Translation: Evening Firefly (Chu Kosaka)

Yesterday I called Chu Kosaka's lyrical style simple and straightforward, but that's wrong. Maybe the song I posted the translation for yesterday was rather simple, and I was thinking of how The Locomotive is too, but today I'm thinking that I could only call The Locomotive "simple" because Kosaka has explained what the song is about. With his explanation, it makes perfect sense. Without it, I'm sure I would've been confused.

The comparison to High Winds, White Sky (which also came out in 1971; good year for folk-rock) fares better. The original songs on Arigatou, like Evening Firefly here, tend to the impressionistic. Compare the title track on Bruce Cockburn's album, or Let Us Go Laughing. 

Kosaka takes the impressionism further than Cockburn, though. In both the chorus and the verses, grammatical links tend to be left out of the clauses, so it's just image / image / image / image. For this translation, I've tried to present the individual images in a way that helps the song segments feel like coherent wholes, but it's an interpretive act. A different reader/listener could create different coherence.

Musically, this may be the only place where you can hear Haruomi Hosono influenced by Crazy Horse. It makes sense — Hosono loved Buffalo Springfield and Neil's first solo album, so he would definitely have found his way to a copy of Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. The influence didn't take root (though, god, imagine Hosono leading a Crazy Horse-esque band?), but it's clear he'd been listening. It's like Crazy Horse filtered through the blues-rock of Happy End's Yudemen.

This Kosaka song made such a deep impression on its producer that, eleven years later, Hosono turned two lines of the lyrics ("come this way, firefly" and "the water ... is so sweet") into the text of Luminescent/Hotaru.

:::

Hey! He-ey! Come this way, firefly.

The water over that way is so sweet,

in summer

at the head of the river

at sunset.

There's someone I'm pining for.

The sunset clouds are glowing.

They're performing the Bon dance in the nearby town.

I catch a glimpse from behind

of the red strap of a sandal.

    Hey! He-ey! Come this way, firefly.

    The water over that way is so sweet,

    in summer

    at the head of the river

    at sunset.

I visit the temple behind Sagayama.

I run upstairs, geta clacking.

Hey there, evening firefly,

the water here is bitter.

    Hey! He-ey! Come this way, firefly.

    The water over that way is so sweet,

    in summer

    at the head of the river

    at sunset.

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