‘A Shameful Life’ (‘No Longer Human’) – The Marc Gibeau Translation

After yesterday’s look at the Donald Keene version of Osamu Dazai’s Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human), it’s time to move on and discuss its successor.  This one has been out for a few years now, and while it hasn’t attracted the attention of its illustrious predecessor, it’s an enjoyable read, and certainly well worth a look.  But who is the person responsible for it, and what distinguishes it from the earlier translation?  Well, come this way, and I’ll do my best to answer those questions, starting with the vexed matter of why it has a different name…

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In 2018, Stone Bridge Press brought out a new translation of Dazai’s classic novel under the title A Shameful Life (Ningen Shikkaku).  The translator this time around was Marc Gibeau, and while he doesn’t really discuss why the title was changed in his afterword or notes on the translation, there’s a sense that it was a deliberate attempt to distance his version from Keene’s translation, in effect, shifting himself slightly out of the great man’s shadow.

Gibeau’s ‘Translator’s Afterword’ is nice and long (very useful for people like me!), with a slightly different focus to Keene’s introduction.  Written for a modern Anglophone audience, it concentrates on two areas.  The first is the ‘I-Novel’, the Japanese genre of the time, which stressed authenticity of character (and insights into the author’s own life) over plot, preferring truth (or ‘truthiness’) to the invented.  The second is the writer’s life, and Gibeau provides a lot of information about Dazai that the original readership would have had fresh in their minds while reading the book.

As was the case in Phyllis I. Lyons’ work The Saga of Dazai Osamu, Gibeau elaborates on the complicated relationship between Yōzō Ōba (the character), Osamu Dazai (the writer) and Shūji Tsushima (the person – Dazai’s real name).  However, he also offers a helpful warning:

As readers, we risk falling into a similar trap.  We risk seeing only half of the novel, just as the Madam has only seen half of Yōzō.  We risk seeing in this novel the story of Dazai Osamu and, through him, the story of Tsushima Shūji.  We risk looking for answers to such questions as why Tsushima Shūji committed suicide with Yamazaki Tomie.  Yet in doing so we also ignore the overarching message of the novel.  The impossibility of knowing another.  That is, the impossibility of understanding and the impossibility of being understood.
p. 137 (Stone Bridge Press, 2018)

It’s a telling reminder that it’s best not to try too hard to draw parallels between fiction and real life, no matter how tempting it is (and believe me, in this case it certainly is!).

In the short ensuing ‘Notes on the Current Translation’, Gibeau is a little more coy.  Answering his own question of ‘why?’, his retranslation of a classic appears to have been more of an intellectual exercise than springing from any desire to usurp Keene:

I was immediately struck by Dazai’s vivid, wandering, shifting, endless, labyrinthine sentences.  How in the world does one translate something like this? (p.139)

And yet, while he’s careful to avoid any criticism of his predecessor, if you read between the lines, and ponder his wish “to avoid ‘editing’ Dazai’s novel” (p.140), there’s a veiled suggestion that DK did take liberties and that this version will set a few things right…

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So, how does Gibeau’s version of the novel read?  Well, there are definite differences in style and language.   There’s clearly a slight toning down of vocabulary, with not quite as many noticeable words jumping out at the modern reader as in the first translation.  Other differences include the occasional use of Yō-chan as a diminutive, which is absent from the Keene translation, and the way in which the language of Yōzō’s friend, Horiki, is more marked:

“Hey, lend me five yen, will ya?” (p.37)
  versus Keene’s
“Can you lend me five yen?” (New Directions, 1973, p.59)

I wonder which is closer to the original text…

For a few other comparisons with Keene’s text, I’ll return to some of the vocabulary I picked out yesterday.  Instead of prologue, notebooks and epilogue, Gibeau opts instead for preface, journals and epilogue.  In the section introducing Yōzō to the Marxists, social outcasts, criminal consciousness and a wound of a guilty conscience become pariah, guilty conscience, to have skeletons in one’s closet (hmm – some major differences there), and our old friend Flatfish is rechristened as Flounder.

The little song mentioned yesterday is also slightly different, indented in the text, and with drawn-out vowel sounds indicated:

Whaaat narrow alley is thiiis?
Whaaat narrow alley is thiiis? (p.108)

Again, does the original justify this variation?  It would be great to see the Japanese here!

In terms of grammar and sentence structure, there’s a slight difference evident right from the preface.  There’s far more use of ‘I’, where Keene prefers an impersonal ‘you’, and Gibeau seems to have a preference for longer sentences, and the use of fronted adverbials – for example:

Never in my life have I seen a man with such a peculiar face. (Gibeau, p.10)
I have never seen such an inscrutable face on a man. (Keene, p.17)

For me, the effect of these changes is smoother, but is it Dazai?  Well, you’d have to read the Japanese to decide that.  One thing Keene definitely has on Gibeau, though, is his use of French as I’m afraid the new version simply translates the poem Yōzō recalls into English…

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If I’m honest, I was slightly concerned about starting the Gibeau translation as I was worried that I was going to hate it, given it was a translator whose work I wasn’t familiar with messing with an established classic.  However, A Shameless Life provides a smooth, enjoyable read, and on the whole, it’s probably more to my liking than the Keene version.  In any case, it’s certainly not a disaster, and it’s a version I’m happy to recommend…

…so why, only six years after it was released, is there yet another translation to try?  Find out tomorrow 😉