BY KENTA SUGAWARA

Mitsunobu Yamamoto, who teaches The Study of English Translation at Sapporo University, is a professional translator. He has won fame as translator of more than three hundred novels from English to Japanese. In particular, his translation of The God Father brought him great fame. Although many translators, when they translate a novel, produce a "word-to-word" translation, as if by a machine, he hates this way. The most important thing, he believes, is always to think deeply about his task, to make the most of his own ability, his own expressions, and he believes that the purpose of a professional translator is to express what the writer wants to say through his own natural voice and heart.

Five years ago, he started Inter-College Sapporo, an institution which translates and publishes and trains the people in Hokkaido who want to be literary translators. He moved from Tokyo to Hokkaido to build up the institution, but his original purpose was to own a farm and to have a coffee shop on the farm. He would like to convey the experiences of his life to his students who hope to be professional translators. Although too much work at Inter-College Sapporo forced him to stop practising kendo, which was the salt of his life, he said, "If I abandon the dream of the farm, the new aim of my life, my life would become insignificant."

In his class, students understand the experience of his life and learn his style as a literary translator. He says "Whether you want to be a translator or not, you should devour Japanese novels to elevate your ability to understand the true meaning of the Japanese language." He insists that people should open themselves to the various experiences of life, including those which place them in bad situations. At times when people are sucked into the mire of those experiences, they have to allow the imaginations full play to help them get over their own difficulties. To read many Japanese novels inspires the imagination, elevates our ability to understand Japanese and greets us with a new experience.

He has read many novels written by Japanese authors. Yukio Mishima, in particular, has influenced his life. Although he disagrees with Mishima's fierce kind of nationalism, he believes nonetheless that if Japan wants to make an international appeal, we must preserve our own culture based on Japanese nationality.

A Professional translator, Mitsunobu Yamamoto relies on his own imagination, which utilizes the experience of his life and reads Japanese novels, in translating literature from English into Japanese. He hopes that students in his class will understand the way he translates. After he has realized his dream of having his own farm and coffee shop in Hokkaido, he wants to bring people who understand him together there. On his farm, he would like to tell them that a literary translator needs the same level of imaginative ability as the original author's imagination because each sentence implies the writer's character.