I didn't realize how lucky I was
When I could smile contently straight from the heart
No matter how nostalgic I might feel about it
I can never go back to that summer
Because I'm the one who let go of your hand
Slender yet strong
I didn't realize because you're so precious to me
And I almost lose sight of you
But, you know, I keep telling myself over and over
"You're one of a kind in all the world."
A wind blows heralding the changing of the seasons
It frightened me to feel you slipping a little further away
Those days when we were still together
We were serious about each other
And cried over it, didn't we?
Our hearts were more delicate but we sure were shining brightly
When I find something I feel like I can believe in, I'll be sure to reach out and try for it
You know, I keep telling myself over and over
"Even though we're apart, we're friends in our hearts."
I gaze up at the blue skies on clear days
And kick at puddles when it's rainy
Over and over, I come to know
The reason I was born
The meaning of being alive
On painful days when I feel I might be overwhelmed with heartache
When I want to run away into the night
hana ("flower") // hamasaki ayumi
lyrics: ayumi hamasaki
Supposing I ran off and vanished
Before your very eyes
Would anybody even search for me?
And could I possibly maintain the notion
That people are kind until I was found?
Which is more painful:
Growing pains or childlike naivety?
Let's stop it with such questions
If you bloom...
What kind of strength do we need
To grow straight and tall?
If we were in the city teeming with people
Would anybody even lend me a listening ear?
Does this relentless cry even reach anybody?
What kind of courage do we need
To grow straight and tall
Beloved and beautiful
All the while knowing that one day we are destined
To wilt away and scatter?
Which is more painful:
Growing pains or childlike naivety?
Let's stop it with such questions
If you bloom...
A Song for XX // hamasaki ayumi
lyrics: ayumi hamasaki
Why are you crying?
Why are you so unsure?
Why have you come to a stand-still?
Come on, tell me
When are you going to grow up?
How long can you stay a child?
Where have you come running from
And just how far do you intend to go on running?
I was so out of place
I didn't fit in, didn't belong
And I had no idea whether there was any
Hope for the future
They all kept telling me I was a strong kid
"Don't cry," they said,
"There's my good little one."
I didn't want a word of that kind of praise,
So I feigned ignorance
Why are you smiling?
Why are you with me?
Why are you leaving?
I just wanna know
What made you stronger?
When did you realize your weakness?
How long must we wait
Until we are able to understand one another?
It's nearly dawn
I've gotta get going
I can't stay in the same place forever
Believing in people means eventually being betrayed
To me, that's no different from being spurned
At the time, I didn't have the fortitude even to try and believe
I'm sure I knew too much about too many things
Born all alone, we live on alone
I believed that to be
The natural course of things
Depend on you // hamasaki ayumi
Lyrics: ayumi hamasaki
Music: Yasuhiko Hoshino
If there should come a day when you set out on a journey
Let's set out together from there
Just when you thought you were going to reach the goal you'd been aiming for
Did you come to realize it was still a long ways off?
Just how far are you gonna go?
What will you do on these days without end?
When you get tired from flying on and on all that time
You can rest your wings, you know
I am here
If there should come a day when you set out on a journey
Let's set out together from there
Will you trust in the ray of light
Or will you fear the darkness?
