Translation: Tales of First Love (Norihiko Hashida & Endless)

1972 was the year of the epic Hiro Yanagida collaborations and, of course, the final (and still my favorite) Happy End album. By 1974, Takashi Matsumoto was establishing himself as a professional lyricist. Inbetween was 1973, which is when most of the work (if not actual releases) of Takashi's great Production Year was getting done. Lyrics were on the backburner.

Among the few he did write in '73 is Tales of First Love (Hashida/Matsumoto), recorded by Norihiko Hashida & Endless. A great overview of Takashi's work in the early '70s points out that his lyrics here are "not particularly virtuosic." Right: they're too general and abstracted, and on the sappy side (althoooough Takashi may not be fully to blame for that; consider the title of the non-Matsumoto B-side, "Youth is a Journey of Tears", and you can see the vibe Hashida, or Hashida's label, was going for). 

But one does not leave the best band in the world and go straight to writing trash. The second verse, for instance ("we were tickling..."), is pretty great — there's an element of startled wonder in the Japanese that I couldn't figure out a way to get across in English. And the chorus, while labored, and unnecessarily dense, says something real and disquieting.

Call it growing pains, maybe. Speaking with Shigeru Suzuki about Heroine of the Skyscraper (Matsumoto's contribution to the Happy End era's begun/then scrapped/but ultimately transfigured "four solo albums" project), Takashi laughed and said, "Happy End would have instantly rejected a song titled Heroine of the Skyscraper." They would have rejected Tales of First Love too, on artistic rather than thematic grounds. But the thing is, if you're trying to move your art somewhere new, you're bound to take some wrong turns here and there; and without those wrong turns, you wouldn't know which way you should actually go.

Besides, it's a good song. The melodicism and drive of Hashida's tune shore up the places where Takashi fumbles, while the slightly askew manner in which Takashi goes about writing a conventional love song / youth anthem does the same for the unadventurous early-'70s folk-pop arrangement.

Plus, it's addictive: I've played it thirty times today alone.



:::



We were busy

with our bittersweet kisses.

Our fingers intertwined,

we smiled and daydreamed

about love.

A first love is like the wind —

transparent, lemon-yellow wind

that blows and blows among the seasons

we've forgotten.

And time keeps flowing 

ever forward.

All this happened

long ago.

We were busy

tickling each other's ears

with our whispers.

We were spilling

radiant love 

over our hands.

A first love is like the wind —

transparent, lemon-yellow wind

that blows and blows among the seasons

we've forgotten.

But you are someone

I remember:

a girl I knew once,

long ago.

A first love is like the wind —

transparent, lemon-yellow wind

that blows and blows among the seasons

we've forgotten.

But you are someone

I remember:

a girl I knew once,

long ago.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: The Door of the Heart (Agnes Chan)

I'm finishing up my work at the university I've been teaching at for eight years, preparing to move south and inland, and juggling a whole variety of time commitments related to not especially interesting things. In this way, I make no progress transcribing the Zipangu Boy lyric sheet, let alone translating it. 

But as I find myself slipping back into Takashi Matsumoto obsession (is it the season? his stuff feels so right in summertime... will my life henceforth be a series of Summers of Matsumoto?! maybe it wasn't just a beautiful one-off!?), I've uncovered several part-finished Matsumoto translations among my notes, some of which I forgot ever starting. I can work on them in two or three minutes installments, and it makes me happy, so here's The Door of the Heart (Masaaki Hirao/Matsumoto) from 1975.

Exquisite high harmonies — a glorious, tremendously sweet refrain — unexpected, forthright, and pure lyrics that call the word "crystalline" to mind — sure enough, it's Takashi writing for Agnes Chan. 

How long will their collaboration be this great? Always? All twenty-eight of Takashi's songs for Agnes could rule, couldn't they? Why not? Ah, the heart is a hopeful machine.

Also: I perk up every time Takashi uses "wind" as an image. You should too. It's his favorite image, after all, and not one he uses lightly.



:::



I knock,

but your gentle voice doesn't answer.

You invited me to come,

and that's why I came,

but now look, I'm heading back alone,

and it's already Sunday.

I strain my ears

but hear nothing beyond

the anxious pounding

of my heart.

I wonder where you are

and who you're with.

The door to your heart

is firmly shut.

I want my love

to turn into

the key that will unlock it.

I wonder how

you feel about me.

I wish I could turn into wind,

slip through the keyhole

and find out.

And I wonder what is written

in the diary you keep 

inside your room.

I wish I could turn into wind

and take a peek

as I ruffle the diary's pages.

The door to your heart

is firmly shut.

I want my love

to turn into

the key that will unlock it.

The door to your heart

is firmly shut.

I want my love

to turn into

the key that will unlock it.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Schooldays Spent Daydreaming (Part 2) (Morio Agata)

One of the audacious things about Morio Agata is that he'll fill his albums with reprises... no I know, that in itself is not audacious, lots of artists do that (not, however, enough artists). But you know how standard procedure is to put space between repeating motifs? The Band on the Run chorus bookends its album; Mrs. Vandebilt's reappears only towards the end of Side B; there are several minutes of music between You Never Give Me Your Money and Carry That Weight; The Happiest Days of Our Lives divides Another Brick in the Wall 1 and 2; etc. That's standard procedure. 

But Agata's never bothered much with standard. 

His 1985 psych-folk triple-album masterpiece 永遠の遠国 (That Everlasting, Far-Off Land) is a wonderful extreme, with Side A basically being different arrangements of the same song all lined up in a row, and Side E doing the same thing again (even more transparently) for a different song. And those two songs still get reprised in a more ordinary way on Sides D and F.

And so, directly after Schooldays Spent Daydreaming (Part 1) comes Schooldays Spent Daydreaming (Part 2) (Agata/Agata, arr. Keiichi Suzuki). Honestly, listening to the album straight through, you wouldn't necessarily realize that Parts 1 and 2 are different tracks. It transitions so smoothly.

The arranger is Keiichi Suzuki of Moonriders, later of The Beatniks (with Yukihiro Takahashi), and later still of Mother/Earthbound OSV fame. Keiichi, who produced That Everlasting, Far-Off Land, learned the trade by observing Haruomi Hosono work on Zipangu Boy. As the double album took shape, Suzuki found himself wishing that Hosono would just fall asleep already, so that he (Suzuki) would have a chance to take over for half a track or two. No words were spoken about this burning desire but Hosono must have noticed, because here and there pockets were suddenly left open, as if on purpose, for Suzuki to take the lead on — Schooldays 2 being one of them.

Haruomi and Keiichi were old friends by then. Keiichi was already hovering around in the Happy End days (he and Agata, who were in a band called Hachimitsu Pie together, got Hosono to play bass on Agata's home-recorded 1970 debut album, 蓄音盤 / The Gramophone). He played piano with them at their farewell concert in autumn 1973, and liked to daydream of the band continuing with him in it full-time.

Postscript: there aren't many things better than being so moved by a song that I cry while I'm translating it. I wonder if Zipangu Boy will have moments like that. I did tear up a little bit, working on this one. But what I really want is to weep like a baby.

:::

The distant silver sea...

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

All of us enjoying

summer break together...

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

I'll be a good boy, and wait...

And where are those terraced fields

swimming off to now?

Ever closer to the sea.

Ding-dong... dreaming days.

The distant silver country...

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

And all along, the summer break...

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

I'll be a good boy, and wait

for my ear infection to get better.

It's not like I've never swum before.

We'll all go swimming,

and we'll swim fast.

Ding-dong... dreaming days.

.

And so the boy dozes, and dreams, and finds himself embarking on a journey to the Pure Land.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Schooldays Spent Daydreaming (Part 1) (Morio Agata)

Onwards to the second track, Schooldays Spent Daydreaming (Part 1) (Agata/Agata, arr. Moonriders): the second time a theme appears that will appear again later (in fact, very soon). The album is a labyrinth and even though I call it my favorite of all time, structural details go on surprising me. Such as the symmetry! Long-time listeners, compare Tracks A1 and A2 [1 and 2] with Tracks D4 and D5 [26 and 27] (the actual closer, D6 [28] has another story behind it, which I'll tell when we get there).



:::

The distant silver sea!

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

And all of us enjoying

summer break together!

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

And where are those terraced fields

swimming off to now?

Ever closer to the sea.

Ding-dong... dreaming days.

The distant silver country!

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

And all along, the summer break!

Schooldays spent daydreaming.

And where are those terraced fields

swimming off to now?

Ever closer to the sea.

Ding-dong... dreaming days.

And where are those terraced fields

swimming off to now?

Ever closer to the sea.

Ding-dong... dreaming days.

.

The boy is by no means a bad kid. He does, however, hate studying. Dozing away at his desk, he finds himself transformed into Sinbad; or else, gazing out the window at the shoreline, and paying no attention whatsoever to his lessons, he goes on great excursions to the distant islands of the south.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Zipangu Boy (Morio Agata)

Hokkaido songwriter Morio Agata's Zipangu Boy (recorded late 1975, released early 1976, co-produced by Morio and Haruomi Hosono, with a band featuring Keiichi Suzuki's Moonriders and orchestration by Makoto Yano) might be my favorite album ever.

— on the basis of the music, at least. I've been eager to find out whether the lyrics are correspondingly great. So a few months back, after making sure it would have a lyric sheet, I bought a CD copy, but it turns out that said sheet is a tiny, lo-res reproduction of the lyrics from the original LP, which means that some of the rarer kanji and their furigana are unreadable. That's alright. I'll do my best.

Translating the whole album is some project, and I've been waiting for the right time to plunge in. I'm not sure now is the right time (note how I've only finished half of Shigeru Suzuki's Band Wagon) but I'm in the mood to get started, so here goes.

(I go on tinkering with translations months or years after I "publish" them to this page — that's how I work. So check back now and then if you're interested in versions that will be a little more accurate and a little more beautiful.)

Now raise the anchor!

...except oh yeah, we're sort of already in media res, since the first melody you hear is a reprise from an earlier Morio Agata record — that's how he works.

But soon enough the song proper — the title track — or okay, the first incarnation of the title track — Zipangu Boy (Agata/Agata), begins in earnest.

In the lyric sheet, many songs are followed by snippets of prose. These are exclusive to the booklet, neither spoken nor sung. I'll follow Agata's own typesetting, with the break marked by a dot and only paragraph, not line, breaks in the prose codas.

The "dragon king, Lord Ryujin" is a sea god from Japanese folklore who likes to visit people's dreams, particularly when the dreamer is on the verge of waking.



:::



That night,
I heard the ocean roaring
in the mountains behind our home.
It was moaning like a wildcat
all night long.
The ocean's pretty scary, huh...

My ear was infected
and hurt so much
I couldn't sleep.

Mom was crying,
facing the telephone.
Dad didn't say a word.

That night,
I heard the ocean roaring
in my own ear.
The dragon king, Lord Ryujin, was furious,
and my ear
was going crazy too.

I was on Dad's back.
We were heading home
from the village doctor's.

Mom was crying,
facing the telephone.
Dad didn't say a word.

.

Our protagonist is a young boy living on the coast of Japan, dreaming of far-flung southern isles. He's a sickly boy, however, always in and out of the doctor's. The boy's father is a sailor. The boy hopes that, when he grows up, he can be as strong and as cool as his dad. He dreams of travel to distant, unknown lands...



(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: The Woman in the Dunes (Shigeru Suzuki)

Shigeru returned to California to record Band Wagon, with a case of mild guilt about turning away from Caramel Mama, who had been working on his new songs alongside Hosono's Tropical Dandy and assorted other projects; but Shigeru felt the band's new exotica leanings were straying too far from what he needed, which was to make up for all the songs he didn't write as a member of Happy End.

He was in town when George Harrison and his gloomy Dark Horse tour came through. Shigeru went to see them, was besotted (and no surprise; look up the grainy AUDs that survive, they're awesome), got back to his hotel room, picked up his guitar, started playing around with the opening chords to My Sweet Lord, and came up with The Woman in the Dunes (Suzuki/Matsumoto).

Takashi borrowed the song's title from a Kobo Abe novel. In an interview a few years back, he called this set of lyrics his favorite of everything he's written. I can't see why — I think they're good, but not extraordinary — which probably means that I didn't understand the song and, by extension, that this translation isn't very good.

:::

Snow is gliding

on the wind.

Waves are thundering

as they crash

like bolts of lightning

on the shore.

"Your kind of landscape,

right?" you murmur

and turn your eyes away

in a desolate kind of way.

Come on,

quit joking around.

Your reckless gaze

draws the irritated lines

of a whirlpool of heat

on the water.

