Gained in translation

IT’S not often one gets the lowdown years later on an authority figure who was briefly a source of fascination. You know you’ve hit pay dirt when the inside scoop includes a ribald description of his most embarrassing moment -- an ungainly giant with a spastic colon grappling with a Japanese squat-toilet.

Back in 1975, when I was a sophomore at Princeton, I ventured into a course called Modern Japanese Literature in Translation. The professor was no one’s image of an academic -- a huge hulk in his mid-30s with long sideburns and a mess of dark hair.

If John Nathan was big, his personality was even bigger -- and his demands on his students were completely outsized. His reading assignments were terrific but outrageously extensive -- a syllabus on steroids, averaging three or four books a week. Regretfully, even the most conscientious among us cut corners. Nathan boomed bitter disappointment at our lack of preparation. After graduating from Harvard in 1961, he was the first foreigner admitted as a regular student to the University of Tokyo since the Russo-Japanese War ended in 1905; the workload in the Department of National Language and Literature made our assignments look like a cakewalk.

Although Nathan seemed temperamentally unsuited to academia, he was clearly brilliant and often mesmerizing. His passion for his subject, if not for his students, spewed forth like lava; he wanted to cover everything. I remember the excitement of hearing anecdotes about his friendships with Yukio Mishima, Kenzabur{omacronl} {omacronc}e and K{omacronl}b{omacronl} Abe and of reading stories by {omacronc}e in typescript, newly translated by Nathan -- who, while still in his 20s, had introduced {omacronc}e’s work to American readers with his 1968 translation of “A Personal Matter.”

After Nathan left Princeton in the late 1970s to devote himself to filmmaking, he directed a trio of documentaries about the Japanese. In 1999, he published “Sony: The Private Life” and in 2002 a translation of {omacronc}e’s “Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!”

All this is covered in his memoir, whose title, “Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere,” indicates a degree of self-awareness and candor that proved an irresistible lure to this former student, who found him a somewhat careless professor.

No surprise to his students, Nathan is a practiced storyteller. “Living Carelessly” is an engaging chronicle of his passionate lifelong involvement with Japan. It offers a vivid picture of Japanese culture from someone who infiltrated it intimately -- studying at its top university, marrying Japanese printmaker Mayumi Oda, fraternizing with its best writers and documenting lunch-box workers, rice farmers, Kabuki actors and Sony founders on film. Yet despite this intimacy, Nathan confesses repeatedly to finding the Japanese character “elusive” and “imponderable,” “an intriguing and lovely mystery.”

“Living Carelessly” is also a candid confessional portrait of a man so driven to prove his artistic talents (to himself and others) that his achievements in several realms fail to satisfy him. Nathan, it turns out, is no easier on himself than he was on his students. He blames himself for the failure of his first marriage after 17 years and repeatedly highlights his arrogance and insouciance in business matters and personal relationships, noting that “tranquillity . . . has continued to elude me.”

He sets the tone on the opening page, introducing himself as an unlikely devotee of the Japanese, the grandson of a reporter for the Jewish Daily Forward named Nathan Stupniker: “I am a hulking man with a hairy chest, parboiled hands, and a basso profundo voice in which I have a predilection for sounding my own horn. In short, there is nothing delicate about me -- allow me to say, nothing apparent -- yet delicacy is thought to be definitive of the Japanese sensibility.” This wry self-portrait squares so perfectly with my memories that I had to laugh.

For the most part, Nathan maintains his balance on the tightrope between hubris and humility essential to such career retrospectives. It’s a gift to be able to dine out on your failures, turning them into amusing anecdotes (though one suspects, gratefully, that there’s lots of dirty linen he’s decided to keep indoors).

Nathan’s history as a translator encapsulates the vicissitudes of his career. The chance to work with Mishima, “the most famous novelist in the land,” arose because the former translator, Donald Keene, was otherwise engaged. Nathan, whose command of Japanese was so good that a Tokyo professor declared it usankusai (“bizarre to the point of being suspicious”), was “too young and too excited to feel daunted.” In the 10 months he spent translating “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea,” he hung out with Mishima “as though we were friends.” Mishima, he writes, “declared that we were an ‘unbeatable team,’ and asked me to help him win the Nobel Prize.” But when Nathan backed out of translating Mishima’s next novel, “Silk and Insight,” which he found “difficult” and “unrewarding,” the friendship, and a potential long-term contract with Knopf, ended abruptly. Mishima considered Nathan’s agreement to translate {omacronc}e’s “A Personal Matter” for Grove Press an unforgivable act of disloyalty.

As it turned out, Yasunari Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to garner the Nobel Prize, in 1968. Two years later, Mishima committed hara-kiri, and Nathan contracted to write “Mishima: A Biography,” published in 1974.

By the time {omacronc}e won the Nobel in 1994 -- in part on the strength of Nathan’s translations -- they had been out of touch for 10 years. Nathan had been consumed by his attempt to prove himself as an American filmmaker and by the collapse of his production company, which produced such PBS business documentaries as “In Search of Excellence” and “Entrepreneurs.” Despite the estrangement, Nathan went to Stockholm, where he vowed to make more of {omacronc}e’s writing available to readers of English. He also returned, more happily this time, to a professional life in both film and academia, that again revolved around Japan. He remains the Takashima Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara.

Nathan notes, however, that he’s translated just one {omacronc}e novel since 1994 and comments that if he’d kept at it despite the poor pay, he might have earned himself “a permanent seat at the table of literary history.” He explains ruefully, “my unceasing efforts to undermine myself allowed me to invalidate even translation as a genuine measure of creative gift.”

Yet, as this memoir makes clear, Nathan’s achievements, while falling short of his dreams -- whose don’t? -- add up to more than he thinks. Even when he was most “bored with . . . Princeton,” he inspired at least one student with his transcultural penetration. The year after his course, I went to Japan on a summer teaching fellowship. Like him, but lacking his fluency in Japanese, I stood out everywhere as a light-eyed gaijin. I learned quickly that mentioning an admiration for {omacronc}e alienated me even further, branding me an intellectual. Nevertheless, over the course of that summer and the decades since, I made a point of finishing every single book -- and then some -- on Nathan’s syllabus. They were wonderful.