Found in Translation

Kumar Sivasubramanian has lived stretches of his life on at least three different continents. We met through a closed Facebook group (before I was kicked off by a sour-faced Dubliner) that effectively served as a cult devoted to the genius and works of British author Alan Moore. There have been a few occasions, when doing these interviews, that I felt as if I was looking into versions of what my life could have been. Not so much like funhouse mirrors as the Wood Between Worlds in C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew. Talking with Kumar is no exception. He is also Tamil Canadian (his roots are Indian Tamil whereas I was born in Sri Lanka), also studied English Literature, and is also enamoured with Alan Moore! Our given names come from the same root. Even his surname is similar to that of my grandfather's, and could have been our family surname had my father not chosen his own instead (Tamil names are a complicated affair and did not have surnames before they were imposed upon by colonizers).

Kumar lives with his wife and son in Australia and translates manga for the renowned company Dark Horse Comics. In between doing this, he posts on things as diverse as new discoveries in science, trending social developments, and breaking news in indie comics. It's rare to meet someone who loves and is equally at home in the arms of Fine Literature, Star Trek: The Original Series, and Thrash Metal. I had to find out more about the trade winds that filled the sails of this cultural buccaneer!

The above photos are of Kumar (far left), his brother, and family in Chennai, taken in 1979 and then recreated in 2017. Both photos were taken by Kumar's dad. The covers below are from volumes of manga that Kumar has translated.

Koom: Your life has taken a very unique trajectory. How does a brown man coming from a family of doctors in Fredericton end up in Australia translating manga?

Kumar: First of all, it's actually one biology prof, one homemaker, one psychiatrist, one jack-of-all-trades, and me.
There was not a HUGE amount of pressure on me in terms of career trajectory, maybe because my older brother had already earned all the necessary glory by going medical, and my parents were... SORT OF... hands off with me? My first year in university, I was actually in Computer Science because it had a clear career path, but halfway through the year I realized my Arts electives were the only courses that were giving me any joy, so I switched to the English Lit program. My father threatened to cut off my funding because, he said, he was paying for my education, and an Arts degree is not an education. However, he never followed through on that threat, maybe because he saw me transition from super-depressed to very content, and some scholarship money started coming in anyway.

So, how did I get here? Basically around age 11, I became really obsessed with comics and that spilled over into Japanese comics too, and I inherited some Japanophilia from my older brother. Later, when I was doing my Master's degree at UWO in 97-98, none of us were really sure what we were going to do after we graduated, but a neighboring university held a "Liberal Arts Jobs Fair" at which various exhibitors were set up, like exterminators and insurance companies. However, there were also some "Teach English In Japan" outfits, so I happily took the opportunity.

I moved to Japan, and started picking up Japanese. I also made a friend who was an amateur comics artist, and he got some pro work doing some short stories for the comics anthology series Dark Horse Presents. I wrote two of those for him, and that created a connection with Dark Horse Comics, who later contacted me about doing translations. Later, I met my wife, a fellow teacher, who is Australian, and we moved here in 2004.

Koom: From what I understand, you are fairly proficient in Japanese and you spend a fair amount of time translating volumes of manga. Would you like to talk about this? Do you find that your dreams are sometimes in Japanese or are influenced by a Japanese sensibility? I recently saw the film Arrival which is centred around the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the idea that language constructs consciousness and wires/rewires brains. Do you believe in this? Has your way of thinking/processing been affected by spending some of your head space in Japanese?

Kumar: Wowzers! I haven't really looked at it THAT way, and I wonder if it's related to the age at which you learn a language. What I mean is perhaps I have some Tamil and Telugu word-concepts in my brain from childhood which somehow (?) affect my thinking. (You know, a lot of those subcontinental languages have no words for "please" or "thank you".) Whereas, since I learned Japanese in my 20s, each word is still translated into an independent, discrete English language concept. I do believe that language can affect consciousness -- it's one of the central conceits of Nineteen Eighty-Four too -- but I don't think learning Japanese or my current level of immersion in it has re-wired my brain. I'll tell you, though, last time I went to India, people would speak to me in Tamil or Telugu and I would understand them fine, but when I tried to respond the words would only come out in Japanese. Messed up, or what!
That said, I've heard anecdotally that if you have more than one language as a child, it's easier to pick up other languages later, so that might have helped in my case. Also, there is some disputed speculation that Tamil and Japanese have a common ancestry, so MAYBE there are some connections to be drawn there regarding my neural net, but I don't know what they are.
And, no, I don't recall ever dreaming in Japanese.

Koom: Now, that's interesting! I'd never heard that Tamil and Japanese might have a common heritage! It might explain why I was fairly taken with Japanese literature, art, and film in my twenties. Can you extend some of the cultural connections you made in your last answer to your love of manga? What is it that draws you to the elements of manga? Or is it simply a case of there really being nothing else quite like it?

