The Translator Without Talent

Though with only two dozen manga translations, 80 essays, 55 reviews, one exhibition pamphlet, and zero solo-authored books under his belt, Ryan Holmberg PhD is widely regarded as the biggest fish in the puddle-sized sea of alternative manga in the Anglosphere. Fresh off a major professional setback and a steamy summer of near-murderous romance, in the fall of 2017 Dr. Holmberg departed for a two-year stint as a Visiting Professor at the prestigious University of Tokyo, where he would commence to document his research finds, translation troubles, and escapades with aging manga artists in a series of detailed Instagram posts @mangaberg. Since returning to the United States in the fall of 2019, Dr. Holmberg has continued to undermine his academic career as a so-called comics scholar by investing way more than time and sharing way more about his personal life than he should on this Instagram account.Collecting 300 pages worth of Instagram posts of cutting-edge research, rarely-seen manga images, and behind-the-scenes looks at the nitty-gritty of manga research and translation - as well as a NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED manifesto of Dr. Mangaberg's thoughts and theoretical musings about comics translation - THE TRANSLATOR WITHOUT TALENT is a tell-all slog through two-plus years of activity of your favorite nose-in-the-mud manga scholar. Hopping across the work of some of the best and weirdest alt-manga and gekiga artists in the world, this genre-defying volume is perfect for anyone who is obsessed with obscure, amazing, and all-too-frequently retrograde manga, but does not have the patience to scroll through an Instagram account for free. Comics studies has never seen anything like THE TRANSLATOR WITHOUT TALENT . . . and it may never again. Published by the comics and manga fanzine BUBBLES in its first foray away from the xerox machine.

A Japanese manga legend's autobiographical graphic novel about a struggling artist and the first full-length work by the great Yoshiharu Tsuge available in the English language. Yoshiharu Tsuge is one of comics' most celebrated and influential artists, but his work has been almost entirely unavailable to English-speaking audiences. The Man Without Talent, his first book ever to be translated into English, is an unforgiving self-portrait of frustration. Swearing off cartooning as a profession, Tsuge takes on a series of unconventional jobs -- used camera salesman, ferryman, and stone collector -- hoping to find success among the hucksters, speculators, and deadbeats he does business with. Instead, he fails again and again, unable to provide for his family, earning only their contempt and his own. The result is a dryly funny look at the pitfalls of the creative life, and an off-kilter portrait of modern Japan. Accompanied by an essay from translator Ryan Holmberg that discusses Tsuge's importance in comics and Japanese literature, The Man Without Talent is one of the great works of comics literature.

Selected papers from a lively conference on the state of the art in translator and interpreter training. Topics range from culture specific problems (in Iran, South Africa and Canada, for instance) to the internationalization of the profession. The book is brim-full of teaching ideas and strategies: problems of assessment, teaching translators to be professional and business oriented, using cognitive methods, terminology management, technical translation, literary translation, theory and practice, simultaneous/consecutive interpreting, subtitling and many other related topics.

A gritty collection of graphic short stories by a Japanese manga master depicting life on the streets among punks, gangsters, and vagrants. Tadao Tsuge is one of the pioneers of alternative manga, and one of the world’s great artists of the down-and-out. Slum Wolf is a new selection of his stories from the late Sixties and Seventies, never before available in English: a vision of Japan as a world of bleary bars and rundown flophouses, vicious street fights and strange late-night visions. In assured, elegantly gritty art, Tsuge depicts a legendary, aging brawler, a slowly unraveling businessman, a group of damaged veterans uniting to form a shantytown, and an array of punks, pimps, and drunks, all struggling for freedom, meaning, or just survival. With an extensive introduction by translator and comics historian Ryan Holmberg, this collection brings together some of Tsuge’s most powerful work—raucous, lyrical, and unforgettable.

"San'ya," Tokyo's largest day-laborer quarter and the only one with lodgings, had been Oyama Shiro's home for 12 years when he took up his pen and began writing about his life as a resident of Tokyo's most notorious neighborhood. In this fascinating book, he portrays himself as an outsider both from mainstream society and from his adopted home.

When renowned translator Hanne Schubert falls down a flight of stairs, she suffers a brain injury and ends up with an unusual but real condition: the ability to only speak the language she learned later in life: Japanese. Isolated from the English-speaking world, Hanne flees to Japan, where a Japanese novelist whose work she has recently translated accuses her of mangling his work. Distraught, she meets a new inspiration for her work: a Japanese Noh actor named Moto. Through their contentious interactions, Moto slowly finds his way back onto the stage while Hanne begins to understand how she mistranslated not only the novel but also her daughter, who has not spoken to Hanne in six years. Armed with new knowledge and languages both spoken and unspoken, she sets out to make amends.

The award-winning, bestselling French novel by Philippe Besson—“the French Brokeback Mountain” (Elle)—about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress/writer Molly Ringwald. We drive at high speed along back roads, through woods, vineyards, and oat fields. The bike smells like gasoline and makes a lot of noise, and sometimes I’m frightened when the wheels slip on the gravel on the dirt road, but the only thing that matters is that I’m holding on to him, that I’m holding on to him outside. Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Without ever acknowledging they know each other in the halls, they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair. Dazzlingly rendered in English by Ringwald in her first-ever translation, Besson’s powerfully moving coming-of-age story captures the eroticism and tenderness of first love—and the heartbreaking passage of time.