Spanish Translation of the New Novel to Be out in March

  The Spanish translation of Machi to sono futashika na kabe (City and Its Uncertain Walls) will appear on March 13 from Tusquets Editores, as announced on the publisher's page. The translator will be Juan Francisco González Sánchez. It seems that he has also translated Murakami's First Person Singular, a few books by Yoko Ogawa and other authors.

 

Also, while the readers are waiting for different translations, here is an interview Murakami gave to Kyodo news. He explains a number of things about the new novel:

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2023/11/910c6404f958-novelist-murakami-speaks-of-fully-pursuing-motifs-in-latest-novel.html

 

The German translation of the newest Murakami novel to appear on January 12

The German translation of Murakami's 2023 novel, which is to be called in English, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, will appear in German on January 12  — Murakami's birthday!  — from Dumont. The translation is by Ursula Gräfe. Congratulations, Ursula!

I heard through the grapevine that the English translation by Philip Gabriel may appear in the spring, but since it has not been announced on Amazon yet, perhaps the message I got became mangled owing to said grapevine. I have also just checked on the French and Italian Amazon sites. While I was able to see titles, ("La ville et se murs incertains" and "La città e le sue mura incerte") no date or cover image appears, so perhaps those are just a result of some AI magic. 

I am very curious to see the English and other European editions to see how translators will handle the pronouns in the book. As was the case in Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando, 1985 (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, 1991, English translation by Alfred Birnbaum), the protagonist of the newest novel also uses two different pronouns to differentiate the two worlds he inhabits - boku (a somewhat informal, masculine "I") and watashi (the universally used "I"). In this new book, we also get the second person pronoun kimi in two versions: sometimes it is written using the Chinese character, and sometimes in hiragana, one of the phonetic scripts used in Japanese. This creates an immediate difference between the two worlds and the atmosphere of the narratives. 

As many readers will know, in his translation of Hardboiled Wonderland, Alfred Birnbaum used an ingenious approach and translated one of the narratives entirely into present tense. In the case of the new book, that would not be possible, as this time Murakami uses tense creatively, switching between past and present to achieve certain effects I don't want to spoil by overexplaining (this is, of course, assuming that the English translation will choose to recreate those in some way). 

I understand from Ursula Gräfe that she tried to differentiate the narratives using style, since German, like most European languages, doesn't have a choice of multiple pronouns for each person. I haven't decided what I will do in my own translation. So far I have just been using I (ja) and you (ty), but I do feel I want to come up with a trick or two to show the difference.