this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Was autopilot a thing in 1950? (Sorry, should have mentioned when the text was actually written)
Even if it was, I’m not sure a young woman that grew up in Imperialist Japan would necessarily know what it was.
There’s plenty of modern words that I can use, but I’ve hit a wall for words that are era-appropriate.
Given that automata (plural) were a frequent diplomatic gift from the West to the East in the 17th/18th centuries, maybe she would have a vague understanding of the concept. Especially if she was fond of romance stories/dramas in an Above the Clouds setting. I can think of at least one fable about an emperor who was given a mechanical bird in a cage that sang when the handle was turned by someone else.
This is the tricky/challenging/really interesting thing about this. When it comes to trauma translation, the norms, conventions and scholarship around it state emphatically that you can’t appropriate another’s trauma experience. You can’t make assumptions on behalf of the trauma survivor. The problem is that translation is, of itself, a form of transmutation. It doesn’t occur in a vacuum and there are always going to be things that get changed in translation.
If the survivor writer is someone well known that you can dig and find information on, it can help. But with these accounts, most of them didn’t live more than a decade after and there is absolutely no information about them besides what is in their testimony. So if they state that their profession is a doctor or a high school teacher, or if they write with a lot of Chinese characters, then I can safely assume that they’ve had a decent education. If they write in a particularly literary way, then I can assume that they are familiar with literature and replicate their register in translation. If the account is void of that, then I have to go on thoroughly educated guesses. I have no way of knowing if she was fond of anything at all.
Fair point. Is there any way of finding out what films/general readership books etc. were popular at the time? Maybe the publishing houses of the day (if any survive) have a list of best sellers. This might be a way to get an idea of what was going on in popular culture at the time. Like, I'm not a film person, but I do recognise the names of popular films atm and have an idea of what they're about even though I've never watched them and probably never will. Even current tv shows might give some idea of what was popular - that is, if tv was around in that area at that time. Would shinto religious observance be useful source of info about probable life experience? Or other customary observances that are traditional to that general area? I'm thinking of the tree-threatening ceremony, for orchard growers.