Lauren Elkin points me to this great piece at Tin House's website, on an author who adopted a pen name Edogawa Rampo, which I am told is pronounced Edgar Allan Poe.
It may be cliché to say so, but things do sometimes get lost in
translation, which is what happened, two years ago, the first time I
heard of the writer Hirai Taro. I was in Germany visiting my recently
relocated Japanese friend, updating him on my life, my graduate
studies, and my ever-growing obsession with Edgar Allan Poe. To which
he responded, “Oh, then, I wonder if you have ever heard of Edgar Allan
Poe?” The look on my face must have given away my confusion because he
repeated the name, but much more slowly, dividing it up into oddly
stressed syllables that sounded more Japanese than English. It took us
a couple of minutes of question and answer for me to finally
understand: Hirai Taro was a famous Japanese mystery writer who had
taken a phonetic version of Edgar Allan Poe for his own penname. I was
a little surprised that I hadn't heard of him. After all, Edogawa
Rampo's brazen acquisition of Poe's moniker, as well as his prominent
place in Japanese literary history, should have made him a welcome
import to American literary shores by now.
Taro's book Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination is available to English-readers from Tuttle publishing.
