Fandom Pulse interviewed me about Castalia House’s new translation program that has already translated 18 works from Japanese, Spanish, and Italian:
In the book world, some of the most interesting things happening are coming out of the Castalia Library. Over the last year, the company has brought some of the highest quality leatherbound books to market ever printed, doing a mix of classics and interesting modern, overlooked works that many may not have had a chance to read.
Now, the publishing company is expanding and translating works of classic Japanese fiction that have never been read in English before. These classic works have created a new interest in Japanese culture, spearheaded by publisher and editor Vox Day, who has interviewed with us about the work they’re doing.
Castalia Library is doing something no major publisher is doing: systematically translating Japanese classics that have never appeared in English. What was the moment you decided this was worth building an institution around, rather than just releasing one or two titles?
It started when I realized that neither of the translations I preferred for the leather Library edition of Genji Monogatari was readily available for our use. Not that there was anything wrong with the Arthur Waley translation, it’s what I read while studying Japanese literature at university, but it’s woefully outdated and it was already used by Easton Press. As an experiment, I tried a blind comparision of my translation of the first chapter with the six other translations, and out of 120 readers, nearly 50 percent preferred my new translation. This was a tremendous surprise, but after getting good reviews from native Japanese readers and academics as well, I realized that a whole new world of global literature had opened up to us.
So, while I worked on Genji, I asked Kenji to start with a shorter classic that only had one or two older and outdated translations, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki. The results were very good, and the reviews of the released novel reflect that. Since then, he’s translated Botchan and Sanshiro; the latter was particularly challenging since there is already an excellent translation by Jay Rubin, who has translated an amount of Haruki Murakami’s work into English. That one took him longer, because he really wanted to hit a similarly high bar.
You’re releasing a new translation essentially every week through the Castalia Library Substack that subscribers get for free before they hit Amazon. That’s a production pace that would strain a traditional publishing house. How did you build the infrastructure to sustain that?
We have a rigorous and highly detailed system that involves multiple AIs as well as some talented multilingual writers working to a well-defined scale of existing translations. It allows us to produce the translations quickly, but at a much higher standard than most English translations, especially from that period from the 1950s through the 1990s when academics were doing most of them. Academic translations tend to be accurate, but excessively dry. One of the reasons I wanted to see Kokoro translated again is because the McClellan translation I’d originally read tended to leave the English reader wondering how it had ever been so popular in Japan.
Read the whole thing at Fandom Pulse.