The 1980s and 1990s saw a significant evolution in the practice of climbing in Japan, with the newfound popularity of free climbing correlating with environmental concerns. It was the widespread construction of climbing gyms at the end of the century that cemented this development, compensating for the poor rock durability of Japan's mountain ranges – Osaka's City Rock Gym was the first to be established in 1989. The practice of free climbing spread throughout Japanese society, creating a veritable subculture with its own codes, traditions and rituals [1], while Japanese sports institutions promoted the discipline in various competitions [2]. This has culminated in the inclusion of sport climbing in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

Cultural production followed suit: the first high-profile production was Baku Yumemakura's Kamigami no itadaki (1997) and its manga adaptation in 2000. Shinichi Ishizuka's Gaku: Minna no yama (2003) and Shinichi Sakamoto's Kōko no hito (2007) followed in its wake, before the more adolescent slice-of-life works of recent years. Burabura Donkey seems to fit into this trend: Atsushi Kaneko explained that it was the most natural concept for him to experiment with the use of the GBA's L and R buttons [3]. The project was originally intended to use 3D assets and original characters, but Nintendo pushed for 2D and the inclusion of the Donkey Kong characters. The project was consistent with Nintendo's experimental philosophy regarding its hardware and its desire to create a tangible link between the player and the gaming experience.

Burabura Donkey demonstrates the strength of the climbing concept, but also the limitations of such a system. The title does not quite manage to balance out its difficulty due to some uninspired level design. While the physics of spinning and throwing are well recreated, the game is rather cumbersome when the player is facing enemies, and there are times when they can be caught off guard by erratic movements and permissive hitboxes. Burabura Donkey leans heavily towards the arcade variety, with timed challenges to collect Crystal Coconuts and missions in the bonus mode adding to the difficulty of the title. Nevertheless, the Adventure mode provides a good opportunity for players to familiarise themselves with Donkey Kong's movements, a necessity as the title tends to be rather painful on the fingers as the buttons have to be held down for long periods of time.

Although the concept is fresh, Burabura Donkey suffers from contradictory ideas. The presence of enemies and bosses serves to mimic the progression of Donkey Kong Country, but is sometimes superfluous or contrived. The bosses all explore different ideas, attempting to use the various concepts introduced in previous levels – the boulders Donkey Kong can grab or the bombs he can throw – but the execution is often rather awkward: the fight against Davy Bones is particularly slow and suffers greatly from the complexity of the controls. Paon's concept is solid, however, and despite disappointing sales in Japan – Burabura Donkey was a GBA exclusive – Nintendo seems to have been satisfied enough to commission Donkey Kong: Jungle Climber (2007) for the DS.

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[1] On the success of free climbing and the creation of a homosocial and hierarchical subculture, see Wolfram Manzenreiter, 'No pain, no gain: embodied masculinities and lifestyle sport in Japan', in Contemporary Japan, vol. 25, no. 2, 2013, pp. 215-236.
[2] In particular, following the announcement in 2016 of the inclusion of climbing in the 2020 Olympic Games, the joint work of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Monbu-kagaku-shō), the Japan Sport Council (Nihon supōtsu shinkō sentā), and the Japan Mountaineering and Sport Climbing Association (Nihon sangaku supōtsukuraimingu kyōkai), has led to the inclusion of climbing in high-level sports curricula, as well as the construction and renovation of facilities needed to prepare athletes. On the topic, see Ruizhi Chen, Yuan Li, 'Development and Revelation of Japanese Sport Climbing', in Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, vol. 571, 2021, pp. 873-878.
[3] '『ぶらぶらドンキー』開発スタッフインタビュー', on nintendo.co.jp, consulted on 11th June 2007.

Often described as one of the best games for improving typing skills, The Typing of the Dead takes its cue from existing software, while adding a fresh twist with its rail shooter heritage and quirky humour. Although typing software has been available to the general public since the early 1980s, its form has always been fairly rigid, often using the figure of a real-life teacher – Mavis Beacon became a familiar figure in schools and among American children in the 1990s. Those aimed at a more childish audience certainly made use of well-known mascots, such as Typing is a Ball, Charlie Brown (1985), or claimed to be adventure games, such as Granny's Garden (1983). A decade later, The Typing of the Dead was a seriously addictive title that took full advantage of its arcade nature.

