-
Access our Top 20
Books of 2024!
Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Philip Gabriel is one of the major translators into English of the works of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and of works by Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe. He's also the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and Margins of Japanese Literature. He is a professor of modern Japanese literature and former head of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Philip Gabriel's website
This bio was last updated on 11/13/2018. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
As an undergrad you majored in Chinese but some Japanese novels motivated you to read them in their original form. What about those books enticed you to learn this language?
At the time, the Chinese books we were reading were all influenced by the ongoing Cultural Revolution and thus pretty boring. I wanted to read more typical fiction, but about East Asia, and the Japanese fiction I read in translation then excited me by its variety. I read Soseki, Kawabata, Tanizaki, Mishima, Oe, Abe, and found them all so different from each other, but also quite different from Western writers.
And what took you from reading the Japanese to translating books to English?
When I was living in Japan and working on my Japanese, I was part of a small reading circle of Japanese and U.S. academics in Nagasaki, where I lived. Just a handful of people who met regularly to read translations of modern Japanese literature and compare it with the original text, often line by line. The discussions we had were so stimulating that I started to think I could try my hand at translating.
What goes into your work process as you translate?
Blood, sweat and tears, as Churchill put it. You can read something in a foreign language and think you have it ...
Roland Merullo is the acclaimed author whose books include Revere Beach Boulevard, Golfing with God, and the Buddha trilogy: Breakfast with Buddha, lunch with Buddha and dinner with Buddha. Merullo's work has been translated ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Travelling Cat Chronicles
Try:
The Delight of Being Ordinary
by Roland Merullo
Yu Miri is a writer of plays, prose fiction, and essays, with over twenty books to her name. She received Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa, and her bestselling memoir was made into a movie. After the ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Travelling Cat Chronicles
Try:
Tokyo Ueno Station
by Yu Miri
We recommend 4 similar authors
.png)
The silence between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
