Writing exercise 7

It looks like Japan is entering a new era as the first prime minister to be born after the WWII has taken office this week. I don’t know anything about politics nor do I like to talk politics here. Period.

One of the TV programs that intrigued me this week was an NHK news report on a controversy over whether to extend the term of posthumous copyright from the current 50 years in Japan to 70 years, which is the de facto global standard. The program centered on the pros and cons of the reform, and there seemed to be two points about the issue. One point is that shorter copyright terms obviously benefit people because they make it possible for us to read a lot of novels for free earlier than otherwise, which we’re actually doing now thanks to a few free novel sites out there, and because shorter terms will certainly contribute to furthering the proliferation of the great works through dramatization, film adaptation and so forth that can be done virtually for free. Another point is whether following the global standards on just about everything is the right thing to do, considering the obvious advantages that benefit us all. And another benefit of having shorter copyright terms that the program put emphasis on was that they make translation rights expire earlier, making an earlier publication of different translations possible for any literary work. One of the reasons we need more than one translation is that translations published in Japan are generally known to be full of mistakes, some of which can be spotted even by those with only rudimentary knowledge of the languages, as in the case of Françoise Sagan’s works, which are rumored to have made the translator as wealthy as the writer herself despite a lot of hideous mistakes in her translations. By the way, the reason I referred to Sagan here rather abruptly was that an example the program cited happened to be Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "The little prince." The French writer reminded me of Sagan. That's why. The translation right for "Le petit prince" in Japan expired only recently, just 50 years after his death, paving the way for seven or more different translations, instead of the only one that had been available for more than half a century. I think that's a very good thing from the standpoint of not the translators' profits but the spread of the great work, now interpreted in many different ways. The program also showed a bunch of Japanese writers rallying to call for the implementation of the reform, insisting that their ‘great achievements' need to be paid the fair value. I was disgusted at the scene. Their argument that their works of 'high artistic value' deserve to be given some legal privileges does not seem to make sense. And my take on this is that the current 50 years should be reduced to 25 years or less, not only for literature but for music as well.

This month I bought the Microsoft Encarta college dictionary. The last time I bought an English dictionary of this volume was more than a decade ago and it was one of Webster’s. It may be true that buying a paper edition of dictionary in this age doesn’t make sense, but I thought I made a very good purchase. I’ve been using a much smaller version of it for years. One of the good features of it is that definitions are arranged in increasing order of archaism, namely, the most up-to-date one comes first.