More Sweet Zetsubou

Volume 9 of Kumeta Koji’s Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei just came out here in the US, and of course I bought it as soon as I could. It’s all standard SZS stuff, if you’ve read any of the last eight volumes you know what to expect. I love Mr. Kumeta’s fast-paced, satirical humour, and as a whole it’s one of the most quotable series I know.

I did notice that Kodansha has started publishing the series themselves, rather than licensing them through Del Rey. The layout’s almost identical to Del Rey’s; they just swapped out the logos on the spines.

Good for them; I’d have been irritated if they’d totally redesigned the thing and made them look weird on my bookshelf. There’s also a new translator, Joshua Weeks, taking over from David Ury, who himself took over from Joyce Aurino at (IIRC) volume five. Without reading the original I can’t vouch for accuracy, but Mr. Weeks seems to do a pretty good job keeping everything coherent for us anglophones, though I do have a couple nitpicks. Neither he nor Mr. Ury seem to use Zetsubou-Sensei’s standard formula ‘I’m in despair! (whatever) has left me in despair!’ as often as Ms. Aurino did, though Mr. Weeks uses it sometimes, which disappoints me a little. They use ‘hopeless’ or ‘I’ve lost all faith in (whatever)’ instead, which I’ll admit is just as technically accurate (AFAIK) and, perhaps more importantly, generally sounds more natural in most of these cases, but ‘despair’ is a stronger word. For what it’s worth, it’s also what fansubbers generally used in the TV show, so it’s what a lot of fans expect.

I’m also a little disappointed in the relative lack of translator’s notes. Ms. Aurino used a lot of them, Mr. Ury used fewer, though still more than most other series, and now there’s really just a few pages worth. Again, I don’t blame the translator (or editor or whoever decides these things). Most people probably don’t read them and, as the saying goes, ‘It’s not funny if I have to explain it’. Still, as someone interested in Japanese culture and translation, I always read the notes and usually find them interesting. That’s especially true of a series like Zetsubou-Sensei, which packs references so densely. I’d at least like to know the references in the chapter titles, most of which (again, AFAIK) refer to classic works of literature.