Hellos and welcome, dear readers!
In Japanese, there's a phrase that refers to the busy end of the year or December, "shiwasu" which literaly means "teachers run" to show how busy it is. I'm not a teacher, but December certainly is turning into a busy time for me with my phone breaking down and stuff. lol
So anyway, now that I've got a new phone, and it's mostly setup now, or so I hope, I can finally get around to my blogging!!
So without too much ado, let's jump into today's topic, which is about my Japanese to English lyrics translation of Berserk's ending theme, "Wish" by Mika Nakashima.
My Cover Video
Here's my English cover video:
Anime: Berserk, the Golden Age Arc, Memorial Edition
Song: Wish / Nakashima Mika
Inst & MIX: _Soma
English Lyrics & Vocal: Taka Pen
Explanation of the Translyrics
I got the original Japanese lyrics from the below Japanese page:
I'll be showing the lyrics in the following order:
- Original lyrics in Japanese
- Original lyrics in roma-ji
- Translated English lyrics
So here we go! :)
まだ続くと思ってた道で
手を盤いでたはずなのに
突然はぐれてしまったその影を
探し続けてる
mada tsuzuku to omotteta michi de
te wo tsunaide ta hazu nano ni
totsuzen hagurete shimatta sono kage wo
sagashi tsuzuketeru
On a road that would still go on or so it had seemed
We had been holding hands, at least that’s what I’d thought
Suddenly I’m left behind, all alone, and so your presence
I find I’m searching for still
I kept on changing this part many more times than I expected to. lol
If I went with the literal translation, it would go something like this:
On a road that I thought would still go on
We were supposed to have been holding hands
I'm searching for the shadow of you who suddenly went away
The first two lines, I kept on switching around words and phrases to try to match the melody flow as well as try to maintain the order of the words and phrases.
The way the melody and the original lyrics go, both of the first two lines start out with "the road will still go on" and "we held hands" and then afterwards kind of put in a "but it wasn't so". So it would come as kind of a surprise to the listener when you get to the latter part of the line. I wanted to recreate the feel, so I kept on juggling the words and phrases around.
The third line, I also wanted to match the first word, which was "totsuzen (suddenly)" except that if I started the line with "suddenly" it was nearly impossible to continue with the meaning of the lyrics. In English, the "suddenly" would almost always have to come later in the sentence for this part to make sense.
After a lot of juggling, I think I managed to do an okay job here.
いつかは去り行くものだから
そう言い聞かせて眠りにつくけど
夢から覚めて元に戻れたなら
期待してしまう
itsuka wa sariyuku mono dakara
sou iikikasete nemuri ni tsukukedo
yume kara samete moto ni modoreta nara
kitai shite shimau
It’s something that one day is bound to go away
Or so I try to tell myself so I can go to sleep
But if waking from my dreams, and there’s a chance we could go back
Some hope, I can’t help but feel
This part was pretty straight forward. Some embelishments to fit the melody.
Just the last line I kept on juggling around.
Literal translation would be "I can't help but raise my hopes up" which surprisingly had too many syllables to fit into the melody. (Usually it's the other way around!)
Plus, the line starts with the word "hope" so I wanted to put "hope" at the beginning of the line rather than at the end. So I ended up with what I have now.
何もかも残したまま
何処に行ってしまったの？
nani mo kamo nokoshita mama
dokoni itte shimatta no?
You have gone away, left everything behind
Where did you go? Where could you have gone?
Here, we have the same problem as we had with First Star Sonority.
Lemme translate these two lines into English:
Where did you go, leaving everything behind?
11 syllables in English. 22 syllables in Japanese.
Unless I want to sing each syllabe with two notes, which doesn't always work anyway even if I tried, I had to make up extra sounds, so that's why it looks like I'm repeating everything twice. lol
Otherwise, a pretty straightforward translation. :P
逢いたくて あなたに
悔しくて 動けない
何もできない痛い
まだ信じたくない
aitakute anata ni
kuyashikute ugokenai
nanimo dekinai itai
mada shinji taku nai
I would give the world, just to see you
What wouldn’t I give but I can’t move
Not a thing that I can do, it hurts
But I don’t want to take it in
And here's the chorus, the most dramatic part of hte song. Loved it when I heard it, and I'd been singing this part while working even before I thought about translating the song.
