Takami Nieda on Translating Kazuki Kaneshiro: Love Before Trump
Just released by AmazonCrossing, Kazuki Kaneshiro’s 18-year-old novel ‘Go’ has found a new voice in Takami Nieda’s translation. It’s a timely indictment of today’s nationalism.
The happy gaze she casts on a sunny terrace outside the Tampa Bay Convention Center needs no translation. “Better than Seattle,” translator Takami Nieda says with the cryptic clarity of the teenager she’s brought to life in English this month.
Her translation of Kazuki Kaneshiro’s Japanese-language novel Go and its articulate, brat-boy protagonist Sugihara was published on March 1 by AmazonCrossing, the powerhouse translation imprint of Amazon Publishing. A bestseller in Amazon’s Kindle Store, the book now is collecting thoughtful write-ups and reviews from sometimes surprised consumers—many of whom are putting their fingers on the importance of translation:
- “Although this novel was a love story,” writes one reader in a review, “the theme it tackles is discrimination. It illustrates a situation familiar in the US.”
- “The story of a passionate young man negotiating prejudice with personal power,” writes another.
- “This first-person novel allows the American reader to feel the identity confusion and alienation that’s the result of systemic discrimination,” says a third.
“It’s definitely his voice,” Nieda says about how she’s captured the idiosyncrasies of a talkative character. An English department faculty member at Seattle Central College, she spoke to Publishing Perspectives at this week’s AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Tampa. “I could translate in that voice all day because the words that come out of my mouth come out in that voice.”
This is a clue to why she spent seven years shepherding the book to its new English rendition. Nieda spotted the book and was captured by its canny, irreverent cadences. She got the author’s permission to translate it, created samples in English, and shopped it around for a publisher with a brand name the author would approve. That publisher turned out to be AmazonCrossing.
