Translating Murakami

       I missed this, many months ago when it first appeared, but it's definitely worth pointing to: at nippon.com Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit writes on Orchestrating Translations: The Case of Murakami Haruki, with a focus on the German and English translations.
       Among the interesting bits:

After this first success in German, and with more English and other translations in preparation, the author seems to have pursued a stricter streamlining policy through his American agent since the early 1990s. He refused to grant translation rights for a selection of his short stories into German on the grounds that translation rights for an English edition of the stories were still under negotiation, and that he preferred to make the selection by himself.

       (His American agent is (and presumably was) ICM's Amanda "Binky" Urban.)
       More generally/interestingly/disturbingly:

This opinion was not limited to Murakami's international presence; it rubbed off on all other literary productions of Japanese origin, so that a Japanese agent in the 1990s, during the high tide for Japanese literature in central Europe, was reluctant to even negotiate translation rights for a German version as long as no English language publisher showed interest in the book in question.

       Dear god, no wonder they've fared so relatively poorly -- English would certainly seem to be positioned to serve well as the 'lead' language to be translated into, but as we've seen over the years and decades, American and British publishers (especially the big houses) tend to be followers rather than leaders. Big mistake by the Japanese (and they seem to have been paying for it, too, as contemporary Japanese literature continues to punch far below its weight on the international literary stage).
       Also interesting to learn that:

It is worth noting that the overall rate of direct versus indirect translation via English and a few other languages into German has in fact remained fairly stable since 1868 through the present, amounting to 88% versus 12%. Indirect translations today mostly apply to manga and to popular literature, including crime and mystery novels.

       Amazing, first of all, that it has remained relatively stable over that period (if true ... I'd love to see hard numbers ...); amazing, too, that second-hand translation remains so popular. (It hasn't been killed off completely in English either;' the case of Ismail Kadare is a special one (many of his works are translated from the French translations; see David Bellos on The Englishing of Ismail Kadare), but the occasional other example still crops up (far too) regularly.)