ampulets

How would you translate the word 心? The most obvious is “heart”. In Alfred Birnbaum’s translation of Haruki Murakami’s Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World , he translated it as “mind”. I can understand why. In the context of the story, it refers to our consciousness, memory, thoughts… In the more recent translation by Jay Rubin (the title was also reverted to E nd of the World and Hardboiled Wonderland ) , Rubin reverted to “heart” as the English translation. It is more direct. Even in Chinese, the seat of thought is the heart - as in the phrase 心想事成 , which means “may whatever your heart desires or thinks be made real”. Even here, the word for “thought” is actually “desire” because what your heart/mind is thinking of is your desire. Mind and heart are not dichotomised, as in the English and the post 18th century worship of "reason" and the "rational mind". This week I started watching a Masterclass series on the brain, particularly its relationship to a...