What happens when you run out of things to read? Consider the zoomer aesthete, stricken by the twin afflictions of leviathan appetite and particular tastes. They haven’t read everything, but they’ve certainly read everything they care to. Discerning enough to deem their well tapped dry, whereto look they now, yon unknown frontier?
Why, the mysterious East, of course. The spirit of Burton and Müller yet lives, and animates wide swathes of the Western youth. Save us, President Xi, they cry, save us. Shinbo Abe, lend us your fecundity. Kim Jong Un, please bless our drip. This tedium we cannot bear!
The least dedicated slake themselves with anime and k-dramas; this is your base weaboo and koreaboo. But for the Tarrares of taste, television will not suffice — its offerings are too finite (for production is an expensive affair) and too fattened (for the show itself sets the pace).
They dive a layer deeper.
Eastern shows are often adaptations of manga (JP), manhwa (KR), or manhua (CN), respectively. Alacrity! One can scroll through a graphic novel in a fraction of the time it takes to watch an episode. For all the slaving of the artists, barely a second is spared for each static frame; errant emanata fly by in a froth of speech bubbles.
But the appetite of the aesthete remains unsated. They dive a layer deeper.
Manga series are often adapted from ‘light novels,’ so-called for their unpretentious language and length. Pulp fiction, and with a dense publication cycle: often no more than a few months between books. This pace, unhobbled by any illustrator, suits our deep-end divers a little better … but is it best? Another bottleneck remains: that of the pesky publisher, gatekeeping the grist with jealous glee.
They dive yet another layer deeper.
Only the canniest customers sup straight from the source: the Japanese ライトノベル, the Korean 웹소설, the Chinese 网络小说 — the webnovel. The purest of projects, undiluted and uncontaminated by any editor or formal training. The raw material of dreams; the author’s vision alone. However.
There is one last bottleneck. Those sad sacks of woe we call monoglots (best spat with audible disdain: “you fucken’ monoglot.”) rely on the magnanimity of hobbyist translators to port their stories across the pond. It’s a thankless job; remuneration rare. The clamoring crowd feels entitled to their entertainments. Their attitude is decidedly piratical.
(In their defense, if our divers paid a nickel for every title they read, they’d be in dire straits indeed.)
To squeeze past this last bottleneck, they may try to — for once in their lives — learn something. They google strange names like “anki” and “pimsleur.” Alas, avidity of appetite is not be confused with wit, and our lotus-eaters find their learning faculties atrophied through lack of use. Whereto now, young heroes?
In this world of wonders — smallpox slain and footprints on the moon — it seems as all our problems can be solved by technology. Thus, machine translation is a seductive art, though no less dark.
This is the final frontier, where only the bravest biblionauts dare venture. Beware: there is a grey space between languages, an unfathomable abyss, and its traversal is not without hazards. The machine cannot be trusted. It is a primitive and wicked tool, apt to lie and mislead its master. Take its rendition of Lord of Mysteries:
Pain! Good pain! Good pain!
Grotesque and gaudy full is the dreamland of whispering is rapid, sleeps soundly Zhou Mingrui only to think that the head pulls out the pain to be unusual, seemed used the club to brandish ruthlessly, no, is more like pricked the temples by sharp item and follows has the agitation!
Hiss…… is blurry, Zhou Mingrui wants to turn over/to stand up, wants to cover the head, wants to sit up, may not be definitely able to move the hands and feet, the body as if lost the control.
It seems like I have not really awaked, perhaps but also…… under the dream will also appear thinks had awaked, still in the situation of resting…… to similar bitter experience does not calculate actually strange Zhou Mingrui concentrates the will strongly, to thoroughly get rid dark and hallucination shackles.
However, when half asleep and half awake, the will always moves fast like the smog, is hard-to-control, is hard to collect, how he diligently, cannot bear the thought diverge again as before, the distracting thoughts appear.
In good condition, will the greater part of the night, how have a headache suddenly? Is painful such very much! What is not the cerebral hemorrhage?
The veteran machine-translator might be well-equipped to read Joyce, if not for the side-effects common to the profession: namely, progressive illiteracy. You pass them gibbering in the fora and avert your eyes. The dark arts are forbidden for a reason.
Times are different now. A researcher at Google, anxious to read more xianxia novels, devised an architecture for more accurate machine translation. It has since eaten the world.
This was an eminently predictable trajectory for some of us. For example, Gwern’s scaling hypothesis has mostly borne out. It only makes sense; he’s a biblionaut himself.
I met him a few days ago, as it happens, and we discussed the state-of-the-art. To demonstrate, he translated a recently published light novel just before our eyes, verbosely titled (as is tradition): Reincarnated Without a Clue, I Must Investigate My Own Murder?!
The story is rather good, actually, a fusion of Japanese fantasy and mystery tropes that manages to freshen both. A rich man is murdered in his mansion, and his spirit takes possession of the detective sent to investigate. The suspects, of course, are all beautiful women with potential motives and means. There is the maid, the ninja, the catgirl, the elf, and the personal nun (what contrivance justifies the existence of personal nuns is never explained).
(The author enjoys putting new gloss on old tropes: is the ninja tsundere, a suspect, both? Is the elf’s infatuation nothing but racial fetishization? A second murder occurs, and a second detective arrives. One naturally wonders if they, too, are the victim reincarnated, and if the pattern will repeat ad infinitum, until no-one has been murdered but simply their souls reshuffled…)
As I read I reflected on the progress of the field. I once struggled with an excerpt from a Chinese poem for several days, for which the machine gave me:
Indeed, morning resembles black silk, evening becomes snow
…and few victories, I must say, have tasted as sweet as realizing that it used the allegory of the sphinx, and the subject in context was hair:
Indeed, it is silken-black at morning, and becomes snow-white at evening.
I ought to rejoice at the fall of my old foe, the language barrier. East might be East and West might be West, but soon the twain shall meet.
Somehow, I’m wistful instead. Perhaps my travails across the grey abyss have sickened my mind, but I can’t help but think there’s something of value in the obscure, in the misunderstood, in the seams between words. Grotesque and gaudy full is the dreamland of whispering is rapid.