Translation: Expected Way (Yellow Magic Orchestra)

Today's translation from Naughty Boys is Yukihiro Takahashi's Expected Way, the tune and the words both his. I was working on it — I got to the second verse ("I didn't look back") — and started crying. How beautiful can a song get?

Anyone who knows Japanese will see that I've taken a few minor liberties for poetry/affect's sake. I will now defend myself.

When I translate prose fiction, I try to be as faithful to the author's style and word choice as humanly possible, but with lyrics, I'm finding that need less pressing. Lyrics, as a genre, are closer to poetry than to prose, and poetry is untranslatable: it needs to be rewritten into a new original if anything of its beauty or spirit is to survive. I think my modifications (or rather, shifts of emphasis) here are fair.

Also, I think Yukihiro would have liked them. According to this terrific interview with Peter Barakan, Sakamoto knew exactly what he wanted from the English versions of his lyrics, and counted on Barakan to get there for him; Hosono knew English well enough that Barakan's job was mostly just corrections and clarifications; but Takahashi was open to collaboration, and Barakan's renditions of Takahashi lyrics were closer to co-writes than straight-up translations. I like imagining that I might have kept the spirit of their work together alive in my own.

.

I have come a long way.
At last, I have arrived
and cast aside my heavy pack.
I think there is nothing left of what I left behind —

the light from the window, always the same,
the air inside the room I once loved,
the book lying open, always at the same page,
the cigarette butts in the ashtray...

I didn't look back
no matter who called after me.
I pushed the door open with my own two hands
and saw a road I'd never taken stretching ahead.

I'm certain you're the same as ever,
watching TV, laughing alone,
setting aside a half-finished cup of tea,
getting up when the doorbell rings.

[instrumental break]

[repeat above stanza]

If you can get an agitated heart to quiet down,
it will feel like a harbinger of something;
that's the strange sensation
that I want this song to get across.