Me and the president Originally uploaded by Durf Martti Ahtisaari is a former Finnish president and the recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He came to Japan to speak on conflict resolution and then toured the tsunami-stricken areas near Sendai. I got to tag along and interview him for around a half-hour in the [...]
Archive for the ‘work’ Category
Mishima article
I went ahead and scanned the Japan Echo piece I mentioned in my last post. You can go grab it here: Mishima_dialogue.pdf It weighs in at more than 6 MB, so don’t click it if you’re on a slow connection.
APEC 2010
Room to work Originally uploaded by Durf Japan Echo Inc. is once again working in the International Media Center at a big summit gig. Last time was the G8 summit in Hokkaido in 2008, and now it’s the APEC summit in Yokohama. Not much to report yet, as the foreign ministers are just starting to [...]
Talking about publishing
Yesterday I went to a symposium hosted by the Nippon Foundation. The foundation brought a pretty stellar group of fiction editors from Britain and the United States to talk about comparisons between the fiction publishing scenes in the English-speaking world and in Japan, the role of editors and agents, and what they look for when [...]
The fine art of translation . . .
. . . lies in not making the baby throw up. So once you get over the frustration at having to translate what you think is nonsense, take a deep breathe and ask yourself: “what is this text really trying to say, and how can I convey that with minimum disruption to the intended reader?” [...]
