Hearn was famously short and swarthy. There's a photo of him and Setsuko both standing, and they're about the same height. There's also a reason he's facing to the left in all those photos.
22.02.2026 04:06 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0@satorukun0530.bsky.social
I post about Japanese literature and the like. And I guess that includes folklore😅 大阪在住の日本文学愛好家、異文化交流(アイルランド文化)イベント企画者。国立ダブリンシティ大学で日本語・翻訳学を専攻して学士。岩手親善大使(元岩手県国際交流員)、松江親善大使(ラフカディオ・ハーンのエッセイコンテスト受賞者)。現在、日愛愛日文芸翻訳家を目指して先祖の言葉アイルランド語を十数年ぶりに学び直そうとしているところの日英翻訳者。
Hearn was famously short and swarthy. There's a photo of him and Setsuko both standing, and they're about the same height. There's also a reason he's facing to the left in all those photos.
22.02.2026 04:06 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0They couldn't at least put "agus" as Gaeilge?😆
11.02.2026 01:39 — 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0Pretty sure I just heard someone confuse "chinju" (鎮守, protector deity) with "jingū" (神宮, a large/important Shinto shrine)🤷🏻♂️
29.01.2026 22:09 — 👍 9 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I don't know what パ一カ一道着 (paichi-kaichi dōgi) means, and I don't think I want to.
26.01.2026 22:58 — 👍 9 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0
日本時間の皆様、明けましておめでとうございます🌅
帰省中でまだ大晦日で、アイル習慣でクリスマス雰囲気ぐ続くのですが、今年大変お世話になった皆様、来年もどうぞよろしくお願いします☺️
This has to be a pseudonym, right?😂
05.12.2025 11:06 — 👍 6 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Except, presumably, the indigenous inhabitants whom the venture sought to displace?
27.11.2025 03:56 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I suspect this is the only thing anyone outside Louisiana will ever remember this dude for😬
24.11.2025 11:04 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Shigeru Mizuki TONO MONOGATARI Translated by Zacairiá Mac Dhaithí Drawn & Quarterly
The shogun (military dictatorship) was overthrown, a new government and military was quickly founded, and, against all odds, Japan not only resisted becoming a colony of the United States, but in a mere sixty years showed themselves to be a great power by defeating the Soviet Union in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. The world was astounded.
And it came to pass that in its 1904 war with Japan, the "Soviet Union" suffered a crippling defeat.
The world must indeed have looked on with great astonishment😆
The very definition of "FAFO"😓
(I don't know how, or even if, this woman voted in 2016, but for the last several years she's regularly complained on Twitter about how she the North still gets treated as being a de facto part of the EU.)
""Get on' vs. 'Get in on'" is nowhere near ar bad as "Ox Company", but it will never cease to amaze me that a book with so many errorsーusually multiple errors per page, if not always multiple errors per panel like hereーgot published as late as the 2010s, let alone winning an Eisner Award.
12.11.2025 04:02 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This is also a bit of a blast from the past, as my very first ITT post focused on the mistranslated footnote attached to the same panel.
12.11.2025 03:58 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Ian's Translation Tips 049:
This may be somewhat subjective, but "get on X" feels like an error for "get in on X" in cases like this. "We have to get on this Enpon Boom!" sounds like something a manager at a newspaper would say, but this a book publisher trying to get *in* on the Enpon Boom.
Funnier than this?😉
11.11.2025 22:47 — 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Indeed!
I was actually trying to get around the question of particles are words entirely by focusing on the English: if "your", which I'm fairly certain most would consider to be one word in English (...right...?😅), corresponds to anything in the ST, it's 君が.
If spoken by an intimate of the specific Heian-era emperor in question, one could read it that way, but as the Japanese national anthem to be sung at sportsball games, that seems quite unusual.
10.11.2025 23:22 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Thank you for your comment! I'll have to look into, but given that a variant, or the honka of the honka-dori in question (the one included in the Kokin Wakashū itself) has "Waga kimi wa" instead of "Kimiga yo wa", that doesn't seem like the most intuitive reading.
10.11.2025 23:22 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
遅くなりました😅
Indeed... perhaps "nowhere near" was a bit much, but in my defence it's still not the "first"😉
In a comment on the other site, I based my definition of "word" on how they translated it. "Your" is probably an English word (setting aside the issue of whether, in English, it counts as a separate word from "you"😅) and apparently corresponds to "Kimi-ga".
05.11.2025 22:44 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0This is a mistranslation. The word corresponding to "May" is nowhere near the start of the poem, but "your" is substantially worse, as it is confusing the noun きみ ("my lord", "the emperor") with a homophonic pronoun used between lovers.
05.11.2025 22:34 — 👍 10 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 1
It's not impossible that an Anglo-Irishman would use "Welsh" to mean "foreign-feeling" or "Celtish", but such a reading is hardly intuitive, and would need an explicit argument not to come across an error.
BTW, Hearn's best-known modern translator, Ikeda Masayuki, does not render it as ケルト風 or 異国風.
NHK quoted Hearn's "Hi-Mawari" this morning, but (mistakenly?) said that it recounted Hearn's memory of a forest outside Cong, Co. Mayo. Hearn's text is explicit that the memory in question is of Wales, not Mayo.
03.11.2025 06:45 — 👍 7 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0Call me a "libtard" or whatever, but I don't think governments should be *either* recruiting 17-year-olds in their armed forces or executing 17-year-old POWs.
02.11.2025 08:33 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 1More minor point, but I think the idea that he was primarily interested in folktales is a bit of a stereotype. Of the 13 canonical Hearn books on Japanese topics, only three or four of the shorter ones are focused on ghosts and goblins. He also didn't write much about Japanese mythology.
01.11.2025 00:13 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0小泉八雲 wasn't a pen name. "Lafcadio Hearn" became his pen name after he changed his legal name to 小泉八雲. Hearn himself also never wrote under the name 小泉八雲ーsome Japanese translations of his work (although fewer nowadays) credited 小泉八雲 as the ST author, but ラフカディオ・ハーン is more common nowadays.
01.11.2025 00:06 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0come full circle until the publication of Persse's "Gods and Fighting Men", in or around the year of Hearn's death. At the very least, we can be certain that (if he even did grow up with Irish myths and legends) the Irish myths and legends he grew up with were different from the ones I grew up with.
30.10.2025 23:32 — 👍 7 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This is a claim I've seen Irish people with no connection to Japan (and Japanese people with little connection to Ireland) outside a professed interest in Hearn make this claim, but the evidence for it is minimal. Hearn left Ireland decades before the Celtic Revival "went mainstream", and it didn't
30.10.2025 23:29 — 👍 11 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0("Ireland supported the Nazis because of a shared hatred of the Jews" is a hibernophobic conspiracy theory that I've seen some British people *here in Osaka* espouse when they found out I was Irish and opposed the Gaza genocide.)
30.10.2025 12:41 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I know this is likely just AI slop, but I can't help but suspect that the implication that Hitler hated the English specifically and would have championed the causes of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh (or I guess "Brythonic"?) freedom is a deliberate attempt to paint these causes in a specific light.
30.10.2025 12:40 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0