months into this
lock down and i'm torn between spending every waking moment upskilling
or trying to distract myself. It's been a while since I've had such
ample time to learn for the sake of learning and to explore my
curiosity and not for an exam that taking up a new skill as a adult
seems a bit disorienting.
Between reorganising my
room and bookshelves for the 156th time I came across my
old Spanish notes from my second year of uni. When I was still
pretty bad, but improving bit by bit and most of all, still enjoying
learning for the sake of it and the fun of discovering new things
unknown to me because it was otherwise not as known and praised in
English canon.
So, i'm taking a break
from learning because I have to, and starting a new language,
Japanese, purely because I
can. Working on Japanese for an hour each day has been helping me
maintain a healthy daily routine, much like it did years ago at uni.
I'm starting to get to grips with Hiragana and Katakana and slowly
making my way with vocab and basic grammar.
Between language
learning, I've been reading much more. Since travelling last Autumn,
I've been checking out more translated fiction from East Asia, much
of which has been newly translated and publishing in 2020. Earlier on
in the year I read Tokyo Ueno Station (Tiled Axis Press) by Yu Miri
and translated by Morgan Giles. The story of a homeless ghost as it
roams the busy parks and streets outside a bustling station in Tokyo,
exploring class division and what it means to be an outsider in many
forms has been one of my favourites I've read so far this year. So
when I heard Titled Axis were publishing Matsuda Aoko's collection,
Where The Wild Ladies Are, translated by Polly Barton, I eagerly
grabbed a copy.
Where The
Wild Ladies Are – Matsuda Aoko
Publication
date: February 13th 2020
ISBN:
978-1-911284-38-3
Publisher:
Tilted Axis
A collection of
feminist retellings of Japanese ghost stories, each of these stories
goes beyond the fearful, vengeful female spirits you're usually
accustomed to seeing. With complex identities, motives and living
harmoniously in the world of the living, the modern ghost story is
given new life.
Favourite short stories:
What She can do, The Peony Lanterns, Quite a Catch
Much like Spanish, I'd
hope to reach a level of competence where I can read the original
short stories. But again, there's no pressure. Last thing we need is
more of that in the midst of a pandemic. In any case, having been in
the translators shoes (albeit a while ago) I've a real respect for
translators who can seamlessly capture the meanings of the original
prose and the writer's style while simultaneously giving due respect
to the time and culture the story takes place in. Over the coming
months, some more translations i'll be looking out for are:
Translated fiction TBR:
- Breasts and Eggs by Meiko Kawakami
- Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
- Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah
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