This part, I went with the flow of the melody, the sound, and the feelings. The meaning kind of got left behind.
Literal translation of this section would be:
I want to see you
But it's my misfortune and I can't move
I can't do anything, it hurts
I don't want to believe it yet
For one thing, literal translation once again does not have enough syllables to fill in the melody.
For another, what sounds good in the original language doesn't always sound good after literal translation.
So lots of embellishments. For the first two lines, they kind of just came to me, so I went with where my first feelings got me to. A sense of strong yearning and pain at not being able to reach the object of desire.
The last line, though. I kept on changing up until the very end. I was wavering between "But I don't want to take it in" and "But I'm not ready to accept". I liked how "accept" was sounding, and I felt that this was truer to the meaning of the original lyrics, but when I was singing it, it just didn't fit and "But I don't want to take it in" did, so I ended up going with what felt right on my tongue.
あなたが居ない世界の
私に意味を見つけ出せないまま
anata ga inai sekai no
watashi ni imi wo mitsuke dasenai mama
In a world that you’re not a part of
I find myself yet without a reason for me to be in this world
Don't even ask what this part means. If I look at it closely I don't think I understand it myself. lol
Suffice to say I needed phrases with intonations that would fit the melody and still somehow convey "I can't find a reason to exist in this world without you." (15 syllables and need to fit into 22 syllable melody with lots of funky ups and downs and rhythms, to boot!)
But it kind of sounds nice...! :)
最初に誰が傷付けたの
最後に誰か温めたの
あなたが1人で感じたその全てを
わかり合えたなら
saisho ni dare ga kizu tsuketa no
saigo ni dare ka atatameta no
anata ga hitori de kanjita sono subete wo
wakari aeta nara
In the beginning, who was it that brought the pain?
In the end was there someone who was given warmth?
Everything that you have gone through and felt all on your own
If we were to share even once
Here, I was trying to match the construction of the original lyrics. That's why I ended up putting in "someone" where the melody breaks up so it sounds like "some" and "one" although there's no such a word. lol
What's unfortunate was that although in Japanese, the first two lines have very similar constructions so that much of the lines match mimic each other, I wasn't able to recreate that in English because English just doesn't work that way...!
The third and fourth lines are pretty straight forward with just extra embellishments to make up the syllables.
もう2度と 本当に
ありがとうも言えないの
mou nido to hontou ni
arigatou mo ienai wa
Will I never be truly able to
Even give a thank you to you anymore?
This tiny part took a whole lot of hashing up and jumbling up the words and phrases to try to fit the meaning of the original lyrics into the melody.
Literal translation would be:
Will I never really be able to tell you thank you? (14 syllables)
And that had to fill up 21 syllables along with the really funky up and down melody....!
I think I might've spent like two nights in a row in the shower muttering this part over and over to try to puzzle the words together to fit into the melody. When I finally got them to fit, I was like, why wasn't I able to come up with this from the beginning, it sounds so natural! (Well except for the "give to you" part but I claim poetic license...!)
切なくて 想いを
寂しくて 閉じ込めた
伝えたいだけそれさえ
叶わないなら
setsunakute omoi wo
samishikute tojikometa
tsutaetai dake sore sae
kanawai nara
I’m in so much pain, my heartache
In my loneliness, I will keep it in
All I want to do is tell you and if that
Even can’t come to pass
And here we're back to the chorus. This part was a bit more difficult due to the word "setsunakute" which literal translation I'm unable to think of, even when I look it up in a dictionary.
Every language has words and concepts that are different from other languages, and I feel like there's a lot of Japanese emotions that don't quite have their exact counterparts in English, unfortunately.
So I had to improvise right off the bat with the first two lines.
The latter two lines was a battle of intonation and rhythm as well as sound
I initially had something along the lines of "if that can't come true" instead of "can't come to pass" and meaningwise, I think "can't come true" might've been better but I wanted the last note to end on an "a" sound. The original lyric ends with "a" so I wanted to match.
The "a" sounds so much narrower and more strained, which in this song fits well, whereas the "ooh" of the "true" sounds too full and relaxed. In much of the song, you're trying to convey longing, so most of the elongated parts have strained vowels. So in order to avoid having a relaxed vowel, I changed from "can't come true" to "can't come to pass."
