Come
join me,
there’s nothing a warm cup
of tea cannot heal.
Come,
let us play
the broken piano
with a few misplaced keys,
it’s music
still beautiful.
Come,
come away with me,
as I take you
through time,
the time machine
conjured in words.
Come,
do not hide.
Come,
maybe for the first
and the last time.
Come.
I was halfway through Haruki Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun when a thought suddenly struck me. Murakami is a master storyteller and I have been awestruck by the scale of how he imagines great patterns in simple lives. His first person narrative is haunting. It feels all too real. But this is not what struck me in this particular moment.
It was his Translator with a capital T.
South of the Border, West of the Sun is translated by Philip Gabriel.
I have been reading translated works for a long time, but surprisingly the idea never struck me before. Some people choose to live as translators, in the shadows of the author so that we may be able to relive the magic of stories that would otherwise have rarely reached us.
And I’d always thought that it is the author’s book. It is, it definitely is. But may be it is not just the author’s book anymore. It is not just Murakami’s words anymore. It also belongs to Gabriel, whose translation takes me as close as possible to what Murakami intended.
To the re-creators of the magic.
I wanted to say, ‘Hi, Im….and I want to be a writer,’ instead I ended up saying Im interested in…(finance)(marketing)… not that I love those subjects any less, but I have always known how I placed writing at the top. But I was scared, ashamed may be, because what I wanted to become wasnt considered consistent （or may be I didnt see it） with what I was studying to become.
We are often told how there are a variety of things we can do out of the ordinary, I perhaps a business student myself can find a profession, a market inside of business that needs writing, where words are king and their creators-gods.
But for a moment caught between hesitation and the bandwagon of our life I uttered words that most utter, and the most also do so because the other most utter them. We are, at most scared of facing our own dreams, wandering if what we like does have a co-relation with what we are doing. It might just have a strong positive co-relation. Its in my hands to find the points and join them.
