Service at the Cathedral of Knowledge

One of the questions I get the most about Yale is “how hard are the classes?” That's always a tough one to answer, because that assumes there's a “standard” or “average” class. Instead of trying to give a vague, all-encompassing answer, instead I'd like to show you how I keep up with one particular class.

This is Sterling Memorial Library, sometimes jokingly referred to as A Cathedral of Knowledge (the architect really wanted to build a church instead).

Now zoom in to my personal fortress.


This is where I did most of my work for a graduate seminar I took this fall, JAPN 559: Reading, Literature, and the Humanities (possibly the most vague title ever) that focuses on translating some pretty advanced short stories, poems, and literary critiques from Japanese to English.

Since it's a class on reading literature, the range of vocabulary and imagery is way broader than would be used anywhere else. That means it's suddenly a lot harder. But with the right sources, I've been able to get through some incredibly tough translations. Let's break down my collection of toys-

At the most basic level, I use an English-based online dictionary of standard vocabulary (jisho.org) and a Japanese-based dictionary that includes more contemporary and casual definitions (alc.co/jp).

I also use a Japanese game for the Nintendo DS that functions as a dictionary where I can write in characters using the touch screen. I got the software shipped from Japan for $50- equivalent standalone touch-screen dictionaries cost more like $300.

When those fail, I resort to two character dictionaries: Koujien gives the most comprehensive definitions once I know how to pronounce a word, but usually I have to start at a kanji dictionary to look up an unfamiliar character by radical and stroke count. These are the end-all be-all of Japanese definitions in Japanese, so with enough labor I can define anything.

Now I can read words. That's a start. Beyond that, I keep a grammar dictionary on hand for things that confuse me. But the funny thing about literature is that it likes to reference other literature, and history, and names and myths and all those silly things that look like words but don't show up in a standard dictionary.

For that, I keep a Japanese literary encyclopedia on hand, as well as an open link to the huge database collection of Yale's East Asia Library. It encompasses periodicals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, photo archives, and more, coming from both original japanese sources and English scholarly collections. This is especially useful considering Wikipedia once led me to mistake Maeda Ai, the most influential literary critic of the 20th century, for Maeda Ai, the voice actress best known for playing Mimi in Digimon. Oops.

Even with all these sources, the class is tough. I thought I had prepared the assignment Arigatau thoroughly for class, thinking it was a nice little short story about a polite car driver appreciating the finer moments of the season's beauty while he drove a mother and daughter to a far-off city. But since it was written in the 1920's, it included a number of now obsolete ways of writing common words. So when I didn't recognize 賣る really meant 売る, I missed the crux that turned the story into a struggle about selling the daughter into prostitution. Oops.

Put together, I can spend an hour or more trying to fully comprehend a single page of text-- thankfully, assignments for the class are short. The challenge comes not because the class takes the most hours but because I have to take every sentence so critically, not just plowing through it linearly. Instead, I have to constantly re-examining the meaning of what I'm reading through a ton of angles. Its hard, and I love it.