Translation: I Want to Hold You Close (Happy End)

I Want to Hold You Close is a masterpiece. Takashi must have known it, giving it a name nearly identical to the song that launched the Beatles. The band as a whole must have known it too, making it the album opener.

The intro is a thing of glory, distilling the essence of the whole album into fifteen unassuming seconds. Apparently nobody understands what the hell is going on there rhythmically, or how it can slide so smoothly into the standard 4/4 of the song's body — in that sense, it's like Led Zeppelin's Black Dog for me. I'll never be able to wrap my head around what John Bonham is doing in that drumbeat, or how something so weird can work so well. The intro of I Want to Hold You Close, same thing.

The psychedelic bridge is transcendent. It's the band nudging you with an elbow: "You thought we were just a folk-rock band, right? You thought this was a straightforward folk-rock arrangement, right?" But while playing with audience expectations may have been fun, it wasn't the main point. The main point was allowing Takashi's lyrics in the bridge to shine, to be illustrated and brought to life, sonically and vocally. And god, what perfect work they did of it. Bless you, Eiichi Ohtaki.

Every verse is a lyrical tour de force. So is the bridge — I did my best with it, though in the Japanese it doesn't quite cohere, certain parts of speech are missing, it's as if the train were moving too fast, or the narrator's thoughts were, or maybe it's that the flurry of blizzard that the train speeds into was too mystical a scene for the narrator's words to stick together in the midst of...

The third verse is insane. In the original, it's the same length as the first two, but the rhythm of the words is so propulsive, and the images so dense, that the only way I could figure out of rendering it into passable English was to use twice as many words as there are in Japanese. And it still doesn't feel right. My version doesn't have the surety, the simplicity, or the beauty of the original. Maybe I'll still figure out some better way. 

Anyway, all this to say something I've said before: if you love lyrics, learn Japanese and study Takashi Matsumoto!


:::

Faint light blows in through the window.

So, the countryside has flown all this way.

I raise the cigarette to my lips,

take a drag,

and think of you.

The locomotive hurtles through winter,

vomiting dark smoke,

cleaving the white fields,

and now your town is near.

Go!

Go!

Go!

Barreling down the rails into

the galaxy of snow.

When I make it to the station

that floats inside malt candy clouds,

and as the station platform drops away

before the train has quite stopped moving,

I'll be leaping off at such a speed that,

to be honest, there is a chance

I'm gonna burn you into cinders.

(Back to: List of Translations)