What’s in a Word?
Ahead of his appearance at the Club this month, prolific translator Alex O Smith discusses the joy of storytelling.
In The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino presents readers with a tantalizing intellectual battle: what happens when a brilliant mathematician and a genius physicist go toe-to-toe over the gruesome murder of a man who tried to extort his ex-wife?
The award-winning 2005 novel was a breakout overseas success for Higashino, who has written dozens of mysteries in Japanese. It was also a major coup for its American translator, Alex O Smith.
To translate the story effectively, Smith, who worked on the text with Elye J Alexander, had to get inside the mind of both Higashino and the story’s titular mathematician, Tetsuya Ishigami, a loner who is obsessed with both mathematics’ four-color theorem and his neighbor, who becomes a suspect in the murder.
“What appeals to me about translation is that it’s always a challenge. There are always questions and the answers are never clear, so it’s an opportunity to learn,” says Smith, 46. “Some of Higashino’s mysteries are pretty straightforward, with a puzzle and classic withholding of information. But, once in a while, he’ll do a book where you have a character with a distinct voice and a unique way of seeing the world, like Ishigami in Suspect X.”
Smith’s translation was nominated for both the Edgar Award and Barry Award in 2012. The accolades reflected the translator’s accumulation of experience in the field. He has translated more than 30 novels and manga, including Higashino’s whodunit Journey Under the Midnight Sun, Akira Toriyama’s Dr Slump manga series and Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s sci-fi thriller All You Need Is Kill, which starred Tom Cruise in its film adaptation, Edge of Tomorrow.
A native of northern Vermont, Smith studied at Dartmouth and Keio University and earned a master’s degree in classical Japanese literature at Harvard in 1998. His first translating gig was subtitling Japanese TV shows. Between two years of grad school, a summer internship at video game giant Sega put him on the path of game translation. He quit his doctorate studies and joined the American arm of a Japanese game company.
Smith has since applied his skills to numerous video game projects, such as installments of the famed Final Fantasy franchise.
“I don’t play console games or mobile games,” he says. “I do a little gaming on the PC still, and I’ve always enjoyed board games, card games and nonelectronic RPGs [role-playing games] like Dungeons and Dragons.”
While Smith is loath to refer to himself as a gamer, he is now a full-time writer for Moon Studios, the Austrian video game developer behind the 2015 adventure game “Ori and the Blind Forest.”
Translation may no longer be his focus, but his passion for “storytelling, mythology and folklore” remains undimmed, he says.
“And what do we do now for folklore, instead of sitting around the campfire telling stories about gods?” he says. “Well, we sit in the TV room playing video games.”
Words: Tim Hornyak
Image: Kayo Yamawaki
The Art of Translation
March 20 | 7–8pm