愛花晴々 || My Beloved Flower is Cheerful

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6 responses to “愛花晴々 || My Beloved Flower is Cheerful”

1. 

   Saryu

   20 August 2019

   Re: the flowers representing different people. Um, maybe? Some of the verbs are pretty weird for people (“shine faintly”, “wrap you up”) and others are clearly not talking about flowers (“make your smile bloom” “sing”), so I feel like maybe the object changes throughout the song (though don’t ask me to point you to any particular pattern) or maybe these lines are here for ambience and you aren’t supposed to analyze too deeply. Hard to say.

   Well, “marry” was weird enough that I looked up to verb in a Japanese-English dictionary to see if I was missing anything, so I’d say mission accomplished! But I also feel like, despite being kind of nonsense in the surface, it does make some emotional sense? On one hand, there’s the obvious love connection*, but marriage is also about transformation. You stop being mainly the son/daugther of your family, a relatively lowly position, to become the head of a new one. So I can sort of understand using marriage as metaphor for a person going through a great fundamental change (becoming ‘”immortal” in this case) on an intuitive level, even though I couldn’t really build a logical connection between their dictionary definitions.

   *My first read of that line was something like “Since I cannot marry you, I will instead ‘marry’ you to eternity so that I will always be able to see you even if we can’t be together”. The fact that it’s marrying a woman especifically, when the singer can be assumed to be female, only reinforced my substitute/settling-for idea. But the main point is that I figured that that verb was being used literally and non-literally at the same time, explaining why the metaphor is pretty non-standard.

   As for the mattress line, I think that should be your choice. It’s ambiguous, probably deliberately so, so you can translate it two different ways and not have either be wrong. I’ll only say that if the idea is that the singer can’t have the rest of them, it’s probably better to write it as “I bound only your shadow to the mattress”. Putting it after the “I” gives me the feeling that they’re going “Well, I didn’t go any farther than that so don’t be mad” or like it was what all they wanted to do in the first place.
   “Only” can be kind of tricky like that. I remember a post that read ” ‘She said she loved him’. Now try putting ‘only’ in different places in that sentence and see how it changes”. You get a diferent meaning with practically every variation, it’s pretty interesting.

   Mmh, that’s a good point, though I still find it difficult to translate that line into literal facts. It’s pretty, ahem, flowery.

   I agree, though I think it’s less that there’s no mentioned cause and more the sudden timeskip that seems deliberately strange. Even if we assume the songwriter doesn’t really care about the guy and just wants to showcase the woman’s story, it’s still a pretty big oversight to leave out such an important moment and its inmediate consequences, especially since she’d be very affected. Why not show the murder, if she did it, or her grief and shock if she didn’t? Why not the mourning? We don’t even know if the death anniversary mentioned is the first one, or the first time she tried to drown her sadness with another. One would think these would be very significant parts, if the point of the song was the woman. And surely there was room for a single sentence about at least the death itself, if not all that, but instead it’s mentioned in a really offhanded way, as a mere accesory for the singer’s action, and then never mentioned again. He’s not even refered in the past tense afterwards. He’s just alive one line and the next he’s already nothing but bones and blurry memories,
   I didn’t consciously realize it at the time, but I think the amnesia/denial bit of my interpretation might have been influenced by the fact that there’s this huge, unexplained gap right where the most traumatic time in her life would be.
   It’s not just that the death itself it isn’t actually told on its own, it’s that it’s like it barely even had any consequences or like it’s in some quantum state where it sometimes happened and sometimes he’s still alive, just out of sight. It feels like the song is deliberately glossing over it, and it’s always suspicious when somebody is trying stop you from thinking too hard about something.

   This is 100% unrelated to this song, but I noticed you’re translating Kairiki Bear’s Ángel I’m looking forwards to it! One thing that the official lyrics didn’t include is that in the PV the subtitles for the “shiawase desu” that goes before “koko wa rakuen” change into “tsurai desu” right after the ‘fake’ line is sung. It took me a few times before I noticed it, so I thought I’d point it out and save you the trouble of editing if you wanted to include it in your translation.

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2. 

   releska

   9 August 2019

   Sorry about that (^_^); I let all the comments through – unsure if you’ll be able to edit them but I look forward to reading them later on…!

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   1. 

      Saryu

      10 August 2019

      I can’t edit them because I don’t actually have an account, I just chose the same name every time. That’s why sometimes my avatar changes.
      Either way, all of my post is up and in the right order, putting aside repeats and me complaining about WordPress*, so give it a look when you can! Maybe next time I’m having trouble with the filter I’ll number the parts and write down how many there are, it’d probably make reading it easier…

      * Is it possible to delete those after you’ve approved them? It’s not really important, but they kinda disrupt the flow of the text.

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3. 

   Saryu

   9 August 2019

   More than it being “too late”, I get the feeling the singer might have murdered her beloved… At least, there seems to be some pretty serious mixed feelings in there.

   There’s this constant contrast between light and shadow, with the protagonist being associated with darkness and the other person with light. One thing I noticed is that, in the line “Oh, my melancholy nature”, the word for melancholy has the kanji for shadow in it, and the one used for the title’s “cheerful” has to do with clear skies, and thus indirectly sunlight. The other references are more obvious: “I envy your cheerful figure in the sun”, “I sink into the darkness”, “my hatred nests in the shadows”, etc. And in the last two quotes you can see the ambivalence I was talking about (technically it doesn’t say to whom the hatred is directed, so it could be a love rival or something like that, but economy of characters and the previous quote suggests otherwise).

