Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

As Sumire and Miu sat there together at the table at the wedding reception, they did what everybody else in the world does in such situations, namely, introduce themselves. Sumire hated her own name and tried to conceal it whenever she could. But when somebody asks you your name, the only polite thing to do is to go ahead and give it.
According to her father, her mother had chosen the name Sumire. She loved the Mozart song of the same name and had decided long before that if she had a daughter that would be her name. On a shelf in their living room was a record of Mozart’s songs, doubtless the one her mother had listened to, and when she was a child, Sumire would carefully lay this heavy LP on the turntable and listen to the song over and over. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was the soprano, Walter Gieseking on piano. Sumire didn’t understand the lyrics, but from the graceful motif she felt sure the song was a paean to beautiful violets blooming in a field. Sumire loved that image.
In junior high, though, she ran across a Japanese translation of the song in her school library and was shocked. The lyrics told of a callous shepherd’s daughter trampling down a hapless little violet in a field. The girl didn’t even notice she’d flattened the flower. It was based on a Goethe poem, and Sumire found nothing redeeming about it, no lesson to be learned.

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Asi nebudete číst Murakamiho anglicky, a já vlastně Sputnik přečetla prvně taky česky a anglicky jen prolistovala. Ale zarazilo mě, že česky přeložená Fialka zůstala v angličtině jako Sumire, tak jsem vybrala ukázku, ze které vyplývá, proč fialka, a dávám k posouzení. Osobně si myslím, že české řešení je lepší. Sputnik pro mě nějak nebyla kouzelná kniha, stejná taktika popáté už nezabírá tak, jako poprvé, ale přesto pro některé osamělé okamžiky může být ta pravá.