Flipped!: A David P. Welsh Back-To-School Special On Translating Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei



By David P. Welsh

"Japanese is a tricky language for most Westerners," Del Rey observes in its translation notes at the back of each volume of manga it publishes, "and translation is often more art than science." The boilerplate is expanded for one of the publisher's more recent series: "In the case of a text-dense manga like Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, it's a delicate art indeed."

The series, written and illustrated by Koji Kumeta and subtitled The Power of Negative Thinking, does seem like a translator's triathlon. There's an enormous volume of dialogue and narrative text on just about every page. It's a dialogue-driven comedy, presenting the various pitfalls of puns and turns of phrase that don't translate easily, if at all. And the text is packed with very specific cultural references that even Del Rey describes as "difficult to understand... without some serious background knowledge of current events [in Japan] at the time the manga was running."

Depending on the translator's thirst for a challenge, it sounds like either a dream job or a nightmare. Del Rey is usually very generous with its supplemental notes on linguistic and cultural references, but Sayonara takes them to a different plateau. The first and third volumes each have a dozen pages of them in small print, and the second has eleven. Even the chapter titles, often drawn from classic and contemporary Japanese literature, require annotations.



Here's an example from the first volume:

"Post-Graduation Career Despair Survey, page 25

"This is a more obvious pun in Japanese than in English. In Japanese, kibou means 'hope.' It's made up of the kanji ki and bou, which taken individually, also mean 'hope.' However, since zetsu means 'to sever, cut off, shut off, die out,' etc., the word zetsubou means 'despair' or 'hopelessness.' Both words use the same root, bou."

I've seen refereed articles in scholarly journals with fewer footnotes. I don't really know how translators are compensated for their work, but I hope that Joyce Aurino, who translated and adapted the three available volumes of Sayonara, makes better than scale. I'm thinking of a possible hazard supplement and a spa weekend between installments. The science of her work is obviously rigorous and demanding beyond usual standards, and the art of it is also impressive.

For all of the laborious mechanics that went into presenting it as something comprehensible for an English-reading audience, Sayonara is intended to be a snappy, satirical school comedy. It's a caustic, unsentimental Azumanga Daioh or a less surreal, less deadpan Cromartie High School. It was originally serialized in Kodansha's Weekly Shônen Magazine, primarily targeted at teen males. Whatever else one achieves with the translation, the result should be... well... funny.



It is, and sometimes it's very funny indeed. The book is about a suicidal high-school teacher and his class full of stereotypical misfits. The students have names, but it's much easier to remember them by their archetypes -- Super-Positive Girl, Methodical and Precise Girl, Poison Email Girl, Ordinary Girl, and so on. Having yet to successfully end his life, Itoshiki-sensei passes the time by teaching his charges about just how capricious, contradictory and hypocritical the world is. He's not trying to gird them for the difficulties they'll someday face; he just likes sharing his wealth of misery.

There's no need to contact the Board of Education or Child Protective Services. The student body is armed with their individual fixations and the willful ignorance those fixations can impart. It's almost a symbiotic relationship; the dimwitted, dysfunctional adolescents are forever providing new sources of despair for their woebegone instructor.

It's an episodic situation comedy, and Del Rey was right to think that its rapid-fire cynicism is at least somewhat universally funny. There are dimwitted students and neurotic teachers the world over. Unworthy celebrities, incomprehensible bureaucracies, and alienating, counter-productive modern conveniences are the domain of no single nation. There are some hilarious high points, and the stories are always at least amusing.



There isn't much in the way of characterization, though that's hardly a flaw given Kumeta's format and aims. He's assembled a range of familiar stereotypes to help him make whatever barbed point he has in mind, and he blocks them well in that regard. He can generally pull the right fixation to the forefront to give the punch line more oomph. I do wish he'd been more distinct with character design; even though they're marked stereotypes internally, the classmates can visually blur together at points. Overall, though, the art is crisp and chipper, providing polished if not especially innovative visual irony.

Like most situation comedies, especially ones that eschew subplot and character development, Sayonara reads best in small doses, as it can become repetitive over continued exposure. If you sprinkle a chapter or two in between other things you're reading, the material stays fresher. I don't really see that as a failing, as it was created to be serialized in a periodical.

As for those copious notes in the back, I have to credit both Kumeta and Aurino with the fact that they aren't strictly necessary to appreciate Sayonara. The stories themselves have a nice, satirical bite even if you can't identify every pop idol or government functionary being referenced. It's nice that you can flip to the glossary to get the nuances of the joke, but it's a relief that you don't really need to.

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* Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking, written and illustrated by Koji Kumeta, Del Rey, 192 pages, February 24, 2009, $10.99, ISBN: 978-0-345-50893-5

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* art from Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking, selected by David Welsh

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David P. Welsh has loved comics since his parents first used Archie and Casper to sedate him during long trips in the family station wagon.

He's worked as a reporter and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, and later sold out for the glamorous world of public relations. Prior to relocating to The Comics Reporter, he wrote his Flipped column for Comic World News for just over three years. He's written articles on comics for print outlets and a variety of other web sites.

He lives in West Virginia, which he says has gotten a lot easier since the Starbucks and Barnes & Noble opened up.

You may e-mail David with questions or commentary You can write to this site about David's columns

Please bookmark his site, Precocious Curmudgeon.

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