I’m slammed by so many work emergencies these days I haven’t had time to write too much for myself, but here a couple of quick little thoughts about the uses of literature in translation and in the world to follow up on What Good Is Literature?:
1. Literature: It’s What’s on TV
Every so often people ask me whether a liberal arts education really prepared me for my career. The short answer is, yes. The longer answer is, yes, and without a strong literary and liberal arts background, my translations of TV shows and films would be not only inferior to what I can do now, but just plain sub-standard. You can’t afford to miss the explicit literary references made in films, and those notes usually aren’t in the script–you just have to have to know them, or have enough ear for literature to recognize a quote even if you don’t know it. A random sampling of spontaneous quotes I’ve encountered in anime:
- Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and most of the rest of Shakespeare’s canon
- Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl
- Antigone
- Alice in Wonderland
- Science fiction works by Robert A. Heinlein & others
- Dante’s Divine Comedy
- Yasunari Kawabata‘s Snow Country & other famous works by Japanese authors
- The Bible, the Koran, various sections of the Apocrypha, Kabbalistic writings, Buddhist sutras, etc.
2. Literature: It Moves Society Forward
I’m a devotee of the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast, and in the various biographies of important historical figures, I’ve noticed a theme. For the women in the 1600s through the early 1900s, times when women of all classes were often barred from the same education men got, there was one sentence that popped up over and over in the biographies of women who revolutionized their fields of poetry, science, human rights, et cetera: “Her father gave her full access to his library.”
Sometimes, of course, it was the library of a brother, a family friend, or some other figure. And as often as not, these women’s fathers still didn’t allow them to pursue an “unwomanly” formal education–but they were allowed to read what they liked. And then they changed the world.
Something to think about!