When you find you can flap your wings no longer
Tuckered out from continuing to fly all that long way
I will be the one to warm
The one you need is certain to be
Standing by your side
Smiling for always
When you get tired from flying on and on all that time
You can rest your wings, you know
I am here
All of us set off on a journey some day
And the day will surely come when we throw all caution to the wind
Our story has only just begun
Filled with anxiety and hope
For my dear // hamasaki ayumi
lyrics: ayumi hamasaki
music: Yasuhiko Hoshino
It may be that I'm singing this song
Because I cannot say the words I wanna say the most
Happiness is best before it's ours
When we are merely dreaming of it
Once we have it in our grasp
We are seized by the fear of losing it
And that's why the human heart is not
So simple to figure out
Everyone is carrying hurts
So there are times when the tenderness of another
Seeps into the wounds
And it touches my heart so much I nearly cry
My loneliness is like an armor keeping people from seeing the real me
I don't wanna end up alone
I wanna fall asleep with the reassurance
That I have you
I may go on singing
With the chance I'll be able to say the words I wanna say the most someday
I may fall in love with someone
Without being able to hear the words I wish to hear most
I never believed in the red thread
I always thought destiny was something to reach out and grab
The world spun around me at such speed
I was exhausted, looking for love and helping hand
Someday, I want to reach the ideal me
Since the moment you found me, I've had this feeling I could be stronger
Because I can be proud of who I am
I don't wanna give up any more
I've bid goodbye to the past that troubled me
You were the first one to teach me what's most important
There have been times when I have been uncertain
Even hesitating to be at your side
I was afraid someone would get hurt
I had learned the wrong definition
Of what real tenderness is
It's time I stop caring only about what others think
I draw in closer to your lips
Though I've never seen eternity
I start getting nearer to your lips
But I can trust in it now that you and me are 'we'
Because I'm no longer alone
Not every romance eventually comes to an end
As the dawn comes to the longest night
I've a feeling I can take a step forward
Trusting in myself
Someday, I want to reach the ideal me
Since the moment you found me, I've had this feeling I could be stronger
Because I can be proud of who I am
I don't wanna give up any more
I've bid goodbye to the past that troubled me
You were the first one to teach me what's most important
YOU // Ayumi Hamasaki
lyrics: ayumi hamasaki
music: Yasuhiko Hoshino
This side of you is so beautiful it hurts (1)
Unable to venture a single word,
My eyes are overflowing with tears
Before I even realize
You were hurting
You were far more exhausted
Than anyone could guess
I'm so sorry I didn't notice
* Wrapped in a spring breeze, we dreamed a far-off dream
A break in the summer clouds vanished as quickly as it appeared
The heartrending skies of autumn
The cold sea in winter
The more drawn into it we became,
The more quickly our time passed by
We've been through a lot
And I am proud of who you are now
In each and every day
Perhaps we all live
We never seem to take the most straightforward path
Tired from taking roundabout ways
But the place we finally reach is...
My wish is to be the one who can heal
Your heart simply by being by your side
poker face // Ayumi Hamasaki
lyrics: ayumi hamasaki
music: Yasuhiko Hoshino
translation: Donny
*Anyone can cry (1); it isn't hard to do (2)
But I wanna smile
Your love is what I want (3)
In the midst of the surging crowd,
Looking for an answer I was unable to come up with
Feeling who I really am inside being obscured (4) little by little
The better I got at making up stories and excuses (5),
The more the emptiness of it all scared me
Repeat *
My tender side is lost (6)
When I put on a poker face (7)
So I wanna be genuine
Your love is what I want
Every person is a lonely creature
And that's why everybody needs somebody
To care and be cared for (8)
Nothing is a sure thing
But I have faith (9)
When I find something I hold dear,
I'll defend it to the end (10)
When I hit a wall that looms too high,
When I get hurt
I need only to stand again (11)
I don't want anything else
I just want one thing
And your love is what I want
Study Notes:
1.Anyone can cry
The original phrasing is tsu datte naku kurai, which literally means, "At any time/whenever... crying." I've taken some artistic liberty here and used the English indefinite pronoun, which does a similar job but leaves the agent/subject of the sentence unspecified rather than the time. The semantic boundaries of English and Japanese are not always one-to-one, something important to keep in mind when learning one or the other and when translating,too.
2. It isn't hard to do = naku kurai kantan (It's simple to do something like cry)
V(dic)+kurai and N+kurai has the meaning of "at very least" or "something so easy/insignificant as..." For instance, say that someone is not much of a chef but (s)he can make toast; (s)he might say:
"料理は上手い方ではないですが、パンぐらいは焼けます。"
Ryouri wa umai hou de wa nai desu ga, pan gurai wa yakemasu.
