I came across Kazutoki Umezu’s Vietnamese Gospel about five or six years ago and have loved it since then. The album cover and music are very much what I can imagine about southeast Asia, where post-war wounds blend with warm evening breezes.
Vietnamese Gospel – Kazutoki Umezu
And then recently a friend of mine accidentally found an alternative version with lyrics by Komuro and his band. It was a night in Provincetown. Early summer, light rain at times, and we just watched Clouds of Sils Maria.
I hated the song the first time I heard it because the lyrics sounded like all the Japanese songs you’d hear. But then I started to find the vocals so good, like Maki’s style, tributes to life. And I had a feeling that the song was sung for memorizing some kind of war and people’s hope of meeting their descendants (like I still think Mizutani’s Distant Memories is about political rebellion and revolution).
I tried to look up the lyrics or any interpretations but couldn’t find anything, so I transcribed them. I found lyrics quite hard to translate, especially for a language like Japanese where every word can be a euphemism, so I’ll not ruin it. Probably just put them in a translator to get a sense of what they are singing.
They are not singing anything in particular anyway 🙂
In 2019 I and Cindy did a translation for an LGBTQ video made by students at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts. The lyrics’ brainwashing, I still sing it.
We put some of our thoughts about the translation process at the end.
This is a project (fall 2019, JPN III – Contemporary Texts) that digs into what can be translated and what cannot. I see many unnatural expressions now but I’ll just leave it as that.
I do NLU so it was kind of funny for me to look at this. I thought quite a lot about how to improve knowledge representations to capture nuances in cultural differences when I was working on this research paper. But if humans themselves don’t concur in the same representation, how would you expect machines to…
NinH 