When Alfred and I did Underground, and Jay and I did Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, we didn't try to intentionally create anything unified, but with 1Q84 the editor, at least, did try to smooth out any major differences, which makes sense since it's a single novel. I'm the only one of the three Murakami translators who's worked with the other two translators on projects. We each have our own styles-Jay, for instance, tending to use fewer contractions than I do. I admire Jay's and Alfred's translations, but I just do my own thing, my own take on what Murakami should sound like in English. When translating 1Q84 and other Murakami works, do you feel any obligation to be respectful of the voice and feel of Jay Rubin's and Alfred Birnbaum's translations? Do you feel that you all are creating Murakami's English oeuvre, and that it ought to feel unified, or are you more focused on each book in isolation? Gabriel's notes on a page of the original Japanese version of 1Q84 Here I simply read the whole translation again as a novel in English and try to improve the phrasing. It's more fun to do the final run-through before I send it out to the editor.

After the first pass the editor and I of course made some revisions, deciding, for example, to put most of the internal monologue in italics, and to put some passages that were in present tense into past. The first step in revising is to go back and check, line by line, the original with the translation. It took about ten months to come up with a rough draft of Book 3 of 1Q84, and then I spent two months revising it.

With writers whose prose is trickier, I might do only three pages a day, but Murakami is pretty straightforward and logical. Twenty pages a week, 80 pages a month-that's always my goal. Usually I work five days a week and finish a rough draft of four pages per day. How many pages did you translate on average each day? How long was the revising process? Here he discusses his work on 1Q84, Murakami's much anticipated 1,000-page three-book novel, which he translated with Jay Rubin. A professor of East Asian studies at the University of Arizona, Gabriel has also translated the fiction of Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburō Ōe. In 1988, as a graduate student at Cornell, Philip Gabriel translated the first Haruki Murakami story to be published in the U.S., 'The Kangaroo Communique.' Since then he's brought three of the author's novels into English-including Kafka on the Shore, for which he won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize-as well as two works of non-fiction, a short story collection, and stories published in the New Yorker and Harper's.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami