Writing is just part of what I do. My main goal is to be a professional novelist (I’ve been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times and featured on the Guide to Literary Agents website about this) and I’ve completed more than one novel. While I work toward this goal, I pay the bills and build my readership as a freelance writer. I’ve written a few hundred articles for more than thirty magazines, newspapers and websites, but the freelance gig that tends to interest people the most would have to be my involvement in the manga translation process.

Manga are Japanese graphic novels and they’ve given me quite a bit of freelance work, as I’ve written about them for such places as Booklist, Comic Book Resources, Graphic Novel Reporter and Publishers Weekly, to name a few. But I’ve also been part of the behind-the-scenes work in the manga world: I’ve written the English adaptation.

It occurred to me that it would be a fun and significant job I could do, so I wrote to manga publishing companies, inquiring. I already knew people from most the companies and they were familiar with my reviews. Digital Manga Publishing, one of the main manga companies in America, gave me a “test,” having me work on some sample pages. I passed and was hired as a freelance adaptor.

The phrase “lost in translation” usually refers to what fails to be carried over from the original to the target language. However, in taking on the novels of H.G. Adler, I have often felt lost to and utterly consumed by the subtlety of Adler’s prose and the uncanny way that the consciousness of the author remains always at one remove from the narration itself, and yet present in every sentence. This was most obvious when I translated the Holocaust phantasm of Adler’s novel The Journey, for there the multiplicity of anonymous voices obliquely tied to the oppressors and their victims served as the woven fabric of Adler’s own present sensibility amid the prose. In Panorama, this at first seemed less obviously so, for as a species of Bildungsroman it uses an omniscient third-person narrator to render the more straightforward development and life of Josef Kramer, the book’s protagonist.

But like that other Josef K. of further renown, Josef Kramer remains a kind of cipher through which passes the people and places that he initially witnesses, and that eventually define him. The more Josef Kramer experiences and observes, the more the consciousness at work within him grows through its ability to absorb experience, survive it, and relive it through memory. Because Josef is a survivor, it is his memory that narrates Panorama, though at the start the reader is not overtly made aware of this. As the novel proceeds and Josef grows from child to schoolboy living in post-World War I Bohemia, then to university student to young man witnessing the cataclysm that drags him through the horrors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Langenstein, the reader begins to understand that it is Josef who is narrating the story of Josef, himself “aware of no break between yesterday and today.” Indeed, as an exile in England at the book’s close, Josef realizes “the past is so transparent in its intrusion that it no longer relates to any so-called ‘I’ or ‘you’, nor is Josef sure any longer whether he is someone who has acted or is a witness or a victim, or whether he is all of these together….”