RE: Requital of a Crane (A Japanese Folktale)
I’m sorry I delayed responding to this. I tend to leave things that require more focus to a time when I have clearer head space. I can see you’ve had a lot of wonderful and well-deserved feedback in the mean time.
I read this twice. :)
I always look for folklore that I can read to my kids, and I love the theme covered here and would want to share that with them. So a part of me wondered if you might have made this a more compact read, while maintaining the integrity of the tale. Not a lot shorter mind you, I just felt there were opportunities as I read. But I have no experience in translations and just how much, if any, creative license is permitted. I also wondered on the way you did the dialogue in italics. Is that a Japanese folklore thing? It threw me a little.
Overall, I loved the sensitivity of this piece. It was a wonderful choice for your project. The symbology of birds in stories always interest me, so your introduction of the crane was much appreciated. Now it’s more than just origami to me. Hehe.
Thank you for sharing this, I wasn’t sure you would but had hoped. I didn’t expect you’d format the post so beautifully with the artwork. You’ve pleasantly surprised me with your writing and good taste! ❤️
I was a little surprised by the length of this one as well. I’ve translated four other tales and they were all about half the words of this one. I don’t know if I changed my style or not. I haven’t tried a translation like this in over a year and I wanted to jump into the writing with a fresh start so I didn’t look back at any of my other writing, or anyone else’s.
I really don’t know how much leeway you get when translating, but the text I worked from was very bare so I took a lot of liberties. I enjoy writing, but I’ve never really had ideas come to me whole, so for me it’s nice to have a very basic road map like the text I used to create the details around. I try to approach it as if I were writing a short story. Often times, folk tales are very sparse in their details. I want to do my best to fill those in with the details I’ve seen and sensed while living in Japan.
As for the italicized dialogue, that’s something I picked up at college. I was told that thoughts and dialogues could be written in italics without quotations and ever since the first time I tried formatting a piece like that, I preferred the way it looked.