"Just say something

already, anything," you mutter,

your cheeks

frozen solid.

Come on,

quit joking around.

The grains of sand here

are as sharp as needles.

I hold you to me

as if to keep you safe.

Come on.

Let's go back to town.

Come on.

Let's go back to town...

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Expecting Rivers (Yellow Magic Orchestra)

I've been wrestling with the lyrics to Expecting Rivers (Takahashi's; music by Takahashi and Sakamoto) for over a year, on and off. Here's the least unsatisfactory version I've managed to date. I hope someday I can figure out a better one.

As for the song itself, well — what's there to say? If you swear by Naughty Boys the way I do, then it's already taken up residence in your heart.



:::



Dreams fly by
In the starless sky
Dreams fly by

Now and then, on pitch-black nights, I go out walking.
We get swept away as we fumble along.

The river is splashing and flowing in its banks.
The water is the color of tears.
You are wavering, you’ve lost your way.
And me, I go wandering around.

Dreams fly by
In the starless sky
Dreams fly by

The river is splashing and flowing in its banks.
The water is the color of tears.
You are wavering, you’ve lost your way.
And me, I go wandering around.

Dreams fly by
In the starless sky
Dreams fly by

Now and then, on pitch-black nights, I go out walking.
We got swept away as we fumbled along.

Above the gliding river
where the water is brimming over,
you are shaking, you are trembling,
and I get up, since it's time.

We put the oars to the water
and the boat makes good progress.
Let's ply onward, you and I,
laughing as we go.

Dreams fly by
In the starless sky
Dreams fly by

We put the oars to the water
and the boat makes good progress.
Let’s ply onward, you and I,
laughing as we go.

Dreams fly by
In the starless sky
Dreams fly by



(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: The Scents of August (Shigeru Suzuki)

Here, at last (and I thought I'd have Band Wagon done within the month!), are The Scents of August (Suzuki/Matsumoto).

Long, long has Takashi practiced setting bitter lyrics to cheerful music. The way these words blend intense desire with a similarly intense desire to deny that desire crushes me.

Anyone who has been in Japan — or who grew up in New York City, as I did — or, for that matter, ever watched a slice-of-life anime — will know about ramune.

:::

In a train station

in the middle of nowhere,

we're taking shelter in the shade.

I watch you drain 

your ramune.

(Isn't it empty?) A line

(Isn't it lonely?) of cold sweat

(Isn't it sad?) trails down

(Isn't it empty?) the nape

(Isn't it lonely?) of your neck.

You place the empty blue ramune bottle

against your sunburned skin.

"Ah!! So cold!"

you say, and laugh

like a spoiled child.

The way your chest is heaving,

soaked in discolored light,

I could see it 

even if I were standing

fifty miles away.

(Isn't it empty?) The little finger

(Isn't it lonely?) of my left hand

(Isn't it sad?) hurts

(Isn't it empty?) where you

(Isn't it lonely?) bit it.

Sitting in the worn-out train,

trying to focus on nothing

except the very act of sitting,

I feel the alternating currents 

pass between us

every time 

that we bump knees.

(Isn't it empty?) The scenery

(Isn't it lonely?) that flies past

(Isn't it sad?) blows

(Isn't it empty?) the smiles

(Isn't it lonely?) on our faces

(Isn't it sad?) into pieces.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: The Boy with a Slight Fever (Shigeru Suzuki)

Shigeru Suzuki's first solo album Band Wagon was, according to Takashi, the final time he was able to tap into the vein that had yielded his Happy End-era work. 

The first four syllables of the first word on the album (風まじり, kazemajiri) are a very-near-homonym for 風街 (kazemachi, the Town of Wind). Was Takashi being defiant? His 100% art-foremost Great Production Year was ending, and he was stepping into the world of the pop charts, but here was Shigeru making an album and — unlike Haruomi and Eiichi — asking Takashi to write him lyrics, and while Shigeru would be happy if the album sold (it did) it wasn't a major consideration, since he had Caramel Mama. Artistry was paramount, seemed to be Shigeru's message. And so Takashi — as I imagine it — drew himself up and said: "Well then, thank you. Here the fuck I go."

