I expected my next post to be about ATA 54 from a freelancer’s perspective, but a recent Intralingo post spotlighting literary translator Peter McCambridge sent me in another direction.

Mr. McCambridge, a Canadian translator, mentions a specific moment with a specific book—Bestiaire by Eric Dupont—where “as soon as I put it down, all I wanted to do with my life was translate it.”

Reading that, I felt such a jolt of recognition. Yes, that’s what the world looks like through Translator Goggles! You may not even realize you’ve put on the goggles, but from that moment on, an almost visceral urge to translate certain works you’ve experienced is inevitable. You see a work of art through those goggles, and you realize you’re seeing what you need to be doing. It’s happened to me a few times over the last 15 or so years, but perhaps the very first life dream the goggles gave me was a dream I knew deep down could never come true.

…Until it sort of did.

The birth of the dream came sometime during my freshman and/or sophomore years of college, when a friend of mine showed several of us a Japanese TV show from the 1990s that was unlike any other TV show we’d ever seen. That show was called Revolutionary Girl Utena (少女革命ウテナ).

It wasn’t the fact that it was anime that made it different from other shows. By that time I’d been introduced to anime already, and Utena was different than other anime. It was different than everything everywhere. And it still is. To this very day, I have never seen anything like it, or anything that tried to accomplish more than a very small subset of the same things, with the recent exception of Puella Magi Madoka Magica to the latter. And beyond being different, it made us think differently. I thought about gender differently. I lent it to a coworker earlier this year, over a decade after it originally came out, and when she gave it back she said, “I feel like a different person now.” That’s how powerful it was. It’s probably the reason why I’ve stayed in the anime industry so long, through so many hard times: it tells me what’s possible.

So of course I lusted to translate it. I wasn’t even qualified back then, but it was a dream. A dream I never even really had, because surely it couldn’t come true: Utena had already been translated in the United States, and it’s exceedingly rare for a show to get retranslated.

Years later I entered the industry, and I occasionally fantasized. I believe my first boss told me I could retranslate it if our company ever picked it up, but it still wasn’t a dream I could really dream.

And then, years later still, there was the remaster of the series. I thought someone would probably pick it up for US distribution eventually. If it had been my company, I’m sure my new boss would have let me work on it, but since it wasn’t, the dream still felt beyond my reach… until to my surprise, someone from the US distributer Nozomi contacted me.

She said that she’d received my information from a colleague who knew how I felt about the series. That when she’d pitched a certain job to my colleague, my colleague had referred her to me. The job: to translate pages and pages of interviews about the series to be made into booklets for the new DVDs.

And so, through a friendly relationship with a fellow translator and my retelling over and over of why I’m here (because Utena is possible), I got to dream the impossible dream and have it in a certain way come true. I got to touch the show I’d wanted to translate through the medium of translating booklets about it.

My client, Nozomi, was even good enough to give me a credit for the booklet and a copy of the ring you saw me wearing at the very top of this post, which came with the special edition.

 

So you know the answer already of why I’ve stayed. But if and when I stop, when I ask myself, “Was anime worth it?” I know I’ll say yes. And it turns out that both answers are the same.