Posts tagged with meet-me-in-a-dream
Soft Serve, by Shigesato-Itoi
my translation of the 53rd story (out of 99) of 夢で会いましょう [Meet Me in a Dream] by Haruki Murakami and Shigesato Itoi, not guaranteed to be accurate. see the intro post to read more!
I wonder, are there criminals still who kidnap kids by offering them ice cream?
When I was that precious, young, kidnappable age, I heard the warnings all the time. And it made some sense. Who wouldn’t succumb to ice cream then?
Soft serve ice cream—the only kind a kid could care about—was discovered by artisan mistake. The cone was added after to give the cream a place to rest when your tongue needed a break from the cold. These were things I’d known. I knew that the white ice cream was vanilla, the brown was chocolate, the red was strawberry. I knew you could buy a swirl of any two. I knew if you ate it scrupulously from the top till you hit the cone, you’d condemned yourself to sticky hands. I knew you had to lick around the sides, to make a column.
All I didn’t know then was the taste.
When something tastes bad, it goes, you can’t forget it. When something’s good, the memory won’t stay.
Once I reached the bottom of any cone, its little recesses so much like netting… once I’d ate those last few crunchy bits… The taste of soft serve had already left me.
If only I could have had a cone three whole days in a row—no, even just two cones two days alone—then the taste would stay forever mine.
But no: such a dream was no more than delicious fantasy. The true sweet memory of soft serve ice cream would remain an abstract thing, no more than a tempting topic of discussion between friends.
Translator's Note: again, with Itoi, this: the way he strings his sentences together feels so natural in Japanese, but I can't adapt it to English quite the same, not without altering the casual voice. Instead, as usual, I fall to punctuation. See those ellipses there? I made them up. They're an original. Again, I err on the side of "a casual deal."
Xerox, by Shigesato-Itoi
my translation of the forty-seventh story (out of 99) of 夢で会いましょう [Meet Me in a Dream] by Haruki Murakami and Shigesato Itoi, not guaranteed to be accurate. see the intro post to read more!
It’s kinda wild that a guy who gets mad at a girl for putting her ass on the copier ends up being the guy who turns the same copier on my colleague’s telling me while shredding a vulgar result of this down into the trash but both are just as guilty of it is my complete thoughts on it and thinking on this while I talk I ask him hey want a copy of mine like my mouth’s gone rouge and made this decision its own and god almighty the shame that I’m suddenly bathed in but what’s that phrase ye who’s without sin throw the first stone and it’s all the Xerox’s fault anyway but again what’s that other old phrase love the sinner hate the sin and who says this wisdom can’t be held to the machine also and yeah I’m annoyed and completely embarrassed but its my place to yell out or complain but already the guys and the girls in the office have overheard this and they’ve all come around to laugh and throw insults and film me falling completely apart and I swear somewhere near very near I hear babies cry out and I have to wonder certainly this is a dream but then what do you know some new asshole’s come over and squashed down my dream in the copier too and the cops have been called and they’re here with the judge and the jury’s already come back and I’m sentenced death on a mimeograph cross in the company break room.
Translator's Note:
In the original Japanese, they spell it _Zerox_. I did _not_ respect this decision.
If you've read my original stuff (in English), you know I'm a lover of the long sentence, so as a challenge to myself I tried to maintain the original's lack of punctuation—something much harder to do in English, lacking particles to indicate parts of speech. In their place I _attempted_ to use rhythm to offer a little guidance, in imitation of spoken language. Did it work? I don't know.
Also: italics is _technically_ cheating, but god did I feel i needed it.