elżbieta skibińska [er]: How did you discover Lem's prose? Were you familiar with his works before you were asked to translate them into Japanese?mitsuyoshi numano [mn]: The first Lem novels that fell into my hands were Solaris and The Invincible. They were included in an anthology of world literature in the science fiction genre, published by the Hayakawa Publishing House, although they were translations from the Russian. I was probably fifteen or sixteen years old, so it must have been 1969 or 1970. I was already passionate about science fiction as a boy, so I read books in this series whenever I could get hold of them, and that's how my chance encounter with Lem came about, an encounter that was completely unexpected. I had been reading mostly American SF novels by such authors as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. When I heard Lem's name and the title Solaris for the first time, I don't even think I knew where Poland was located or what kind of language Polish was.However, as soon as I started reading Solaris, I realized that what I was dealing with was radically different from the science fiction novels I had known up to that point. Even the title itself, Solaris, sounds intriguing. One might think it is a harbinger of something mysterious. As I read it, I realized that it is a work that draws the reader in with tremendous force, not so much that it piques your interest, but rather that it induces fear. I was still a teenager and didn't know how to define this feeling; now I would be tempted to call it metaphysical anxiety (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz referred to it as “a metaphysical sense of the strangeness of existence,” and writer Yutaka Haniya as “the unpleasantness of the principle of identity”; naturally, as a fifteen-year-old boy I knew neither Witkiewicz nor Haniya). It was a feeling that comes from trying to probe the limits of human cognition and transcend them. The heroes of Solaris, and along with them the readers, are confronted with the Unknown. In the face of it, they begin to realize the limitations of their own understanding. At the same time, they begin to open up to the Unknown and immerse themselves in their helplessness.This reader's experience can be termed “ontological” or “epistemological.” We live in the world, as it were, by force of inertia, and do not generally wonder how it is constructed, the universal principle that governs it, and finally what this world actually is and why it came into being. And it would seem that the most important question for humanity is what we (and therefore this world) are, where we come from and where we are going. In short, we need a broader view, taking into account not only our present existence, but also our origin (where from?) and destination (where to?), which we are unable to see with our own eyes, and Lem was one of the few writers with such a perspective. After reading Lem, the world no longer seems the same. Readers of Solaris are nudged to experience an epistemological transformation.Eventually, influenced by reading Lem in translation, I began to study Polish and, alongside my specialization in Russian literature, I took up the study of Polish literature. Fortunate for me, when I started studying at the University of Tokyo in 1973, Polish was taught by Professor Shōzō Yoshigami, a pioneer in the study of Polish literature. Later, while studying at Harvard, I had the opportunity to study with the wonderful teacher Professor Stanisław Barańczak.Reflecting on those times, it would not be an exaggeration to say that I started learning Polish because I wanted to read Lem in the original and I was pushed to do so by intellectual curiosity, a desire to understand how this extraordinary world was depicted in the original text. Later, I also started reading poets, prose writers, and philosophers such as Witold Gombrowicz, Stanisław Mrożek, Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Milosz, Leszek Kołakowski, and Wisława Szymborska, but it all started with Lem.[er]: Have you ever met or corresponded with Lem? What came of it?[nm]: I had the opportunity to meet him twice. The first time, I visited his home in Kraków on September 22, 1995, where we talked for over two hours. The interview was translated into Japanese and published in a major literary monthly, “Shinchō,” in the February 1996 issue (the Polish text has never yet been published). Lem had a sore throat at the time, but nevertheless answered all the questions. He talked fast and with great enthusiasm. I was surprised by the extent of his knowledge when, at the beginning of the interview, unsolicited, he brought up topics from Japanese history and culture, showing a very good familiarity with them. All the threads of our discussion were fascinating, but particularly memorable to me was what he said in the wake of our conversation about the earthquake in Japan, which held a truth about the twentieth century: “. . . it is not only the earth that shifts beneath our feet, but the social system, the human relations, everything changes, values decline [. . .]. This is precisely what happened this century, this is the very essence of the twentieth century.”The second time I had the honor of meeting with Lem was on May 14, 2005, in Kraków, at the LEMological Congress, a conference organized by the Kraków-based Wydawnictwo Literackie to celebrate the publication of the Collected Works of Stanisław Lem. The congress was held in the historic Józef Mehoffer Hall, with Lem and his wife in attendance. As a guest from far-off Japan, I gave a long speech in Polish to mark the opening of the symposium. I was faced with a hall filled with a Polish audience and the celebrated couple. Speaking in Polish in front of none other than Lem, whose works were a turning point in my life, leading me to pursue literary research, was incredibly audacious on my part (I'm not even sure whether the speech in my imperfect Polish was well understood). It warmed my heart when, after my speech, Lem, who was already advanced in age, stood up and bowed in my direction.His figure still stands before my eyes. It was the last time I saw Lem.