While the title starts off in an almost academic manner with its Training Mode, which teaches the home position to promote effective touch-typing, the game leans immediately towards the silly approach of The House of the Dead 2's (1998) script, with the voice acting as ridiculous as ever and a gothic horror that hardly takes itself seriously with the Dreamcast and keyboard equipment of the characters. The first words the player encounters are quite simple and short, but the difficulty increases until the zombies have to be felled with idioms that are about twenty characters long. The expressions chosen are reminiscent of the Phrases in Wheel of Fortune (1975) and add to the absurd atmosphere of the title. Their juxtaposition – for example, 'It's only a job', 'Surgical knife' and 'Hard luck woman' – also mimics the puns in the Japanese version, which constantly plays with homophonic kanji: for example, 愛だは for the 間は locution.

The Typing of the Dead proves to be a particularly well-honed title that is hard not to like. The difficulty curve is very accessible, but offers a real challenge on the highest difficulties, testing accuracy, reflexes and endurance – which the player can further pursue in the Drill Mode. It is a shame, however, that the selection of expressions, apart from those using special characters, is primarily a matter of translating the absurdity of Japanese puns rather than a genuine attempt to improve performance on certain parts of the keyboard: the game does identify the keys with which the player has the most difficulty, but there is no dedicated mode to improve specific areas such as using a single hand or words typed only on the upper row. Nevertheless, The Typing of the Dead is an effective, charming game that delivers exactly what its concept suggests.

     'In a land of clear colours and stories,
     In a region of shadowless hours,
     Where earth has a garment of glories
     And a murmur of musical flowers...’
     – Algernon Charles Swinburne, 'Dedication', 1865.

It took me several years to understand my girlfriend's fascination with translation. At first I thought it was an expression of her bilingualism and that it came naturally to her. She liked to compare texts at her desk, with two books open and bookmarked. I remember seeing Jane Austen and Plutarch, T.S. Eliot and Cicero in different editions. One book she kept coming back to was George Steiner's After Babel (1975), which I later took with me. When I was younger, its seven hundred pages frightened me with their complexity, and I kept the volume only as a souvenir: the spine was cracked from heavy use, and some of the pages were slightly worn and yellowed. These marks identified her presence, her aura, her memory.

     Understanding is a translation

It was only when I was later writing notes on After Babel that I understood what she valued in translation. It is difficult to capture Steiner's theses, since they do not form a grand, all-encompassing theory, but a key idea – formative for the field of translation studies and comparative literature – is that the communication of information is a secondary part of human discourse. For him, each language colours the individual's relationship to reality in a different way, allowing them to express a situated point of view, an otherness of being. As much as Steiner represented an ideal of the Renaissance man for my girlfriend – and still does, in a way, for me – he was not without his faults. His erudition was often the result of clumsy approximations, where it was more important to keep exploring elsewhere than to specialise.

Through it all, he remained the image of a reader, eager to compare and understand the texts he encountered. My girlfriend loved translating and comparing because, in her illness, she found in it a way of travelling and experiencing spontaneously the rich imagination of texts. Compared to the simple act of reading, translation forces the reader to immerse themselves in the text, to decode its signs, to identify cultural markers and to discover the various references hidden within it. A first glance will reveal expressions and objects that refer to a more or less precise period of time; a closer look will reveal word choices and content that were in use a few decades or centuries earlier; the scansion of the text will also make it possible to delimit a style and influences. Translating means observing and experiencing these elements in order to render them as faithfully as possible into another language, knowing that the result will still be distorted.

     Un petit pan de mur jaune and the rock of the Lighthouse

To transcribe is to experience. Certain scenes, conveyed by contemplative narrators, always linger in my mind. In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), Mrs Ramsey reads extracts from the famous anthology The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), edited by Arthur T. Quiller-Couch: each passage, chosen a priori at random, resonates with the previous ones, allowing the reader to enter Mrs Ramsey's consciousness and the atmosphere of the house. The way she picks the verses, as if plucking petals, contributes to the strange languor of the moment [1]. In Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1927), the narrator fantasises about his trip to Venice. However, this vision of the Serenissima is largely altered by Proust's own readings [2] and his desire to leave a mark, however subjective, through his literary account.

Type Dreams is fully aware of this artistic and ontological strength, drawing on the aesthetics of the typewriter and transcription to instantiate moments of contemplation in the present moment. KB0 offered a sublime insight into the relationship between the physical act of writing and existence; as such, I will not elaborate on these issues here. However, I would like to point out that, beyond the systems and anachronical Victorian aesthetics that seem to run counter to technological progress, the choice of texts is part of a veritable journey into the history of human production and Richard Hofmeier's mentality. The exercises are like musical études, and their poetic absurdity contrasts strikingly with the more concrete texts. There is something deeply wistful about these meditations on existence, death, love and memory. Just as the narrator of La Recherche instantiates his life in a literary production – to inscribe it in Time – Hofmeier seems to conjure up a malaise and an absence by transcribing texts that evoke this sorrow.

