Shuntaro Tanikawa.

Another post about an interesting translator: Michael S. Rosenwald at the NY Times reports that “Shuntaro Tanikawa, Popular Poet and Translator of ‘Peanuts,’ Dies at 92” (archived).

Shuntaro Tanikawa, Japan’s most popular poet for more than half a century, whose stark and whimsical poems, blending humor with melancholy, made him a kind of Everyman philosopher ideally suited to translating the “Peanuts” comic strip and Mother Goose rhymes into Japanese, died on Nov. 13 in Tokyo. He was 92. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter, Shino Tanikawa, who did not specify a cause.

A perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mr. Tanikawa was revered in Japan, not just in literary circles but also among casual readers. It was not uncommon to see commuters reading his books on the subway. He published more than 60 collections of poetry, beginning in 1952, when he was 21, with “Alone in Two Billion Light Years” — a book that heralded a bold new voice who shunned haiku and other traditional Japanese forms of verse. […]

In the late 1960s, as Western pop culture took hold in Japan, a local publisher hired Mr. Tanikawa to translate Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts” into Japanese. “Peanuts” collections were best sellers in Japan, and eventually Snoopy-branded stores, hotels and cafes popped up throughout the country. In 2016, the Charles M. Schulz Museum opened a satellite outpost in Japan called the Snoopy Museum Tokyo.

Cultural critics, podcasters and even academic publications like the Journal of General Management have sought to unravel the popularity of “Peanuts” in Japan. One reason they point to: Mr. Schulz’s simple drawing style, which mirrors the sleek, stark aesthetic of Japanese design and pop culture.

Another, possibly bigger, reason: Mr. Tanikawa’s extraordinary ability to mimic the voices of “Peanuts” characters, whose philosophical sensibilities — encapsulated in Snoopy’s line “You play with the cards you’re dealt … whatever that means” — resonated with Japanese society.

Mr. Tanikawa and Mr. Schulz’s widow, Jean Schulz, discussed the poet-cartoonist mind meld during a 2016 conversation published in one of the Schulz Museum’s exhibition catalogs. “I had the impression that he was like a philosopher,” Mr. Tanikawa said, according to a translation of the conversation provided by the museum. He added, “I think Snoopy is a dog sometimes becoming really close to how humans feel.”

I’m in no position to judge either his poetry or his Peanuts work, but I like very much the fact that he successfully combined the two.

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    I wonder if it helped that the format was familiar anyway?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonkoma

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