   I think the singer might resent them because they feel they’re fundamentally incompatible, so all all the pain she feels about their unrequited love is ultimately pointless. You can kind of see it in “I musn’t fall to the flames” and how flowers need sunlight to live. So being together would be metaphorically lethal to them both. Orrr maybe not so metaphorically, since one of them did die.

   I’m not so sure about what happens in the last two stanzas. I’m not very clear on what “falling” means to someone who’s already been dead for at least a year, and whose form has probably changed very much since they were alive. Coupled with the “pressed flower” line, I thought maybe the singer had taxidermied the corpse or something, but if she has it around why can’t she remember its face? Maybe it’s just not the same when they’re eternally “asleep” (and that’s ignoring how the process might have gone wrong physically, since I doubt the she had much experience with it).

   Later I considered that maybe the grief got to her so badly that she forgot that her beloved was dead (hence why the first three sentences of the last chorus speak of them in the present tense, as if they were still alive), thus keeping them forever young and healthy in her own delusions. The “I bound only shadows to my matress” might then mean keeping only their shadow, as in just her idea of who they were instead of their entire living self, or might refer to her own nature, how by being all alone or laying with others, she’s staining the matress with her dark nature, when her beloved would’ve balanced it with their light (Sorry, rando she emotionally cheated with, you don’t get a light-related metaphor representing you! There isn’t enough song left so you gotta share the darkness with the protagonist). Of course, this would mean the singer and the dead person were at least briefly a couple, when I get more the impression that it was a pretty distant relationship, if not just stalking (See: “I must not be seen”). She always describes them as though she was looking from a distance and never mentions actually interacting in any way. I mean, it’s not even clear if they ever replied to her letters.

   This theory would make sense of the last line, which would be the moment she rediscovers their death. The transition to knowing to repressing it and back seems a little sudden and underexplained to me, though. Might be because of the poetic style, but it still feels like a stretch.
   Oh, since I’m already talking about the last part: Does “getting wet” have the same double entendre in Japanese? It struck me as an oddly lewd line at first, but maybe I’m looking too deeply into it. Narcisusses (?) do grow near water, so maybe that’s the intended association. Then again, I’m pretty sure there’s no kind of flower that “sings beguilingly”, so it’s hard to say how literally we’re supposed to take the flowers’ description.
   Also, do they have the idiom of “spitting venom” and such for saying cruel words? Honestly, that was the first thing that made me think of the murder theory; if they don’t, well, it’s hard to imagine any nice reasons for poisoning letters.

   …While writing this I got reminded of “A Clingy Boy Sticking Close for Fifteen Years” and realized there’s nothing suggesting the girl’s beloved was alive at the beginning of the song. Maybe they died a hundred years ago and she can see ghosts! (But probably not). I don’t feel like it’d add anything to the song if it were true, though, so I think I’ll just ignore that possibility.

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   1. 

      Saryu

      13 August 2019

      Thanks for editing. What do you think of my theories? I’m especially curious about the idioms bit. On one hand I might be seeing meaning where there is none (or at least not the one I’m thinking of), but on the other hand the song is chock-full of metaphors so a little wordplay (or more like blurring the line between analogy and literal truth) would hardly be surprising.

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      1. 

         releska

         13 August 2019

         That was a really interesting read! Those points that you raised, like the contrast between light and dark, follow closely with my own interpretation. My understanding of the underlying narrative is as follows:

         The speaker loves someone, but never tells them how they feel, though they attempt to write them a letter on several occasions. As they watch the one they love be happy with other people, they start to resent them. By the time they finally decide that enough’s enough and write the letter, their beloved has passed away. Their feelings are never conveyed. Though they still pine for their beloved, their feelings grow weaker as time passes and they meet new people. The letter has provided them with catharsis and their original love is preserved like a dried flower.

         Moving on to some of those grammatical points, though:

         ‘Spitting venom’ does exist as an idiom…! (毒を吐く) – it refers to someone saying something bad about someone (they talk about it on a woman’s blog here: https://woman.mynavi.jp/article/140510-55/)

         I can also confirm that yes, the same verb (濡れる) also refers to getting wet during sex. I think these comparisons are intrinsically impossible – the flower references may just be symbols of beauty. I was thinking, though, what if the flowers are actually people the speaker has been in a relationship with? Like, “perhaps you will sing beguilingly like the other person I was recently with.”

         Oh! That reminds me – I thought the use of ‘marry’ in the second last stanza was a little odd, so it should seem odd in the translation. The verb itself literally means ‘to take to wife/to marry a woman’, and it’s written in the causative form (so the speaker is making the recipient marry something).

         Reading your interpretation made me think of an alternative translation of the mattress line as well: “I only bound your shadow to my mattress.” All we get is 影 (kage – shadow), and no indication as to whether it’s singular or plural. If we look at it in this way, it strengthens the idea that the speaker cannot physically be with the one they love. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this – if you think it leads to a more cohesive interpretation, I’m happy to make that change to that line.

         In regard to the ‘falling’ part, technically a dead flower can be attached to a plant for a little while before it falls. Perhaps that what the speaker’s referring to?

         Either way, there’s definitely something fishy about how the cause of death isn’t mentioned. Perhaps there’s a bit of foul play going on…

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