If you have an interest in Japanese culture, Japanese language, or life in Japan, this book will engage you. The writing is beautiful and the writer knows of what she writes. That's pretty much all I need in a book!

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book.

This is such a delightful memoir. The prose is beautiful, as befitting a translator who clearly loves language. I enjoyed the Britishisms as well. And I absolutely fell for the unique memoir structure. A book that should be read and reread. I certainly intend to reread it rightaway.

Translation—the conveyance of ideas, sentences, a story, a feeling, from one language to another—is inherently contradictory: be as exact as possible, or risk failing at the act. But since the transference of meaning is something so subjective, so tied to cultural and social cues, one could argue “exact” is impossible. Translation becomes its own art form then, one that can only be deeply personal, its product as unique as the heart and brain behind the translation. Such is the case for Polly Barton, a British translator of Japanese work like Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job: for Barton, the act of translation is tied up in the act of becoming herself. Fifty Sounds is a memoir and meditation of what is lost and gained of oneself when one enters this space of communion between a foreign culture, its language, and those of your own. (MORE BELOW)

My thanks to both Netgalley and the publisher W. W. Norton & Company for an advanced copy of this memoir.

Sir Francis Burton Victorian explorer and translator of the Arabian Nights story had a true gift for languages. Some believed he was conversant in close to 30 and could fake his way through a variety of others, from Asia, Africa and Europe. For a person who struggles to write and both speak English good, or well, I find this amazing. Burton learned best by immersion into the culture, learning a language as he went about his explorations and wanderings, learning about the language, the people and culture, and more importantly the nuances. In Fifty Sounds: A Memoir, Polly Barton discusses immersion into a culture she didn't know much about, learning a language and alphabet that was unfamiliar, and thrust into a lifestyle that was certainly different from what she had known.

Broken into fifty essays, each with a word in Japanese as title that sets the scene and the theme, the book is a very personal account of a young woman entering the world, and throwing herself quite deep into it. Ms. Barton holds nothing back about her life, love and her experiences both before and after Japan, and of course her time teaching English to Japanese students as part of the JET program. Moving to the island of Sado at the age 21 was quite a emotional and physical shock to her, as her studys in philosophy really did not prepare her for a world that she would have to struggle to understand and be understood. The book discusses her first fumbling days to becoming a translator of renown.

The writing is very personal, sometimes seeming like diary entries where a reader might wonder why they need to know this about the author. At other times like Ms. Barton is watching a character called Polly Barton moving through life. These two styles work well in showing both the troubles Ms. Barton was having dealing with the alienation and the aloneness. You can also tell that Ms. Barton is a translator as the words she uses seem to always fit. There is no extraneous words, everything seems balanced and right, even in what seems like digressions into philosophy, the point they come to fits the theme of the chapter. The writing is very confident, something that a lot of memoirs never rise to.

For readers interested in Japanese culture this will be a book they never knew they needed. For a woman thinking of teaching overseas, or for a young person just entering the world, I think there would be a lot to learn here. A very good study of a life lived well, with many risks and even more rewards.