# Translating "*Dust Spurt!!* Ep 3. 'Marine Boyz '79'"
## original comic by Takahashi Rumiko, July 1979
## translated by Zoë Sparks, April 2026

I finished defending us in the eviction proceedings and then
doing our taxes on April 15th. The moment I returned home from
the post office, having sent the tax forms, I felt an
overwhelming desire to make some kind of art.

I'd been totally enmeshed in legal and bureaucratic stuff for
about 5 weeks and hadn't really gotten a chance to work on
anything that wasn't deeply prosaic. I was still afraid, as I'd
had been over those five weeks, that if I took even a day's worth
of time to make art it would end up causing us further housing
trouble. 

A couple days prior, on April 13th, I had been flipping through
the pages of the Takahashi Rumiko compilation *Rumic World Vol.
3*. I had come across the comic "マリン・ボーズ'79" randomly in
that context and was extremely delighted and amused by it.

As I was reading it, I had gotten the feeling that it would be
fun to do a translation of it, but put the idea of out of my mind
at the time. I was still hard at work on the taxes in that
period.

Right at the moment that I returned home from the post office,
knowing I was free of both the taxes and the court case, I felt
the desperation of not having made any art in like 5 weeks
bearing down heavily on me. I resolved that even though I knew I
needed to pivot to the housing search, I wanted to take just a
few days to do _something_ artistic. The possibility of
attempting the translation in that amount of time immediately
came to my mind.

I spoke with Lily about it and she agreed that it was all right.

I was finished with the translation four days later, on April
19th. Towards the end, Lily did start getting a bit antsy and
asking if I was done yet, and I probably said "It's almost there"
continuously for the later half of the project. It would've been
nice if I had been able to complete the whole thing in two days,
and I did have a first draft done by then, but I ending up
needing to edit and revise it a lot before I was satisfied with
it. Given that, I'm really pleased to have done it in four.
Translation is awfully complex!

I hope you enjoy this little-known Takahashi Rumiko comic from
her very early period.

---

This isn't the only Japanese translation project I have coming
down the pipe for this fundraiser; there's also two WIP projects
that I'll share with all of you.

One is a translation of a talk given by the Zen monk
Dogen in 1238. The other is subtitles for a 1990s TV
documentary about the modernist tanka poet Yosano Akiko.

You can look out for those in the coming days.

---

If you're curious about my Japanese language background:

I first decided I wanted to learn Japanase when I was 13 in order
to read classical poetry in the original. My middle school had a
book of classic haiku and tanka in English translation that I was
very taken by.

The following year, I went to high school at the local liberal
arts magnet, and had the opportunity to take Japanese as my
language there. At the teacher of that class's suggestion, I
skipped a year of Japanese after the first year, so my sophomore
year I was studying alongside the juniors.

That same school year, I got a scholarship to go to Japan for the
summer as an exchange student on homestay through the
organization Youth For Understanding. My Japanese host parents
helped me improve my conversation skills while I was there, both
by speaking with me and taking me weekly to a conversation
practice group for Japanese learners at the local rec center. I
also attended high school for about a month of my stay and was
exposed to the language in a lot of different contexts that way.

As it happened, I didn't end up going back to high school for my
junior year after I returned from Japan. Instead, I went
immediately to college at Simon's Rock. As part of the
requirements for my B.A., I had to take one-and-a-half semesters
of a language, and did two semesters of Japanese at Bard and one
semester of it over the summer at UT Austin.

I graduated with my degree in 2010, at the age of 20. I'm now 36.
Over that intervening time, I've continued to consume Japanese
media daily, both written and auditory, with a certain bias
towards older literature (reflecting my initial and continuing
interest in poetry). I've also corresponded on and off with
native speakers, sometimes for years at a time. The language
continues to be a major part of my life and I'm always learning
new things about it.
