An interview with Alfred Birnbaum

Translator of Haruki Murakami’s "A Wild Sheep Chase," and many others

I came of age in the Eighties, a period where the vast majority of content imported from Japan, which is to say video games, toys, anime, comics, and films, wasn’t particularly well translated. The translations of games in particular were often unbelievably, epically, legendarily bad, to the point some have achieved eternal meme status today. 

Occasional…