So I guess everyone saw today's Google Doodle, celebrating the 85th anniversary of Maurice Sendak's birth. Good times. It reminded me of something I meant to blog about a while ago: the Japanese translation of Where the wild things are.

Wild thing is the key term, and the translation used is kaijū 怪獣, usually rendered "monster" (the characters individually mean something like "uncanny beast"). To be honest, I am not crazy about this as a translation. I'm not accusing the translator (the legendary Jingū Teruo 神宮輝夫) of dropping the ball, exactly — I certainly don't have an alternative proposal ready. But I feel like the word kaijū introduces a qualitative difference that wild thing doesn't. I don't have a statistical analysis to back this up, but I feel like it's pretty rare to use the word kaijū metaphorically at all. Wildness, on the other hand, is something we all have in equal or lesser measure, depending on the day. (And of course the wildness in this book is famously based on reality.)

Similarly, wild rumpus becomes kaijū odori, "monster dance." This just doesn't do it for me at all. The whole point of a rumpus, surely, is that it does not have the constraints of a dance. Come on.

Check out the final exchange between Max and his former subjects, just before he departs:

But the wild things cried, "Oh please don't go ― we'll eat you up ― we love you so!"
And Max said, "No!"

かいじゅうたちは　ないた。「おねがい、いかないで。おれたちは　たべちゃいたいほど　おまえが　すきなんだ。たべてやるからいかないで。」

「そんなの　いやだ！」と、マックスは　いった。

Literally:

But the wild things cried, "Oh please don't go ― we love you so much we could just eat you up ― we'll eat you, so don't go!"
And Max said, "I don't like the sound of that!"

It's interesting that Jingū felt the need to make the link between love and eating clearer. I feel like the whole middle third of his version of the wild things' line could be dropped and the children of Japan would still get the idea. Max's response, too, is more like something a real child would say, completely different in tone from the simple, rhyming "No!" of the original.

(Note that none of this stopped Kaijūtachi no iru tokoro from becoming one of Japan's favorite children's books.)