Rakuin no Monshou I – On a Twilight Star, a Dragon Roars

(As a note, all romanizations are works in progress – these names are actually kind of a pain to guess at.)

Now here’s a post that’s been a long time in coming.  I was originally introduced to this series courtesy of the wonderful Wyatt Salazar (whose stuff you really should look at) probably a year and change ago, when he asked me if I knew anything about it because he found the artwork interesting.  Likewise interested, I finally had a chance to delve into it when I came to live in Japan.  I’ve had this book since I bought it from Kinokuniya in Matsuyama back in August of last year.  I kept telling myself “I’ve got to read this book” and true to form, I read it piecemeal for so long, that finally this past week I finished the first book.  Hopefully I can get the rest read in a more timely fashion, or I’ll never ever catch up.

For the uninformed (not hard, this title is pretty low-key despite having a good number of volumes), Rakuin no Monshou is a fantasy/sci-fi series by Sugihara Tomonori.  The central plot is as follows: the Kingdom of Garbera and the Mephius Empire have long been enemies.  However, after the most recent war, the rulers of both countries decide to try their hand at peace by arranging a wedding between Imperial Prince Gil Mephius and Princess Vileena Auer.

Then, things get complicated.

Poetry

Allow me to start this article off by acquainting my readers with a few core concepts of Japanese poetry.

Japanese poetry originated in two forms, the tanka (short poem) and chouka (long poem).  However, they were very strictly metered – a tanka consisted of five lines, with 5/7/5/7/7 syllables.  A chouka could go on as long as it wanted, alternating 5/7, but the last three lines had to be 5/7/7.  For the observant, you will notice that the 5/7/5 is the same syllabic arrangement as haiku; haiku rose out of renga poetry, in which any number of people would take turns composing parts of a tanka (the first would compose 5/7/5, the second 7/7 relating to the first, the third 5/7/5 relating to the second, and so on).

This semester marked my first descent into classical Japanese, and I have to say, it is an entirely different beast.  Fortunately, under no circumstances am I ever really expected to be fluent in classical Japanese, I just need to know how to navigate a dictionary, and over the semester I have gotten very proficient at doing so.  But as part of the class, and part of the honors contract I took on for the class, I decided I was going to translate the smallest chapter in the Genji Monogatari, that being the chapter Hanachirusato.

I did not quite realize how hard it was going to be to translate the prose, but the poetry in the chapter was a whole different beast.

I’m going to talk translation for a moment.  I mentioned in my second post that Dr. Royall Tyler, in his translation of Genji, took pains to try and keep the same syllabic format of the poetry, and after talking with a few classmates about it, I decided I would too.  Why not, after all?  It would be fun.

And it was, but let’s take a look at the results, shall we?

TLWiki Release – Hanachirasu

So imagine my surprise when I check TLWiki and discover that the same folks behind the Kikokugai release just recently released Hanachirasu.  As a Nitroplus fanboy, it’s my duty to report this and urge you to go give this game a shot.

You can find the patch here.

Problems in Translation

I don’t know if I’ve made it apparent by now, but translation is hard.  I didn’t really go into the field expecting it to be gumdrops and easy sentences, but sometimes it’s like a punch in the balls.  The worst part is that a lot of the problems come from my own immaturity as a translator, and my immaturity in the language, so when I make stupid, stupid errors that are blatantly obvious a few hours/days after I’ve made them, while I do learn from them, they also make me rather angry at myself.  It’s a vicious cycle of getting angry with myself over a mistake, leading to my making another mistake, leading to more anger, and so on and so forth.

But enough of that, time for some facts.

Teaser

Whispers of a Nightmare teaser, since I have nothing else to post right now.  As I wait for ILL to get me the books yet again, I’ve also distracted myself with volume 3 of Sword Art Online, and I snagged scans of Rakuin no Monsho after a friend suggested I look into it, so that will keep me entertained for a while yet.  I’ll have a full translation posted before the end of September if all goes well.

—

“You probably started reading this letter with some suspicion.  And as you keep reading, I bet your face is changing color.  But you can’t throw this letter away right in the middle of it.  But then, there isn’t a person who can stop in the middle of a letter like this…”

The Lineup

So I’ve finally managed to figure out what six short stories I’m going to be working on for my thesis.  This is a preliminary setup, these are always subject to change, but based on preliminary glances I think I’ll like it

And my thesis director may tell me to add more so we’ll see.

About the Banner

So people have asked me (that’s a complete lie nobody asked me I just felt like writing about it) what the hell my banner on this site is about.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my nightmare.  This is a segment of a Tsurugi battle in Muramasa.  It’s not really that complicated – every kanji pair is simply a command/direction.  But imagine scrolling along in a game and suddenly you come across this giant fuck you wall of kanji.  That looks like a long sentence of Chinese.  There is no kana, no punctuation, no grammar, just kanji after kanji.  When I saw it, I sighed, saved, and closed the game because I didn’t really wanna deal with it at the time.

I can’t wait for classical Japanese when all the poetry is written in kanji (because writing in Chinese was the cool thing in Heian Japan, all the guys did it, and if you were a girl and did it you were considered butch, haha Murasaki Shikibu) and the kanji don’t actually strictly mean anything, they’re just used for syllabic purposes.

For instance, the god Susano-o is written 須佐之男.  Each of those kanji has a meaning but the meaning is irrelevant (literally, the name reads “Necessarily Help Of Man”), they’re just used as representations of syllables instead of kana.

Fun fact: nobody liked kana until Ki no Tsurayuki wrote the preface to the imperial anthology Kokin Wakashuu in kana.  Then suddenly people liked it.

Yeah, I just dropped some knowledge on you.  Use that to impress your friends.

Anatomy of a Translation

While I work on a variety of things over the summer like job-hunting or hunting down all of my thesis material (I just got the three volumes I asked for from interlibrary loan, and holy shit these are not small books), I haven’t had much desire to do more work just yet.  The profiles are short but there’s a lot of wrangling that goes into making them intelligible in English.

Let me provide an example.

Muramasa Teaser

I am a cocktease.  Not really.  Have one or two segments of information on Muramasa; this time, focusing on one of the two classifications of Tsurugi, the “True-Forged”.  As a note, I’ve left Tsurugi in its romanized form for two reasons: the kanji used for the term, 劔冑, is not a traditional combination, nor is the reading a real one.  Literally, the kanji read “sword and helmet”, the reading given, when attached to kanji, means “sword”, but the West, as described in the text, actually has separate terms for these, so I feel that leaving the term romanized is not an incomplete translation.

What To Expect

As I wind down my first week actually having this blog, I suppose I should go ahead and establish that content WILL be coming, most likely after finals when I have time to breathe.

What you are going to see from this blog over summer:

• Translations of terminology and descriptions from the flash page of Nitroplus visual novel Full Metal Daemon Muramasa detailing the workings of Tsurugi.  Also, if I happen to ever get enough money to warrant purchasing it, translations of entries from the Muramasa fanbook.
• Translations of chapters of Kentarou Katayama’s light novel series Kure-nai.
• And lastly, work on my translation thesis for college, the science fiction short stories of Hoshi Shin’ichi.

You will see more of the first and third than the second; the Muramasa translations are short, even if technical, so they don’t consume a lot of time while I devote my energy to getting as much early work done on my thesis as I possibly can to leave the rest of the year clear for revising translations and preparing for my defense.  Kure-nai chapters will come as they do.