[er]: What influence has translating Lem had on your personal or professional standing? Have you ever been in a position to suggest a specific work of Lem's to a publisher?[nm]: After graduating from university, I took up the translation of Astronauci [The astronauts, 1951] and Katar [Chain of chance, 1976] thanks to which I became recognized as Lem's translator. These translations were commissioned by the publisher, but later I also proposed translating Doskonała próżnia [Perfect vacuum, 1971] and Wielkość urojona [Imaginary magnitude, 1973], which, despite their importance, had not previously been translated into Japanese. Both translations are the fruit of the joint work of several people— Perfect Vacuum was published in 1989 and Imaginary Magnitude in 1998—but thanks to a robust readership they are still in print.The next challenge for me was to undertake a new translation of Solaris, this time directly from the Polish. As I mentioned earlier, I had already read the Japanese version of Solaris at the age of 15, but it was a translation from the Russian. This earlier translation cannot be said to be of poor quality and can be read in one sitting, but there was a fundamental problem. It was based on the earliest edition of the novel, published in the Soviet Union, which had a number of abridgements, probably the result of censorship. Not only were there a significant number of abridgements, but also important passages describing the ocean on Solaris and depicting the history of solaristics were removed, so the work overall lost something significant.Even so, the Japanese translation I read did not state that the translation was based on the Russian version, nor that it had been abridged. I myself realized this much later, when I read the original text in Polish, and consequently decided to produce a new translation. I approached the Kokushokankōkai publishing house with a proposal to publish a new translation, this time from the original. At the time of publication, copyright issues arose, but they were eventually resolved and my translation was finally published in 2004. For nearly 40 years, Japanese readers have known Solaris as a chain translation from Russian with numerous deletions.[er]: Which of Lem's works do you consider particularly important to bring to the Japanese audience? Is it on the basis of universal reasons or culturally specific ones (due to personal or spiritual affinities)?Do any of Lem's works seem to you so alien to Japanese culture that you rule them out as “candidates for translation”?[nm]: Personally, I think that of Lem's works, Solaris is the greatest, and indeed, it is very popular with Japanese readers. In a 2014 reading poll conducted by SF Magajin the only Japanese magazine devoted to science fiction, Solaris ranked among the world's all-time great science fiction novels. What's more, right now, a 4-episode series of my lectures on Solaris is being broadcast on Japan's premier television station NHK. Broadcasts about Solaris will be followed by ones on A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude, quite popular in Japan, and significant works of world literature.I have never thought of Lem's works as having an exceptionally close spiritual affinity, or conversely, as being difficult for Japanese to understand. Since these are not historical novels by Sienkiewicz, but science fiction that is set outside the historical context of Poland, they have a universal dimension and can be understood by readers around the world.Of course, the translation process is not without its difficulties. Of Lem's well-known works, both novels and short stories as well as other genres have already largely been translated into Japanese, but there are still works that have yet to be translated. First, there are essays and monographs, such as Summa technologiae, Philosophy of Chance, and Science Fiction and Futurology. Due to the nature of these works, the expected audience is rather narrow. Moreover, they are so intricate that only a translator with an excellent knowledge of Polish could undertake the translation. However, Lem's position is so well established in Japan today that one hopes that someone from the younger generation of capable translators will undertake the task. Second, there are almost no translations of Lem's opinion pieces written after 1987. This is partly because the references are far removed from Japanese reality, and partly because they have lost their relevance, although there are some interesting pieces among them, full of brilliant erudition. Therefore, I think it would be valuable to make a selection of those pieces that would be of greatest interest to the Japanese reader and publish them in the form of an anthology.[er]: Lem's prose is a serious challenge for a translator. What has proved particularly difficult for you? And what has brought you professional joy and satisfaction?