There are imperfections in the texts that remind the player of their humanity, whether due to the author's playfulness or a simple typing error. These deviations from the norm force the player to grasp their mental universe and compare it with their own. The extracts from Plato's Apologia Socratis (4th century BCE) are given in the translation by Miles Burnyeat and Christopher Rowe. A long debate about the translation of the dialogue seeks to determine whether ἀρετή should be understood as 'goodness' or as 'virtue'. Burnyeat and Rowe have argued, on philosophical grounds, that the correct translation is 'goodness' – but there is no consensus on this analysis [3]. Nevertheless, the choice of this version, rather than a translation from the Loeb Classic or that of Thomas G. West, allows Hofmeier to situate the theme of death and memory within his system of thought. These long extracts can be contrasted, for example, with the inclusion of 'Seeking Feelings for Words' by Felipe Carretoni, a confidential Brazilian writer.

     And I love you so much

The prose poem is addressed to a significant other, acknowledging their presence and the lessons they have taught the author. 'It has been some time now, love, since you taught me what love is,' the poem ends. There are echoes, deliberate or not, in the text of T. S. Eliot's 'A Dedication to my Wife': 'No peevish winter wind shall chill / No sullen tropic sun shall wither / The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only. / But this dedication is for others to read: / These are private words addressed to you in public' [4]. Carretoni's poem unfolds as the keys are struck, while the surroundings in which the typographer finds themselves slowly change. Starting with the empty, colourless room and the window covered by a light rain, it gradually regains its vibrancy as the player's avatar reappears. The act of writing exorcises the memories of a melancholy love. It is impossible to know what Carretoni and Hofmeier actually mean by this poem, but it hardly matters since the interpretation is left to the reader and player.

Both Apologia Socratis and 'Seeking Feelings for Words' remind me so much of my teenage love and the boundless affection she left me. Sometimes it overflows without knowing where to go: Type Dreams, in its mechanically contemplative approach, channeled that flood by conjuring up the virtues and lessons my first love left me – or what I imagine she left me. Over the past few years, I have spent long hours rereading and transcribing the many letters we exchanged. It was a way of reliving the feelings I had once committed to paper, of instantiating her presence once again. I have not done this for a long time, partly because the tenderness and lost love that surrounds me is painful, and perhaps because I have found other ways to honour her memory. Nevertheless, Type Dreams has brought back all those feelings and bared my heart once more.

Type Dreams is an unfinished work. The campaign for the game is not available, as Hofmeier interrupted the development of the game for personal reasons, and only a summary gives an idea of the themes addressed: 'The world's two fastest typists fall in love just as a new century is born'. A love that has nowhere to go and lives only in the imagination. Like Cart Life (2010), Type Dreams touches on everyday feelings with great humility. Typing the various texts with their distinctive tastes was a gentle stab in my chest: I felt the rustling of the trees, the kiss which tasted of the sea, the mysterious photograph by the lake and the walks on the beach all come back to me. And I cannot leave out the words we always used to close our letters.

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[1] Virginia Woolf meticulously constructed this atmosphere, which echoed her own vulnerability. In On Being Ill (1925), drafted while she was bedridden, she wrote: 'We rifle poets of their flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind, spread their bright wings, swim like coloured fish in green waters' (Virginia Woolf, 'On Being Ill', in The Moment and Other Essays, Hogarth Press, London, 1947, p. 19). The hermetic aspect of a poem is increased tenfold by a patient who hallucinates an entire universe.
[2] Proust was greatly influenced by the writings of John Ruskin, especially The Stones of Venice (1853). Ruskin denounced the effects of industrialisation on the Romanesque and Gothic heritage and became a leader of the Gothic Revival, an aesthetic that had a lasting influence on Proust. As such, '[his] Venice is an old provincial town, full of medieval vestiges, where intimate, parochial life is magnified; but it is also a fabulous garden, filled with fruit and birds of coloured stone, blooming in the middle of the sea that comes to refresh it' (Georges Cattaui, Proust et ses métamorphoses, Nizet, Paris, 1972, p. 26, personal translation).
[3] For example, see Joy Samad, 'Socrates’ Pragma and Socrates’ Toughness: On the Proper Translation of Apology 30b 2–4', in Polis, vol. 28, no. 2, 2011, pp. 250-266.
[4] Thomas S. Eliot, 'A Dedication to My Wife', in Collected Poems, 1909-1962, Faber & Faber, London, 1974.