halfcactus

...because it's Halloween season and my brain needed some enrichment (I haven't worked on anything in ages). PS. Am trying to find an alternative to Vimeo, which is nearly unusable now and likely to become a paid-only service based on how they've been paywalling previously unpaid features. It's unfortunately the only Youtube alternative I know that's 1) free, 2) easily embeddable.

Anywhere I look, I see your face
And anywhere I run, your shadow clings to my hand


also on tumblr

Translation is, as always, not very faithful to the words (eg. "feelings", "love" and "heart" are generally interchangeable to me) but hopefully faithful to the feeling.

literal translation + notes on the words for "haunting"

I'm bolding the parts I changed significantly:

VERSE:
Take a deep breath
And close your eyes for now
Maybe you were
just seeing things

Why am I I agitated?
Aren't I alone?
I thought it was peaceful/quiet
But your voice is still calling (me)

I've buried it all (inside my heart)
I've covered my wounds
But why are they (the feelings) still here?
I can't make sense of it

My only prayer
Is for this to end
Because anywhere I look
I see your face
And anywhere I go
Your shadow clings to my hand
Slowly, I'm buried alive

CHORUS:
I can't break free
You haunt^[1] me every night
<sup>And though I see nothing
I can still feel your touch in the dark
No longer dreaming
Unable to wake
Turn on the lights
I'm being haunted[2] by my emotions
My emotions

BRIDGE:
Are you ever leaving me?
Haven't you tortured me enough?
Will I ever know peace?
Will I ever know peace?

REPEAT CHORUS


1:Literally "to visit"; to be haunted is to be visited by spirits[back]

2: The word for haunting (multuhin) is basically the verb form of the word for ghost (multo), so like, ghosting if ghosting meant to haunt. I went with "haunted by the ghost of my heart" because "ghost" gives the emotions a shape. If that makes sense. [back]</sup>

1.

In any case, translation toward English is not an act of benevolent charity — Penguin’s imprimatur did not rescue Truyện Kiều from obscurity. Nearly a hundred million people live in Việt Nam and several million Vietnamese people live abroad. Việt Nam is now more populous than the United Kingdom, Turkey, Australia, France, Germany, South Korea — and many, many other countries. A friend recently shared a reminder from her mother: Vietnamese doesn’t need you. We get so embroiled in our diasporic angst, writing heartfelt, tortured essays about not being able to impart cultural knowledge to any children we might have, but we’re lucky for what is not the case for everyone who has lost a language or had it taken from them. Vietnamese is not endangered, and its literature is not honored by translation toward English — it is English-using society that benefits from gaining access to literature produced in other languages. . .

—Som-Mai Nguyen, "Blunt-force Ethnic Credibility" (h/t superborb on Bluesky)


2.

In that instant, Kiyose realized something. If happiness, or beauty, or goodness existed in this world, for him, they would take the form of this runner.

Just finished Shion Miura's Run with the Wind (translated by Yui Kajira) and loved it. Although I barely remember anything from the anime, I adored it the first time I watched it and I now appreciate it as an adaptation. :') The big race (Hakone Ekiden) took almost half of the book and I'm amazed at how invested and emotional I was throughout it, even when I was just reading it! I did mostly have to skip Shindo and Haiji's legs because I was too anxious haha.

Also loved the bits where Musa was struggling with colloquial language (as a foreign student) and Shindo was always checking in on him. I actually don't remember Shindo at all in the anime, which makes me feel bad because he is such a GEM.

Some of the side characters (namely the rival athletes and Hana) were more obviously narrative devices than people and it took some time for me to get used to that, and I was very surprised to see the (one-sided) Kakeru/Hana developments.

Really enjoyed the English translation, the (consistent and intentional) choice to leave specific words untranslated and unitalicized, and the writing.

Some excerpts from the translator's notes:

Miura's writing has a warmth and an openness, though it's hard to put a finger on what exactly gives it that feeling. Her all-embracing love for human beings and their everyday lives, in all their messy glory, seems to seep through her words and touch us, too. Her characters come alive on the page, each possessing their own past and future. As readers, we are pulled into that embrace, and, like the spectators of the Hakone Ekiden, we feel absorbed in the Chikusei-so team's endeavor as if we were running alongside them ourselves.

My general stance in translating this novel was to prioritize the momentum of the story, the feel of each character (and their relationships, with all the banter), and the authenticity of the language revolving around running. At the same time, I wanted to retain as many Japanese terms as possible, and in a way that allows curious readers to look things up. After all, it's perfectly natural to come across unfamiliar words or concepts while reading any book, no matter the language it was originally written in. Luckily, it's easier than ever to find out what an engawa or a kamaboko looks like, or what a higurashi sounds like. Of course, there are many English videos and articles about the real-life Hakone Ekiden as well, packed with as much human drama as the story of the Chikusei-so team.