あなたが孤独じゃないと
ただ祈るしか私にはできない
anata ga kodoku janai to
tada inoru shika watashi ni wa dekinai
That you won’t be alone and lonesome
I can only give my prayer, ‘cause there’s nothing else to do for me
Pretty straight forward literal translation here.
The only part I kind of took time on was the last " 'cause there's nothing else to do for me" because I wanted to do something more along the lines of "because that's all I can do" but again, the syllable got in the way. The syllable for "do" is way too relaxed, when you have the long e sound in the original version. So I had to end this part with something with a long e sound.
恐れていた最高の罪
刻まれた声記憶が
薄れていく事
osorete ita saikou no tsumi
kizamareta koe kioku ga
usurete yuku koto
I’ve been afraid of the greatest of all crimes
Etched in, your voice, the memories of you
That they will slowly fade, be gone
This part came pretty quickly to me. Not sure, but I just love the first line so much and that's why it came to me so naturally, maybe? lol
The second line though, I initially had "Your voice, the memories of you engraved" which fit pretty well. Just that when I was recording the part and listening to it, I realized that the first part of the melody felt choppy, I guess because in Japanese, that's the part where "engraved/etched" word goes.
As I did not want "your voice" to be sounding choppy, I flipped the word order around, and "etched in" sounded better than "engraved" so "etched in" it was. Nevermind that it feels like a tongue twister. lol
逢いたくて あなたに
悔しくて 動けない
何もできない痛い
まだ信じたくない
aitakute anata ni
kuyashikute ugokenai
nanimo dekinai itai
mada shinji taku nai
I would give the world, just to see you
What wouldn’t I give but I can’t move
Not a thing that I can do, it hurts
But I don’t want to take it in
Repeat of the chorus.
What was weird though was that for some reason, this second time around, the last line "But I don't want to take it in" sounded better with "But I'm not ready to accept." It just felt better singing it as "But I'm not ready to accept" than "But I don't want to take it in."
I debated on changing the lyrics here, but since my intent is to try to stick to the original lyrics as much as possible, I decided against changing the melody and chose the one that best fit both parts.
壊れる事などない
夏実だけで強くなれるように
強くなれるように
kowareru koto nado nai
shinjitsu dakede tsuyoku nareru you ni
tsuyoku nareru you ni
Never ever to be broken
The truth only by my side, so that I may all the stronger be
So that I may all the stronger be
Last part and one that I had to work on a bit.
The first line was tricky.
The first line basically means "unbreakble" and in the original lyrics, this "unbreakable" can refer to the "truth" that later follows, or to the "stronger me" that "I" am trying to become.
So I had to try to translate the part in a way to recreate the effect.
Otherwise I think I might've done something like "A truth that couldn't be broken" and leave the "unbreakable" to apply only to the "truth" part.
Poems and lyrics are awesome because they can be interpreted so many ways and convey so many meanings, but when you're trying to translate, it can definitely feel like it's an impossible task...!
So this version of translated lyrics is my interpretation of the lyrics, and definitely not the end all version!
Oh, and almost forgot to cover the last and very important part of the song!
"So that I may be stronger"
I really seriously should consider avoiding songs with the word "strong" or "strength" in them! It sounds awesome in Japanese but in English, to me, they sound very weak....!! Plus, the words are almost always placed in a very emphasized part of the melody where when it's translated into English, it's pretty much impossible to fit the word "strength/strong" in that part of the melody...!!!
Yes, this is becoming my petpeeve, actually... lol
I tried so hard to see if I can somehow and naturally fit in "stronger" where the word "tsuyoku" was placed, but I wasn't able to. There just wasn't any way to. So I gave up and just went with what sounded natural in English and melody-wise.
So anyway, that's it for my excuses on translating this song!
Any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to let me know!
You can leave a comment on this blog or send me a DM on Twitter or Instagramm @takapenlyrics
Thanks as always for reading this far!
Karaoke Video
If you'd like to give the English version a try and sing it, I've uploaded a karaoke version so you can follow along and try to sing it. There's no melody guide, so you'll have to know the melody by heart though. lol
Have fun!