Follow along with the recording so that you can hear the poetic diction, and the way Shigeru's phrasing enfolds the words, and tell me: wouldn't The Boy with a Slight Fever (Suzuki/Matsumoto) fit perfectly onto Kazemachi Roman? as a lyric, at least?

Shigeru was coming into his own as a songwriter at this point with a ferocity even more pronounced than what we'd seen on the last Happy End record. You'd never guess he was two years away from committing to syrupy, string-laden soft rock. 

Sometimes I think Band Wagon is one of the best albums ever made, sometimes I don't. The main problem is that its psych-funk-rock onslaught never relents — there is no slower material to offset the energy, no Sketch from the Month of Sleet or Freckled Girl — which makes it an exhausting listen. But if I play just Side A or just Side B, my conviction of the album's splendor returns. So maybe the thing to say is that Band Wagon is a good album consisting of two of the best album sides ever made.

Life has been crazy in ways pleasant (a three-year-old at home; marriage intact; forty new songs awaiting music/arrangement, and talented friends around eager to join the sessions; Morio Agata) and unpleasant (searching for a different job, health issues, getting brutalized by the consequences of a bad or at least insufficiently thought-out decision I made a couple years back... higher education felt like a black hole when I was finishing school in 2013 and seems to have become still darker and more voracious since) so I haven't been translating much. The other day I decided that one way to lift my spirits would be to get back into the young Takashi Matsumoto's embrace. Luckily there's still some material from the Happy End-and-just-after era that I haven't worked through: the back half of Hiro, Heroine of the Skyscraper, the Alas, No Mercy co-writes with Morio, and Band Wagon, which celebrates its 50th anniversary next month! I thought it over for a couple days and settled on Band Wagon. Spent another day thinking about which song to start with, and settled on this one. 

I drafted the translation in the evening. The next day, there was a Takashi post on Instagram about how a fan alerted him that Spotify had garbled a line of lyrics in one of his old songs — which song — well, what would you know, The Boy with a Slight Fever... you say coincidence, I say God's way of communicating, "Yes Sigismund exactly, translate more Matsumoto, it is the way forward." 

It's a wonderful garbling, by the way — it must have cracked Takashi up as hard as it did me, for him to post about it — it's the line 天井の木目 (tenjou no mokume), "the wood of the ceiling." Spotify contributed a tiny stroke to the second kanji, making it 天丼の木目 (tendon no mokume), "the wood grain of the tendon," a Japanese dish: "crisp tempura laid over freshly steamed rice and topped with a delicious light soy dressing" ... it's normal to see weird shit when you have a fever, that's the whole premise of the song, but 天丼の木目 would imply one hungry narrator.

:::

One rainy afternoon,

as I gripped the thermometer tight,

the wood of the ceiling 

wavered

and swayed

and melted away.

Taps against the window glass...

a boy in a baseball cap

smashing marbles with a stone

and scattering them 

amidst the sky.

"Look! Look! 

It's happening before your very eyes!

The tramway's floating

away into the galaxy."

The sound of the faraway tram

spread from alley to alley

like an infection.

When I awoke, the room was empty,

nighttime making 

its stealthy way in.

"Look! Look!

It's happening before your very eyes!

The tramway's floating

away into the galaxy."

(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: A Night on the Third Planet (Morio Agata)

My months of Takashi Matsumoto study led me, as was bound to happen, to the four albums he produced in that mysterious gray area between Happy End's dissolution and Matsumoto's decision to become a full-time lyricist. Takashi has noted wryly that although all four albums are recognized as timeless masterpieces now, they didn't sell anything at the time, and the toll they took on the young producer in terms of time and dedication was too heavy: he had a family that he wanted not only to support financially but also spend time with. 

And so the man who had fashioned Kazemachi Roman and Heroine of the Skyscraper, and who had helped bring Golden Lion, Alas No Mercy, and Who Will Offer This Child a Loving Hand into being, relinquished that side of his artistry... at least for a while, and at least in part.

Now, one of those four albums — Alas, No Mercy — was by Morio Agata, a friend of Happy End's whose 1970 debut album, The Gramophone (funereal lo-fi folk/punk that occasionally recalls Black Sabbath; but I don't think Agata would've had a chance to hear Sabbath yet) has Haruomi Hosono on bass.