3.
llonkrebboj linked me to their translation of 人是_ by Zhou Shen, which naturally led me to falling in love with the song and being tempted to watch Wandering Earth 2.

POSTING HERE SO I DON'T FORGET BECAUSE both their band name and album title are not the most searchable lmfao but oh my God this band!!! Their languages!!! Their songs!!!

Fom their Wikipedia article:

Collage (Chinese: 珂拉琪; pinyin: Kē Lā Qí; Japanese: コラジ) is a Taiwanese band that released their first album in 2021,[1] with two members: lead singer Natsuko Lariyod, who is of mixed Hakka and Amis ancestry, and Hunter Wang, who is of Minnan descent. Rather than use Taiwanese Mandarin, the band focuses on producing music using Taiwanese, Japanese, Amis and English. They incorporate indigenous people's music into their compositions.

I haven't heard their entire album yet but I definitely got teary just listening to 這該死的拘執佮愛 and 萬千花蕊慈母悲哀 even though I could understand next to nothing... to be honest, I feel like half of the emotion was from them having such a moving and fanviddable sound... And the rest is the songs being in (Taiwanese) Hokkien, which I suppose always hits hard even when they're incomprehensible to me. The titles of the later songs in the album seem to be Amis so I'm even more intrigued, especially since they are English-subbed on their Youtube channel. And the album and song covers are pretty, which is always a plus!

I also love how the Youtube descriptions have both the hanzi (like the actual Hokkien hanzi, not the Mandarin translation, which is often the case) and the Hokkien romanization. :')

I'll probably forget this because Hokkien will never be a readable language for me, but:

袂: bue (in Mandarin... 不 or 不會?)

予: ho (in Mandarin... 給 or 讓? The passive thing.)

Tsin (very) really is just... 親

下晡: e-po (afternoon / 下午 in Mandarin)

厝內 chu lai (home / 家裡)

無要無緊 bo yao bo kin... (in Mandarin, 無關緊要) - is this where boey ao kin (it's alright) comes from???

這該死的拘執佮愛 Stubborn Love in Chains (with simpler and possibly more singable lyrics):

Watch on YouTube

萬千花蕊慈母悲哀 Green Tara's Thousands of Sorrowful Blossoms

Watch on YouTube

Btw listening to a song in Hokkien is always an interesting (and frustrating) experience because even with the lyrics in front of me I can't process the words... As opposed to Canto or any other Sinitic language, where my instinct is to match the words up with Mandarin.

ETA: Finished the album. I have to say that there’s a song that appears to be about Japanese soldiers, which I have a knee-jerk revulsion to, regardless of whatever the context is. But it’s otherwise still a great album! Interesting that the Amis songs are often mixed with Japanese.

Happy New Year + Kiong Hee Huat Tsai!

What I consumed in the last two months:
( TV: Rock It, Mom; The Heart of Genius; Wednesday; Salt Fat Acid Heat; 两不疑 No Doubt in Us )


( movies: Spider-Man No Way Home; Glass Onion; Cherry Magic movie )

Misc

Mula sa Buwan (From the Moon):

Localized Filipino musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. I'm not familiar with the original play, and because the setting was adapted to the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in WW2 (which is still pretty recent), I was too stressed to truly enjoy this. /o\ Still, it was beautifully staged, and I was really surprised and delighted to discover that the play was entirely in verse (which is, IME, unusual)! This was a limited two-weekend run where they didn't have any understudies, so there was also a lot of pandemic tension going on backstage; you could FEEL the palpable joy when the play opens with characters rejoicing about how the theater was theirs tonight, and the gratitude of the actors during the curtain call.

Kotaro Lives Alone: recced by aartichapati; dropped because my Netflix subscription expired, but it's a quiet slice-of-life anime that was perfect as a background watch because I could look away without missing anything.

Disco Elysium: The game’s overall feel (like the lack of warmth in the city—Martinaise just felt so cold all the time) was v depressing and anxiety-inducing for me, but I think my anxiety has also been pretty rough on me lately. I do think it was written beautifully, for me to get so emotionally invested in the characters that I met, and for Harry’s personal storylines to hit me so hard. It handles a lot of dark and sensitive themes really well too, neither shying away nor reveling in them. (And I am absolutely pleased with the storylines I decided to put my energy to——the cryptids and perception boost, as well as the entire Church storyline, and the tie.) Overall, 10/10 experience and storytelling, but in many ways, this game is not for me.

On literary translation: "Hosts and Guests" by Robin Myers: Interesting read. NGL, I'm not sure if there will ever be a language that truly feels like home to me. I wander through the houses I grew up in like a ghost lol