Iwa ni Hana

As I was saying, back at university I used to translate newspaper articles I picked in random from English into Japanese and vice versa for practice. Naturally, I encountered stumbling blocks from time to time, in which case I would turn to my language exchange partners for help. One of my partners was a girl from Kobe who was studying to be an English teacher herself, and one of the articles we worked on together was “Mozart redeems my mediocrity” from The Guardian (see here for the full article).

We beat our brains out as to how to translate the sentence “Mozart redeems my mediocrity”. In fact, my partner had not been exposed to such usage before, and was puzzled that anyone other than God can be the subject actor of the verb “redeem” when you are talking about redeeming a human being’s shortcoming (ie. mediocrity). This sentence may sound natural and native enough in English and may be intuitively understood as long as you are thinking in English. After all, we all know that Mozart is dead, and even if he were alive it is doubtful whether he would be able to redeem anyone. “Mozart redeems my mediocrity” is really a shorthand for expressing:

My recognition of the greatness of Mozart redeems my mediocrity.

In any case, our difficulty was that there was just no equivalent Japanese that would be an appropriate translation of “Mozart redeems my mediocrity”. However you translate you it, it just ends up sounding funny, nonsensical, confusing or ambiguous in Japanese. To have a subject other than God when you use the word “redeem” in Japanese just does not seem to work. At last, we agreed that translating a sentence like “Mozart redeems my mediocrity” just forces you to make your best effort to rewrite the whole sentence as something else. Probably something along the lines of:

My recognition of the greatness of Mozart makes up for my mediocrity.

If you think about it, a sentence like “God redeems me” is really a similar shorthand expression for “my humble submission to the greatness of God redeems me”. There is a lot more to be said about it, but first I would like to turn to an anecdote I once read. I have quoted it directly below:

The Welsh are great ones for possessing and continuing the past. I was just reading a few days ago an article by some Americans who had been travelling in Wales last year and who had been startled while travelling over a road and said “This is a very fine road.” Their driver who was a Welshman – this was in mountain country – said “Yes, a fine road. They designed it; we built it, and you know they never paid us for it.” They said “Well, who are they?” “The Romans.” This is not exaggerated. They still hang on onto old grievances, old feelings; they hang on to a lot of old things too. [...] This is not self conscious. It is as though you possessed all the past and you have a fairly happy consciousness that the future is going to possess you too. You just don’t live once, a rotten eighty years. I never conceive why people want to be modern all the time. Being modern really means only now. There is only one instant of time. – from the transcript of an interview dated 1968 in Conversations with Robertson Davies.

The word “redemption” reminds me of that road designed by the Romans, which was apparently working just fine – long after the Empire that had caused it to be built disappeared.

So the Roman Empire had folded. Christendom had folded. The Spanish Empire had folded. The Hapsburg Empire had folded. The British Empire had folded. Nowadays terms like “Lent” or “Ash Wednesday” have fallen out of common knowledge and most people have to look up Wikipedia or somewhere in order to find out their meanings. And yet the force of the word “redemption” – the idea that one’s shortcomings can be redeemed by the grace of a higher being before whom one humbly submits – endures. Across vast expanse of time, it endures.

I am not Christian, and although I do sometimes read Christian texts like The King James Bible published by the Oxford University Press for knowledge, Christianity is not the only religion I read upon. For avoidance of doubt, this is not a flaming post inviting anyone’s opinion on whether God exists or not, or whether anyone agrees or does not agree with the “elitism” expressed in The Guardian’s article. I only wanted to take a brief moment to reflect on the durability and uniqueness of the word “redemption” in our sad, rushing world. That is all.