Kumar: I don't know if there is a direct through line, and understanding this answer is going to require some deep geek knowledge, but my melting pot started with the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, the Super Friends cartoon on TV, action figures, and Amar Chitra Katha comics (Indian myths and fables). When I really got into comics at age 11, I became voracious for ANYTHING that had line drawings and word balloons, even cereal boxes. I used to clip and save Doonesbury strips at age 12! And manga was just MORE line drawings and word balloons. For me, the TV series ROBOTECH was the vital gateway to the Japanese "style": more violent, more romantic, more emotionally mature, and much more serious than its American peers. The manga and anime landscape is vast and varied, but it IS identifiably different from its American counterparts in terms of art styles and storytelling approaches. But it didn't supercede what I already enjoyed any more than, say, watching Kurosawa movies would make you give up Westerns. And back then especially, there just wasn't ENOUGH manga and anime available in English to devote yourself exclusively to it. It just went in the salad with everything else. The point I'm trying to get at is that although I love manga, I still don't necessarily prioritize it over any other medium or genre, even though it's my livelihood as well.
That said, I do think that somehow watching Bollywood movies with my parents as a child made me more open minded about consuming Japanese or Chinese movies or whatever else, in a sense because it was already sewn into my fabric that there were OTHER (very different) ways that people made entertainments, enjoyed equally as much by their target audiences. I was immunized for culture shock, and maybe that paved the way for my ready devouring of manga. If someone read Batman for 20 years and then read DragonBall, I can kind of see why they might react negatively. Surely, you must have had a similar experience, Koom?

Koom: The part of your answer that I really identified with was loving anything with a line drawing, especially if it was accompanied by speech bubbles and text. I also used to clip newspaper strips when I was young! I don't know if I had any kind of experience that primed me for understanding alternate systems of aesthetics. I did really dig the Amar Chitra Katha comics but their style was fairly western, like Classics Illustrated comics. I didn't grow up on Bollywood. In fact, access to movies, period, was rare because my parents were so strict. I had to smuggle comics home and then later skip school to go to the movies. So, I think for me - life was a tension between the culture and expectations at home and the Western values out there in the world. That comes out in my writing. Maybe your parents were more permissive and like you say, a wider array of influences went into the mix at a younger age? I didn't really have a sense that reality might not be the way I had imagined it until I hit the end of high school. I just had a need to express feelings.

Talking of expression, I know that you've talked about creating your own work. We've discussed writing and you mentioned the Dark Horse Presents stories you've written. Do you find that translating other people's work inhibits your own creative process? I've known people who worked in publishing who found that working on other people's books impedes their creative ambitions. Is it like playing a whole lotta tennis and then trying to use your arm for badminton afterwards - difficult to change gears?

Kumar: Re: permissiveness. Oh, yeah! It has become, like, an annual tradition for me and my brother to get together and list off all the wildly inappropriate R-rated movies our parents let us watch as kids. Then later, they would be exasperated that we didn't behave like textbook obedient Indian children and wonder why!

I think translating HAS inhibited my own creativity, but in a very mechanical way. For example, I used to believe that I was good at writing dialogue. But after years of translating other people's words -- good or bad -- I think my ear has gone tinny. Also, you can pack a lot more information into fewer "letters" with the Japanese writing system (and because of the sentence structure), so the word balloons don't need to be that big. But when translating, due to the physically limited dimensions of those dialogue balloons, the English output sentences must be brief, and often you even have to choose shorter words over their longer synonyms. So, basically, after years of doing this, I feel like my own dialogue has lost any poetry/rocket sauce it once had, and become clipped and utilitarian.

I see the translation process as one of problem solving and puzzle building. I love it and it's rewarding, but I don't consider it creative or artistically satisfying.

And, of course, every time I think I'm going to have a minute to sit down and work on something creative of my own, an email comes in with a new translation assignment.

Koom: Right. I know that feeling. But sometimes I think I keep myself busy so I don't have to sit down and work at my own writing. Is there anything you're working on now that you'd like to talk about? Or anything you'd like to work on in the future?

Kumar: Do you mean in terms of translations, or my own projects? Because if you mean my own projects, and I answer, "No," then this whole interview falls apart, doesn't it! Haha! Well, I can't speak for myself, but I have this 'friend', see, and this friend is working on something big, something really ambitious for him, a novel. But he's so mortified by his own hack writing that he refuses to admit that he's writing it in the first place even to his own friends and family and even though he's two-thirds through it, because he sees inevitable failure waiting around every corner and he wants to maintain deniability that he was ever writing it in the first place in case he falls on his face.

Koom: Tell your 'friend' to just keep plugging away at it, come hell or high water!