HFA Alumnus Sam Bett Featured in Harvard Review

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English and Japanese alumnus, fiction writer, linguist, and translator Sam Bett was recently interviewed by the Harvard Review with David Boyd. The two translated Japanese novelist Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020.

Bett's skill with Japanese has been recognized with a First Prize at the 2008 Amagasaki Japanese Speech Contest and a Level 1 Certification from the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. As an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, he spent two summers studying traditional Japanese puppetry at the Imada Puppet Theatre in Nagano, a full year enrolled alongside Japanese students at Kwansei Gakuin University on a Bridging Scholarship, and a month in Osaka conducting fieldwork for an honors thesis on the changing face of entrepreneurship in the city's historic Karahori Arcades.

In March 2016, he was awarded Grand Prize by the Japanese Government in the 2nd JLPP International Translation Competition for his translations of two contemporary Japanese fiction writers, Yoko Ogawa and Toshiyuki Horie. 

In this conversation with Harvard Review, they discuss their new translation of Kawakami’s novel, Heaven, the culture of adolescence, and the process of translating in tandem.

Harvard Review: Heaven is a novel that seems to be more about the culture of adolescence and less about the culture in which that adolescence takes place. Because of this focus on the insularity of the adolescent experience, the overall feeling of the novel was one of familiarity. For me it was a very relatable book; I feel like I grew up with people like the narrator (Eyes), Kojima, Momose—that I knew them intimately. As people who have of course also gone through adolescence, what was your connection to the story like?

Sam Bett: Whatever comes to mind when you hear “coming of age novel about bullying,” set that aside and think back to the pains of your own adolescent experience. Those pains, cranked up to ten, are what propels this book. When I think back on my experience of adolescence, I remember a looming physical sensation, almost like vertigo. The grown-up world was inaccessible and omnipresent. For a rather short novel, Heaven has a harrowing scale. It’s like the two main characters are exposed to the entire hemisphere, longing for shelter, and find it in each other. As adults, when someone makes us feel seen, I think what’s happening is they’re making us feel wanted in the same way that the friends we had as adolescents made us feel.

Continue reading the interview.