The joint
This plate is the owner’s reading of a title. The grammar it stands on is marked separately from the literary claim.
In English the title is a possessive. On the account associated with Steven P. Abney’s dissertation The English Noun Phrase in Its Sentential Aspect (MIT, 1987), the Saxon genitive is not a case ending glued to the possessor. ’s is a genitive in determiner position: the head of a determiner phrase, with the possessor in its specifier. The usual generative development of that account is raising. The possessor moves up into that specifier. The owner’s name for the whole machine is syntactic raising and possessor-in-specifier. The shape is Gravity, lifted in front of ’s, and Rainbow still the head noun underneath.
Japanese calls the book 重力の虹. 重力 is gravity as physical pull. 虹 is the rainbow. They carry. の does the linking, and it does it by another mechanism. It is an adnominal particle between a modifier and a following noun. Linguists have also described this の as genitive case. Neither description is the English one. Japanese does not place this relation in a determiner head, and it does not raise a possessor into a determiner’s specifier. The possession is said. The machine that said it in English is not in the line.
That would be ordinary packaging, except for what the owner does with it. The novel thematizes raising in the physical sense: rockets rising, the parabola of the flight, the raised and the fallen. The owner reads the English title as already taking part, because its grammar raises the possessor. A reader of 重力の虹 is not barred from the rockets, the arc, or the possession. What does not come with the title, on this reading, is the echo between a syntactic raising and a rocket’s rising. The title cannot be carried over perfectly, because that echo was in the joint. The loss is small, and the owner holds that it matters to a reader’s understanding of the book. This is an interpretation of literary effect. It is not a claim that Japanese cannot speak of ascent, and it is not a verdict on either translation.
The other lanes chose other crates. French puts the rainbow first and links it with de. Spanish does the same, and the articleless de gravedad sits where Spanish also says that a wound is serious. German does not translate the possessive at all: Die Enden der Parabel names the two ends of a parabola, and Parabel is also the word for a parable. Chinese uses the classical linker 之 and replaces the everyday word with 万有引力, the technical name of universal gravitation.
Why this break matters to a reader
A reader who thinks a title is only a label can shrug. A reader who thinks this title is one of the places the book states its subject will feel 重力の虹 as a repacking: same picture, different joint. The map’s point is the joint. Crossing remains possible. The German title keeps the parabola by a route the English title never took. Difference, not a ban.