[nm]: Instead of answering this question, I would like to recount a riveting event from May 2005. At the time of the aforementioned “LEMological Congress” held in Kraków, Lem translators from all over the world (including, for example, Michael Kandel from the United States and Pavel Weigel from the Czech Republic) gathered in the evening to read passages from Lem. The idea was that they competed using a pre-set passage to be presented to the public. The text was as follows: Cyprian cyberotoman, cynik, ceniąc czuleCzarnej córy cesarskiej cud ciemnego ciała,Ciągle cytrą czarował. Czerwieniała cała,Cicha, co dzień czekała, cierpiała, czuwała . . .. . . Cyprian ciotkę całuje, cisnąwszy czarnulę!!1As you know, this is an excerpt from a poem in the story “The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard” from the collection The Cyberiad, which was to be instantly created by a computer based on the following instructions: “Let him compose a poem about cybernetics! That there should be at most six lines, and in them about love and about betrayal, about music, about the upper classes, about Africans, about misfortune, about incest, to rhyme, and that all the words should be only on the letter C!!!”I worked on my translation for over 10 hours, during the flight from Japan to Kraków, thanks to which I won a victory, but also a defeat at the same time. Let's start with the fact that the Japanese language differs from Polish not only grammatically, but also in terms of the characters used for writing, so verses cannot begin with the letter “C,” because it simply does not exist in Japanese. However, I imposed a similar rule on myself and created a rhyme that was both funny and absurd. Unfortunately, people who do not know Japanese are unlikely to understand the humor contained in my translation. It's worth adding, however, that while ostensibly the task will be easier when translating into languages close to Polish, especially Slavic languages, I suspect that other, perhaps more subtle problems arise when translating into related languages, so it shouldn't be stated unequivocally that it's more difficult to translate into Japanese.[er]: The grammatical differences between Japanese and Polish are enormous, suffice it to mention the lack of a future tense in Japanese, the absence of any distinction among masculine, feminine, and neuter genders, or the existence of so-called classifiers, different for persons, for large and small animals, for inanimate objects. Certainly, lexical differences also may cause difficulties. As a translator of Solaris could you please share your experience of translating the following passage, in which there are numerous references to colors: Towards the end of the second day, we found ourselves so close to the pole that when the disk of the blue sun had almost completely disappeared beyond the horizon, the crimson tinge of the clouds in the opposite direction heralded the rising of the red sun. The vast blackness of the ocean and the empty sky above it were then filled with a blindingly fierce clash between hard colors aglow like metal, glistening with poisonous green and subdued hollow flames of crimson, while the ocean itself was rent with the glare of two counterposed disks, two furious fires, one mercuric and one scarlet; at such moments it was enough for the tiniest cloud to be at the zenith for the rays falling across the diagonals of waves with their lumbering foam to be lit up with an incredible rainbow glitter. Immediately following the setting of the blue sun, on the north-west skyline, first heralded by the indicators, there appeared a symmetriad; it was fused almost indistinguishably with the red-stained mist and arose out of it only with isolated glinting reflections, like an immense glass flower growing from the meeting point of sky and plasma. [. . .] fifteen minutes or so later the colossus, red and trembling like a guttering lamp made of rubies, vanished again beyond the horizon.2What does the Japanese language allow us to preserve in the text of the translation?[nm]: Certainly, grammatical differences often cause problems when translating, but they can generally be circumvented to some extent by using such methods as rephrasing, paraphrasing, making additions or changing syntax. These are problems that Japanese have faced in translating the vast majority of literary works, not just Lem's, but European literature in general, from antiquity to contemporary literature, from Homer to James Joyce's Ulysses.As for lexical differences, the quoted passage contains extremely interesting epithets, but unfortunately, my answer to your question may disappoint. For, traditionally, the vocabulary for describing colors in Japanese is similar, in fact—please forgive me—probably richer than in Polish. In medieval Japanese waka poetry, colors served an important function, and poets employed a variety of precise terms for hues in their works. Perhaps it's a peculiar association, but the excerpt from Lem's Solaris quoted here makes me think of the children's story “Night on the Galactic Railway” (Japanese: “Ginga tetsudō no yoru”) by the great 20th-century Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa. In this work, Miyazawa uses a wide variety of color terms to describe the sky and cosmos. To sum up, translating the names of colors, of course, after carefully checking each word in dictionaries and finding the closest equivalent, which takes time and energy—is not of above average difficulty.If I were to point out the problems of translating proper names, probably more trouble is caused by neologisms. Lem made unlimited use of fancy new words, which for translators is a nuisance. In order to translate a neologism, it is advisable to find a word that will be close to the original not only in terms of meaning; unfortunately, due to differences in grammatical structure between languages, the process of word formation (derivation) is also different, so this is often impossible. Lem used many neologisms when describing the ocean in Solaris, and translating them into Japanese may seem like an impossible task. A few years ago, a young girl from Poland who was studying Japanese showed up at my office. From our conversation it became clear that she was writing her thesis precisely on how to translate Lem's neologisms into Japanese. In short, my translation became a subject of her study. Yet I myself am still unsure to this day whether I translated Lem's neologisms appropriately.