Saturday, March 1, 2008

Turning Japanese

My novel Pyres has been purchased by Hayakawa Publishing for translation and publication in Japan! Forgive my excitement, but this is my first translation sale ever. Now my bio can say "Derek Nikitas's work has been translated into one language!" But seriously, all you Japanese fans clamoring to get a hold of a translated version of Pyres shall wait no longer. Not that I've ever heard from a Japanese fan. And not that the book is being published right now. In fact, I don't even know when it's going to come out. Still I can't wait to get my very own copy, full of...

(okay, I was about to write "pictographs," but not wanting to look like an idiot (too late), I did five minutes of research. Turns out Japanese characters are not "pictographs" (pictures that are meant to represent exactly what they picture), nor are they "ideograms" or "logograms" like in some Chinese characters (symbols that represent complete ideas rather than mere sounds like in the English alphabet; our numerals are ideograms, like 1). Anyway, modern Japanese is phonetic (sound based) just like English. The "lettering" is called hiragana, or katakana. There is an element of the Japanese writing system called kanji, which is apparently ideographic, because it is older and borrowed from China. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong about this information. Either one of you.)

I can't wait to get my very of own copy of the Japanese edition full of Japanese hiragana and katakana that I can't read. It'll be fun to look at and to break out at parties, nonetheless.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Are there any eatern symbols which dually represent agony and ecstatsy or agony and passion and if so....would you post that image or symbol(preferred)?