Under the Big Tree

The Big Tree by a river

Challenge of Keeping Up with Foreign Rights

I have no real idea when Under the Big Tree first came into print, but I think it was 1984. The publishers did not send me my author's copies, and so it was not until March, 2013, that a good samaritan found my note on the main webpage of Story for a Black Night and emailed me the top photo above.

This good samaritan is a student who was looking for more information about my work. She turns out to be an industrious undergrad named Deanna Nardy who is working on a thesis in East Asian Studies on "the representation of black people in Japanese comics." Fascinated myself by that topic, I have exchanged some emails with Deanna, who writes charmingly of her ambitions as a manga artist, and I look forward to the day when she gets her thesis published by a mainstream publisher. It is sure to be not only unique but well written and illuminating. Brava!

UPDATE: As of February, 2014, there is a second Japanese edition of Story for a Black Night. Douwakan, the publishing company, asked for permission to use the photograph that I used for the 2002 Phoenix Honor edition, and I happily agreed. Here is what it looks like with the Japanese title. This 2014 Japanese edition is titled Under the Big Tree by the River.

Actually this is not exact, and to be exact, I am going to quote a bit of the correspondence between me and the 2014 Japanese translator. I trust he/she will not mind this intrusion because I think the issue of a book's title is a profound one. I was never given the translator's name and although I suspect that the name does appear somewhere in the book, I cannot read Japanese script; so I cannot say for sure. The translator, through two editors, posed many questions to me during our correspondence, seeking to better understand the Liberian culture during that period, particularly as it related to "book". Does the use of the word "book" in many places refer to "the Bible" or to education generally?

In answering these questions I asked what the Japanese title of this edition would be. The French translator had changed the title to Par une nuit noire (On a Black Night) while the Mexican translator made it perhaps more poetic Cuento Negro para una Negra Noche (Black Story for a Black Night). In reply, this Japanese translator wrote this to me:

To be honest, I hesitated to tell you new Japanese title. I hoped that you didn't ask me about it because a title of a book is the best expression of author's feeling. I think it's not good to change the title by a translator. However, only this title was appeared in my mind, "Kawa no Hotori no Okina Ki." In English, it might be "The big tree by a river." "Hotori" means "by" or "close by" or "on the bank of" or "near" in Japanese. It might be influence by the 1984 Japanese edition; however, it came to my mind naturally. I think you'll understand my idea. The most beautiful part of your book was 44 page in 1982 edition. All characters are very interesting for us. Thank you.

I did not ask (yet, at least) if there would be any effort at keeping the dialect of the narrator. As I have written back and forth with the two editors and the translator, the differences between Japanese and English seem so overwhelming to me that I am not sure how I would even phrase such a question. Further, it seems to me perhaps a little impertinent and intrusive of the original author to ask such a question. With the French translator, Rose-Marie Vassallo-Villaneau, we established so intimate a friendship so quickly that I felt more able to ask this question. And ultimately there was the huge pay-off for both Rose-Marie and myself that twenty years later, she did indeed write a second translation of the entire book to achieve a French equivalence to the Liberian dialect. I loved that result.

Apropos of language differences, I was a bit stunned to find, when I received my first copy ofKawa no Hotori no Okina Ki, that Japanese books are oriented differently from American and European books. Kawa no Hotori no Okina Ki opens on the left instead of the right, which means that the pages are reversed from our books. Moreover, the Japanese characters are in columns which are read, I think, from top-to-bottom from upper-right of the page to lower-left, with paragraphs represented by spaces at the bottoms of some columns.

Also, comparing the characters in the titles on the two Japanese book covers, I find something equally interesting. Whereas the 1984 edition has the title reading vertically in a column, the 2014 edition has the title reading horizontally. I did a little research on the internet about Japanese characters (there are three kinds: Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. Who would have thought!) and learned that the character for "river" is three vertical lines, which is the character at the upper left of the 2014 title. This leads me to believe that you can read Japanese characters horizontally from bottom right to top left.

And indeed, if you compare the characters on both books, the seven characters of Under the Big Tree are very similar to many of the characters of Kawa no Hotori no Okina Ki. They are not in exactly the same order and not made with precisely the same strokes, but you can easily see some of the same symbols. For example, the topmost character of 1984 and the leftmost symbol on the bottom line of 2014 must surely represent "tree".

I notice, too, that on the spine of 2014 where the characters are arranged vertically, the character for "river" is at the top of the column. Therefore, I conclude that titles of both books must be read from bottom-to-top of the columns, while I am quite sure that the text within 2014 are to be read from top-to-bottom. It is all quite beautiful, but also quite confusing to my mind.

And of course there is the fact that the Japanese language can be notated by our 26-letter English alphabet —as this translator wrote for me Kawa no Hotori no Okina Ki. Though this fact rather heightens the language confusion, still there is the distinct advantage that the several thousand Kanji characters can be read by Japanese, Chinese, Koreans and other Asian nationalities, no matter that their languages are distinct from one another.

Copyright © 2004, revised 2014, Robert Locke
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