The Floppy Ears of a Dog

犬の垂れ耳 - Inu no taremimi

Sometime in 2025: translating Beautiful Distance

I’m staying in a cottage in Saltaire, translating my first novel: Beautiful Distance. It’s not my novel, but I’m calling it that for now since technically, when I’m finished, each word of the original Japanese will have been taken out and each English word written by me. I’ve decided to keep this diary while I work: a place to put all the thoughts and questions that come up while translating.  

For example: how should I translate the phrase inu no taremimi? 

The floppy ears of a dog? The only reason the dog’s ears are mentioned is as part of a simile: the protagonist’s wife, lying in a hospital bed, ruffles her duvet in a movement supposedly redolent of how a dog’s ears might move if you gave them a gentle shake. So in that sense, floppy or droopy might work. But that’s just one kind of dog - like the wiggly-eared ones I learned to draw in primary school. If I imagine a dog now, it has small, triangular ears pointing upwards. Not the kind you can ruffle.

I wonder how close my mental image of a dog might be to anyone else’s, and how these images get dictated by things like where we grow up, the dogs we see around us. Is the average Brit’s image of a dog anything like the average Japanese person’s, and is that relevant to my translation? I’m overthinking, which I’m learning is part of the process.

I could be more breed-specific, to reduce the chance the simile won’t land. The droopy ears of a spaniel? The floppy ears of a basset hound? I’m googling ‘dogs with floppy ears’. But if the author didn’t specify a dog breed, and I do, I’m inserting something new into the text. Is this a good enough reason to do that? 

I mention my dog-conundrum to a friend who used to live in Budapest.

“When I think of a Hungarian dog, the first ones I picture are the ones with dreadlocks. Komondors. There was this specific way you had to pet them - you wouldn’t stroke them like you’d stroke a dog with a soft coat.”

I wonder what the Hungarian translator will do, if this book gets picked up in Hungary. The rights have been sold in Poland already, and I’m translating it for UK and US publishing houses. Do I need to think about American dogs, too?

The first dog I met when I moved to Scotland was a chihuahua named Brody. Pointy ears, a Very Good Boy. The day I met him I learned, after giving him a round of applause, that ‘clap’ has another meaning in Scots.

Clap (Scots): to pet something, an affectionate pat.