September
is World Kid Lit Month, a time to notice
if global stories are reaching kids in the form of translations. Translator is
now a member category in SCBWI, and two translator members are Helen Wang,
winner of the 2017 Marsh Award and translator of 2016 Andersen Award laureate
Cao Wenxuan from Chinese—and Cathy Hirano, translator of two Batchelder Award
winners, and of 2014 Andersen laureate Nahoko Uehashi from Japanese.
The
Andersen Award, conferred in alternate years on one writer and one illustrator,
is a prestigious prize sometimes dubbed the Nobel prize for children’s
literature.
It
is an honor to have the translators of the two most recent Andersen winners in
SCBWI. Here, Helen Wang asks Cathy Hirano about her life, career and latest
publication.
Helen: Cathy, it’s a pleasure to meet you
on Skype. Please tell me your life story!
Cathy: I was born and raised in Canada, and lived there
until I was twenty, when I went to Japan. It wasn’t really about going to
Japan; it was more about how I was going to live my life. When I was twelve, I
ran into the teachings of Baha’u’llah, a 19th century Persian
teacher. His words resonated with me, in particular, “The earth is but one
country, and mankind its citizens.” I decided that one day, when I was grown
up, I would travel the world.
 |
| Cathy Hirano |
Helen: What
happened when you were twenty that took you to Japan?
Cathy: I realized I was grown up! Instead of going to
university (I didn’t want to study at the time), I had learned carpentry. But it
wasn’t a good time to be a carpenter, let alone a woman-carpenter, because there
were no jobs. My Japanese-Canadian friend wrote to me from France, saying her
parents were moving back to Japan, and although she looked Japanese, she didn’t
feel Japanese, and was scared to go. Would I go with her?
So I went to Japan, and stayed with her parents. My plan
was to stay for a year, master Japanese, then go traveling, and master the
language of every country I went to! But after six months in Japan, I realized
that one year would not be enough to learn Japanese. By this time, I also wanted
to study what makes Japanese and Canadian people so different. We feel the same
emotions, things like love, sorrow and joy, in response to similar
circumstances, and yet we express them so differently. So I went to university
in Japan, and studied cultural anthropology.
Helen: Then did
you go straight into translation?
Cathy: Not exactly. I went back to Canada, but felt I didn’t
really belong there, that I wasn’t meant to be there. So I came back to Japan,
and found a job translating for a Japanese construction company. They were
doing international development work, and I was there for three years,
translating project reports into English. I learned on the job, and my
experience as a carpenter came in useful.
 |
| Dragon Sword and Wind Child by Noriko Ogiwara, translated by Cathy Hirano (YA fantasy) |
Helen: And
you’ve been in Japan ever since?
Cathy: I’ve been in Japan for 39 years. I don’t feel
particularly Canadian, and I will never be Japanese. Mostly I feel human. When
you live with two cultures, it forces you to confront and let go of many
assumptions. You belong to the world not to one culture. That’s probably why I
enjoy translating.
Helen: I imagine
you translate from home, mostly on your own.
Cathy: Yes, while I was working for the construction
company, I got married, and when our first child was on the way, we decided to
move out of the big city to a smaller one (the Japanese would call it a “rural”
city) in southern Japan. When we moved here, I began translating freelance while
raising the kids.
 |
| Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit and Moribito II: Guardian of the Darkness, by Nahoko Uehashi, translated by Cathy Hirano (YA fantasy), winner of Batchelder Award and Batchelder Honor, respectively for Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic Inc. |
Helen: How did
you start translating children’s books?
Cathy: A friend who worked for a Japanese publisher asked if
I’d read some Japanese children’s books and give an opinion on them. I enjoyed
that so much that when she asked me if I’d try translating, I said, “Yes!” It
was just as well I enjoyed it, as there wasn’t any money in it.
Learning Japanese had expanded my ability to think and
perceive things in different ways. I found working on children’s books an
enriching experience. And through translation, I was in a position to give
children another way of seeing the world.
 |
| Hannah's Night by Komako Sakai, translated by Cathy Hirano (picture book) |
Helen: When I myself
started translating again after a long hiatus about seven years ago, it was a
revelation to discover a friendly and supportive community of literary
translators. I wonder if you have the same experience?
Cathy: Actually, until a few years ago, I didn’t know of any
such community, and, living out in the “country”, I hardly ever met other J-E
translators, let alone anyone involved in children’s and YA lit. Then, a few
years ago, Avery Udagawa and Sako Ikegami of SCBWI Japan came to visit me, and
invited me to a translators’ workshop. Thanks to Avery, Sako, author Holly
Thompson and others, there is now a thriving kidlit translation community in
Japan—the SCBWI Japan Translation Group.
For the translators, it’s wonderful to feel part of a
community, to know there are others like you, where you can ask questions of
all kinds and receive practical advice about contracts and copyright, things
that before I had never thought to pay attention to. SCBWI Japan has organized
workshops with translators, discussing and critiquing samples, introducing
useful tools and so on.
 |
| The Friends by Kazumi Yumoto, translated by Cathy Hirano (MG realistic contemporary), winner of the Batchelder Award for Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
Helen: I’ve
noticed how dynamic the SCBWI Japan translators are!
Cathy: It’s a very inclusive group. There is a strong desire
to provide opportunities for developing skills, for sharing knowledge, and for
providing much needed moral support. There is so little out there for many of
us. But they also see it as a platform to increase awareness of the role and
importance of kidlit translation among people of related professions, including
writers, publishers and agents. If we want quality translators and quality
translations, we need to raise awareness of what translators do so that they
can be recognized and compensated appropriately.
In recent years, dedicated SCBWI members have also introduced
Translator as a third member category, along with Writer and Illustrator, and
lobbied to have content for translators included SCBWI-wide.
 |
| The "Translator" box ticked on an SCBWI profile |
Helen: Your most
recent book is Yours Sincerely, Giraffe
by Megumi Iwasa, illustrated by Jun Takabatake. Can you tell us a bit about it?
Cathy: It’s about a giraffe who writes to a penguin, and
then decides to visit him dressed up as a penguin. But he doesn’t know what a
penguin looks like, and he gets it wrong. But everyone has a good laugh about
it, and everything works out fine in the end. It’s a lovely, warm, humorous
book.
Helen: I heard
there’s an interesting story behind the story?
Cathy: Yes, there is. Megumi was not a writer, but one day
she dreamed that she published a book called “The Giraffe that Pretended to be
a Penguin”. When she told her husband, he asked what the story was about, but
she didn’t know! So she jotted her ideas down in a notebook and put it away,
waiting until the time felt right.
After her two sons were born, she kept thinking of the
story, but the timing still didn’t seem right. She tried drawing the story, but
that didn’t work either. One day her husband bought a copy of A Picture Book of Fathers by Jun Takabatake.
She loved his work. After that, whenever she thought of her story, she saw it
with Jun’s illustrations!
One night, Megumi decided to read the giraffe story-so-far
to her sons. By then, her youngest son was eight. “What happens next?” they
asked, “tell us tomorrow.” This, she felt, was a sign that the timing was right
and she completed the story.
Sometime later, she attended a storytelling event at her
son’s school. And who should she meet there but the illustrator Jun Takabatake!
He just happened to be visiting and had tagged along with the storyteller who
was his friend. Megumi told Jun about her story. A few months later, he sent
her an invitation to his solo exhibition in Tokyo, near where she lived. She went
with her whole family, and Jun asked what had happened to her story. They
exchanged a couple of letters, after which Jun asked if he could show the
unfinished book to a publisher, and if the publisher was interested, if he
could do the illustrations. And so the book came about. Megumi had never
intended to be a writer, but a series of little miracles had made her one.
Helen: It’s
funny how some things come into our lives, and stay with us, sometimes latent
for years.
Cathy: Yes! And the story doesn’t
end there! The Japanese edition was published in 2001. The publisher, Kaiseisha
in Tokyo, and Yurika Yoshida at The Japan Foreign Rights Centre (JFC) worked
together to promote it at book fairs. Somewhere along the way, someone also
provided an English translation, but still no publishers expressed interest.
One year, at the Bologna Book Fair, Yurika was yet again telling Julia Marshall
at Gecko Press how humorous the book was, when Julia remarked that she had read
the English, but didn’t find it that funny. Julia wondered why Yurika was so
persistent in promoting the book.
Realizing that the humour was not
getting through, Yurika and Julia decided to ask me what I thought. I found the Japanese very
funny, in an understated way. The humour is in the situation, rather than in
the storytelling. It warms the heart and makes the reader chuckle, rather than
drawing out big belly laughs.
Humour, however, is one of the hardest things to
translate. I decided to try my hand at it to see if I could get it across.
Fortunately, it seems to have worked! Looking back over how the Japanese and
English editions of this book came into being, I think that this story was
meant to be, but it liked to take its own good time being born.
Helen: What is
it that draws you to translating children’s books?
Cathy: There’s an innocence, a kindness, in some Japanese children’s books
that I find inspiring. When I first came to Japan, it was understood that children
were children; young children in particular were allowed to just be, whereas I
came from a background where children were expected to behave almost like
little adults.
I also think that books
like Yours Sincerely, Giraffe speak
to our common humanity. It isn’t being cool or sophisticated that brightens our
lives—it’s things like the warm bonds of family and
friendship and little acts of kindness that we do for or receive from others. Books
like Giraffe also encourage us to
enjoy and celebrate our differences, rather than fearing them.
I have received so much from being in Japan, and translating is a chance
to give back. I hope to share through my work all the gifts I have received, to
open a door for someone and let them see with a new perspective.
Helen Wang is the Marsh
Award-winning translator of Bronze and Sunflower by
2016 Andersen laureate Cao Wenxuan. Wang was interviewed by fellow SCBWI member translator Nanette McGuinness earlier this year on SCBWI: The Blog.
Our thanks to Helen and Cathy for this interview, and to SCBWI's International Translator Coordinator, Avery Fischer Udagawa, for coordinating.
Illustrate and Write – and Translate! – on,
Lee
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