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   マリオ (Mario Menti) (mario@neko.cat)'s status on Sunday, 20-Apr-2025 00:03:59 JST マリオ (Mario Menti)

   I finished Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters in a marathon session on my flight back from Tokyo.
   Fantastic book, but I didn't expect that after 562 pages, it would end with this sentence. 😅 ❤️

   #Tanizaki #TheMakiokaSisters

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     Robert Belton (shiawase@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 20-Apr-2025 05:00:17 JST Robert Belton

     in reply to

     @mario
     That prompted me to look at the original on aozora. Which seems a monster of a sentence with maybe 10 clauses. But looking at the rest of the page, the author makes liberal use of " 、" which maybe works like a full stop for him.
     I'm not a translator but it looks like an interesting problem.

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     マリオ (Mario Menti) (mario@neko.cat)'s status on Sunday, 20-Apr-2025 05:00:17 JST マリオ (Mario Menti)

     in reply to

     • Robert Belton

     @shiawase speaking of translation, I actually liked the translation on the whole. It's quite old-fashioned (it was translated in the 1950s by Edward G. Seidensticker), but that slightly old-fashioned English works really well given the book is set towards the end of the 1930s.
     It's quite funny how he added footnotes to terms like "sushi", which nowadays would be considered to be understood by any English reader, but clearly that wasn't the case then.
     He couldn't find a way to translate the original title though (細雪), because the nuances don't translate into English (eg the 雪 mirrors Yukiko, perhaps the main character in the novel), so he didn't want to go with something literal like "light snow" or similar.