Category Archives: passive

Boobs

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With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement.


 

Murakami (Do I even need to tell you which one?) lived in Europe for three years between 1986 and 1989. In addition to novels and short stories, he also wrote a lengthy set of travel writings called Tōi taiko (遠い太鼓, A Distant Drum).

During his travels he spent some time on a small Greek island, and the tourists there often sunbathed nude. Apparently only the local Greek men (he calls them "Zorba Greeks") went to the trouble of checking out the boobs. This resulted in a three-page discussion of nude sunbathing and the following moment of complete linguistic genius:

おっぱいを出すのも勝手なら、出されたおっぱいを見るのも勝手である。

(I was going to write the page number at the end of that line, but when I realized it was page 69, I thought I’d better explain what I was doing.)

The Japanese is so economical that translating it won’t be as great, but here it goes:

If it’s a person’s prerogative to reveal her boobs, then it’s also a person’s prerogative to look at revealed boobs

That kind of expresses what’s going on with the verb. 出す literally means “take out,” but I translated it as “reveal” in order to maintain the verb tenses and still have the sentence sound okay, although, now that I think about it, “taken-out boobs” is a pretty funny phrase.

The major difference between the English and the Japanese is that no people are explicitly involved in the Japanese sentence; all of the subjects are implied, and he uses the loaded word 勝手 (かって). "Prerogative" feels a little complicated, but I guess it does the job. 勝手 is often used as an adverb (勝手に〜) to mean "do ~ however I want" or "do ~ even though I’m thinking only of myself and not the Japanese collective spirit." One word that pops up in the dictionary is "arbitrary." So does "one’s own way" and "selfishness."

So yes, long story short, if you reveal your boobs, do not be surprised when people look at them.

 

Note to Self – 言われました

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Any time you want to say one of these phrases in Japanese

“He told me ____.”
“She told me ____.”
“They told me ____.”
“It told me ____.”
“The ____ told me ____.”

you should always be using 言われました.

Embracing Japanese Expression – Get Used to It 2

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2. Passive Tense

Arguably, there is nothing more foreign to English speakers than the Japanese passive tense, but the sooner you learn to understand it and use it, the sooner you learn to take off your active tense floaties, the more comfortable you will be with the language. If you grew up as I did, you learned the iron-clad rule “AVOID THE PASSIVE TENSE!” It’s weak. It’s not strong. It’s passive. Well, forget that rule, because there is no rule against using the passive tense in Japanese.

Let’s start with a useful example: そう言われると、そうだよね。

This is the Japanese way of saying, “Now that you mention it…(you’re right! / that is true).”

Let’s look at what’s happening in the Japanese. Here’s the ugly (but occasionally useful) direct translation:

When such( I) am told, it is that way.

I have put the “I” in parenthesis because there is no pronoun in the Japanese. But this leaves someone missing – the person who is doing the telling. The most accurate way to direct translate this is: When such (I) am told (by you). But would anyone ever say anything like that in English? Absolutely not. If you tried to do a literal translation from English to Japanese of “Now that you mention it…” (Something along the lines of, “今あなたがそれを言うと、”), you’ll end up with something just as silly.

The other way you may hear this pattern is, そう言われてみれば、.

The other usage of the passive tense is to describe adverse circumstances – when shit goes wrong. Here’s an example that should be familiar to all elementary school teachers:

ダニエル先生、どうしたの？
What’s wrong, Daniel?

カンチョウされた！
A first-grader just kanchoed me!

Passive tense is very frequently used when something bad or unfortunate happens to you. If we add in all the people to the second sentence above, you get:

私が一年生にカンチョウされた！
I was kanchoed by a first-grader unfortunately.

I’ve added the “unfortunately” to help express the adverse nature of the circumstance.

Now let’s make it even stronger. I mean, come on, a kid just stuck his fingers up your butt! You don’t want to just said, “First grader put fingers in my butt,” you want to be able to say, “Goddammit, that little fuck just stuck his fingers up my hairy asshole!”

カンチョウされてしまった！

しまった is the relatively mild exclamatory phrase which means something like, “Darn.” But change that to　カンチョウされちゃった! , add a little grunt, and then you’ll be expressing some of that fervor! されちゃった is just the contracted form of されてしまう。