Ryan Holmberg

From start to finish, the process of adapting foreign media for a different-language audience is extensive. Prodigal Japanese transplant and multifaceted translating author Ryan Holmberg does it all to bring the exciting world of manga to an American audience.

So what does the process of translation entail, and what unique challenges does it present? To find out, we talked to the self-proclaimed “comics historian” about navigating a foreign language and even explore current tales of history in the making.

PhD historian. Translator. Author. Clearly, you are talented, yet you are billed as The Translator Without Talent. Why?

That’s the title of a recently-published book collection featuring my Instagram posts on manga and adjacent topics published by Bubbles, a zine about comics and manga made in Richmond. It’s a riff on The Man Without Talent, a famous manga by an artist named Tsuge Yoshiharu, which I translated this past year for New York Review Comics. Most of the manga I translate are fairly obscure, but this one got a lot of press and has sold fairly well.

It came to my attention that I screwed up the translation in one of the manga’s key passages, mainly out of carelessness. The title is half tongue-in-cheek, but also a nod to the fact that my heart is in writing history and that I came to translation mainly as means to get the manga I love out into English and provide a platform for my work as a historian—and pay rent. I have no inherent interest in the art of translation.

What do you consider your primary role to be?

I am an art historian by training. I first came to Durham when I was hired to teach Japanese art history at Duke University for a year in 2016-17. Then, I took a job in Tokyo. Now, I’m back because my girlfriend lives here, and am living entirely on freelance work: English-Japanese translation for various clients, and writing about art and comics and serving as an agent/editor/translator/essayist for English editions of literary and avant-garde manga from the past.

What kind of skills must a translator have to thrive in this field?

Fluency in the source language (in this case, Japanese), and the ability to write effective dialogue in the output language (English).

When translating from Japanese, how do you make sense of idiomatic language?

I am pretty fluent in Japanese, having partially grown up in the country (my Navy father was stationed there multiple times) and I spent thirteen years there (I think) total, half as an adult. My last job in Japan was teaching at a Japanese university, speaking Japanese to Japanese students, about Japanese culture. I’m not sure it was a total success, but it wasn’t a failure either. So, for the most part, I make sense of idiomatic language through my own fluency, and when that fails I ask my Japanese friends or search online.

What kind of tools or machines are used in the translation process?

Thank god for online kanji (Chinese character) dictionaries. That alone has cut translation time in half. Otherwise the only machine I use is my brain.

What’s your favorite manga series?

As a kid, I loved the manga versions of early Dragon Ball, Fist of the North Star, and other Shonen Jump comics. In my twenties, I got into political ninja comics—yes, that’s a genre—by Shirato Sanpei. I haven’t really read an extended series since childhood, though. I prefer short stories broadly in the alt-manga category.

What compelled you to document our Southern region @mangaberg?

I live here.

It’s alienating working on Japan in a region that has no real connection with Asia, first of all. But also, I have a background in art history and am naturally interested in how the arts are implicated in social change. I mean, you have people on one side trying to tear down statues, and people literally armed to defend them, on the other. This is the kind of thing you read about in history books. It’s happening in real time right now. There is literally civil warfare being waged over art and public monuments!

With the explosive rise in Black arts, both here in Durham and across the USA, canons of art history have totally exploded, which, as a comics person, is a godsend. And yes, it makes me, a white person, think especially harder about the art I was force-fed in school and at museums.

Having spent many years in Asia, not just Japan but China and India as well, I got a keen sense of how “American culture” gets consumed abroad, and it’s often very white, and very New York and California. So, the South for me—the limited, neophyte window I have on it, at least—blows that view to smithereens. It’s exciting and enlightening, and the least I can do is exercise what little influence I have to introduce what I know and have seen to people outside of the area, as far away as Japan even.

Do you have any publications addressing the topic of our current political climate?

A couple, actually. In the next issue of Bubbles, there will be a trio of interviews I conducted with artists who were involved with the temporary mural project in downtown Durham—Jasmyn Milan (who I believe you also interviewed), Brandon Hampton, and Ali Lymus—focusing on their love of Japanese manga and anime and how they’ve channeled those influences for political ends.

I have also completed an article about a group called Forward Motion Alamance and their use of comics and other media against the Confederate monument, Neo-Confederate presence, and racist sheriff in Graham. That appears online at The Comics Journal.