I first became aware of Morio more than a year ago, as the singer of ヴヰクトリアルの夜, a Hosono composition that graces Agata's 1976 double album Zipangu Boy, which Hosono co-produced. Agata's vocals on that song being so wonderful, I tried the full album once but it didn't click, and I gave up at the end of Side C (a strange twist of fate; Side D is the best one and might have been enough to hook me into a second listen ... I mean, it seems amazing to me now that I could've been unmoved by all those soulful and ingenious songs on the first three sides too, but aren't things often so?).

Alas No Mercy, though, not only sounded gorgeous on the very first listen — coming to it with an ear for Takashi's production helped, but it was Agata's vocals that clinched the deal — it taught me how to listen to Zipangu Boy.

That was in early October of 2024. Now January '25 is ending. I hardly listened to anything except Morio Agata all autumn (and Electric Voyeur, the new Big Blood album). It turns out that not only is Agata one of my favorite singers and songwriters on earth, he has a discography as full and relentlessly wonderful as his friend Hosono's (except that Agata has gone on recording at least one new album a year, his most recent release is only three months old). Soon after Zipangu Boy clicked, I started wondering how much of that rampant genius Agata has managed to keep alive, and I tried an album from 2015, and then the new one, Orion's Forest, when it came out on October 30th. The answer was: all of it. 

A Night on the Third Planet (Agata/Agata) is the opener and sort-of title track of Agata's 2019 album (the Japanese title of the album is a little different; this song's name translates to the English title emblazoned on the back of the CD booklet). 

The album was recorded in the summer, in New York City. One evening Agata attended the screening of a film to which he'd contributed a song, and on display in the cinema lobby were a print and a sculpture by two artists from Aomori, where Agata had lived as a third grader. Agata's thoughts turned to the Nebuta Matsuri, a summer festival in Aomori that had left a deep impression on the young boy (as it would). The drums in the song are modeled after the festival drums. The verse lyrics (らっせらぁ) are, quoth Wikipedia, the "shortened dialectal version of 'irasshai,' calling visitors and customers to watch or join."

So there are hardly any words at all: or rather, there are lots of them, chanted and double/triple/quadruple-tracked, overlapping each other: but there are hardly any distinct words. But this is an elliptical set of lyrics, ripe for interpretation. 

Who is the speaker of that other line, the one that resists the invitation; the one about wanting to go home? Is it the songwriter in New York City, missing Japan — or, nostalgic for the Aomori summers of his childhood? Is it someone in Aomori on one of the nights of the festival, who has gotten caught up in the festival throng but doesn't want to be there (ala Festival of Mud)? Or some lonely wanderer on the outskirts of the city, who hears the festival in progress but skirts around it? Could it be the festival floats themselves, aching to reach the water? Or possibly the alien visitor to earth that the album title suggests, witness to but unmoved by the strange customs of the Third Planet...?

:::



Come join in. Come join in.
Come join, come join, come join in.
Come join in. Come join in.
Come join, come join, come join in.

I want to go home as soon as I can.
I want to go home as soon as I can.

Come join in. Come join in.
Come join, come join, come join in...

I want to go home as soon as I can...



(Back to: List of Translations)

Translation: Bon Voyage Harbor (Chu Kosaka)

Bon Voyage Harbor (Hosono/Hosono) was such a favorite of Chu Kosaka's that he recorded it twice: first for 1975's Horo, and then, a little more slickly, for 1978's Morning. Ryuichi Sakamoto is on record as a fan of the Morning version.

It's an unusual composition, considering the date. It's darker and more stately than just about anything Harry wrote in the Tropical Trilogy years. Maybe Sultry Night is a cousin. 

:::

Midnight is twenty kilometers away.

Drops of gloom ooze from the sky.

Come along now, come along with me.

The city is about to break the surface.

Floating around outside of time —

the unmoored city — where love hides.

Come along now, come along with me

and, together, let's step over the night.

Bon voyage.

It's midnight

in the harbor of our hearts.

Bon voyage.

The harbor is twenty kilometers away.

The drops that form and drop from the waves

are made of memories.

Come along now, come along with me.

The sea is on the verge of sleep.

Bon voyage.

It's midnight

in the harbor of our hearts.

Bon voyage.

Midnight is twenty kilometers away.

Drops of gloom ooze from the sky.

Come along now, come along with me

and, soaring, let us cross the night.

(Back to: List of Translations)