[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: Japanese (English tr. Tyran Grillo)
country: Japan
year: 1985
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Legend of the Galactic Heroes, #5
dates read: 15.6.23-20.6.23
Mobilization (tr. Tyran Grillo), the fifth book of Tanaka Yoshiki’s Legend of the Galactic Heroes series, is a substantial improvement over the previous book, Stratagem. this is both because of the substance of the book — Mobilization is many things but never the filler novel that Stratagem felt like — and also, crucially, because Grillo’s translation is noticeably better than his translation of Stratagem. first and foremost, Mobilization no longer feels like each sentence of the novel was translated in isolation from the rest of the book. that’s huge! it’s a mostly cohesive and coherent text!
it is, however, still riddled with awkward and incoherent individual phrases and sentences, including at least one thing that I’m 99% sure is a mistranslation:
Because they weren’t taking the most direct course back to their base of operations, the trajectory of their path was easily discerned by tactical computer.
something has gone wrong here, and I suspect it’s that Grillo missed a も and so turned what was supposed to be a concessive 〜ても (“Although they weren’t taking the most direct course…”) into connective 〜て (“Because they weren’t taking the most direct course…”).
— which is of course an understandable mistake in isolation, but if he’d been thinking about this sentence in context he would have realized it made no sense. this kind of thing definitely detracted from my overall enjoyment of the book.
this is disappointing because there’s a lot to like here — Yang is at his best and Reinhard is at his worst, where he belongs. the book’s core feeling I would say is simply exhaustion: after years of repeated wars, everyone in the galaxy is at their limit, especially the protagonists, who have been fighting more or less nonstop. Yang is on the verge of collapse (both militarily and personally) throughout the book, and Reinhard does, in fact, effectively collapse at one point, when he has to take to bed because he’s feverish. the central political tension between democracy and dictatorship also comes to a head here: I appreciate Tanaka’s readiness to admit and even highlight democracy’s flaws without ever being willing to concede to dictatorship, even for a moment, however ostensibly “enlightened” it may be. I think he underestimates some of the flaws of capitalist “democracy” in line with the series’s relative inattention to material factors, but it continues to be a really striking reflection on politics.
it also continues the uncompromising representation of the brutality of war: every time there’s a moment where war might seem like it could be beautiful, it’s immediately undercut by matter-of-factly brutal descriptions of death and destruction. if there’s one thing Tanaka wants us to take away from this series, it is that war is ugly, war is death, war is brutality. and war is, especially in capitalist polities, a tool the powerful use to make themselves more powerful.
that said, the battle descriptions felt flatter than usual — I suspect this may have been at least partly a result of Grillo’s awkward style, but I can’t rule out the possibility that it’s also reflective of the original text.
moods: dark, tense