I may not be such a great cook, but it's not like I can't toast bread."
Notice that the English has been translated with a double negative while the Japanese is a declarative sentence. This is often the case when using qualifiers; the natural-sounding equivalent in English or Japanese will be opposite to the other. In the lyrics, the phrase "It's easy to cry" would not convey "kurai" very well, so I have chosen to negate the sentence and use the word "hard."
3. N+ ga hoshii: Is the Japanese phrase of the English equivalent of "I want."
However, as you may notice, the word "欲しい, hoshii" is an i-adjective. So, what is really going on here in the Japanese?
We use "I want..." for sake of sounding natural when these are two different patterns. The English is:
I want your love
sub + verb + direct object
The Japanese is:
あなたの愛 が 欲しい よ
Sub + sub marker + adj + emotive particle
A more direct translation would be "is desirable." However, no one is going to get anywhere in love by telling the object of their affection, "Your love is desirable."
Your love is what I want.
ga also has an emphatic quality, so rather than putting the agent as the subject (I, the singer), it is closer to the Japanese to put the patient (I think that's right... semantics people, a little help?) in the leftmost position.
4. ぼやける is an intransitive verb meaning "become blurry." While it would be correct to translate this as "become blurred" or something like this, I felt the verb phrase "be obscured," which is technically passive voice, would be more elegant than the former.
5. jouzu ni naru hodo means "The better (more skilled/adept) I become..." and is a similar construction to the -ba... V(dic) hodo one.
Uso ya iiwake ga jouzu ni nareba naru hodo... The more skilled I become at lying/making excuses, the more...
うそ simply means "lie," but I thought that "making up stories" paired better with excuses here. By the way, the Japanese idiom for "tell a lie" is "嘘を吐く, uso wo tsuku." You can also say "uso wo iu," but I would say the former is much more common, with the latter being used most often in the imperative negative sentence "嘘を言うな uso wo iu na" (Don't lie).
6. In the original, the i-adjective is rendered a noun by removing the -i and replacing with -sa. So, we get "優しさ yasashisa (gentleness)." However, I thought the English would probably use the concept of one side of someone rather than merely using the -ness suffix. What say you? Also, the original uses the word "忘れる wasureru," which literally means "to forget." Again, looking for the most native-like English, I didn't think it would be very helpful to the non-Japanese speaker to read a translation saying, "I forget gentleness." Not very helpful in conjuring up an image that you can relate to your daily life or (un)luckiness in love.
7. Ah, the word "強がる tsuyogaru." If you recall your lesson on the word "欲しい hoshii" or "たい -tai" for "want to," you will remember that psychological adjectives in Japanese are limited to the first person or second person and cannot typically be used with the third person. There are exceptions, small Japanese children make errors in this construction, and Japanese is not the only language to have such a limit, interestingly enough. You will recall, too, that the auxiliary "-garu"is added to mean "seem, appear, look like..." This can also be appended to other adjectives. Common ones would be "悲しい kanashii →悲しがる kanashigaru" and "恥ずかしい hazukashii → 恥ずかしがる hazukashigaru" to mean "sad -> appear sad" and "bashful -> appear bashful," respectively. For tsuyoi, we get tsuyogaru, which has the connotation of "feigning strength." In this case, it would appear Hamasaki used this word to derive the title of the song, "poker face," so I chose to translate this one as "put on a poker face."
8. 支えられたくて支えていたくて means "want to be supported and want to support," but this means moral support, so the most likely suspect in English would be "be cared for and care for" or something like this. We would most likely use the active before the passive, too, so I have switched the order. I don't have the time to run this through a corpus to check my hypothesis; just trusting my gut on this one.
9. Faith is the translation of 信じてる心がある. This means, literally "a believing heart." This is a perfectly fine translation but a little clunky, so I switched it out for faith. A similar construction is v(dic)+心. For instance, "愛する心," which means, literally, "a mind (heart) to love." I would translate this as, "the will to love."
10. v(stem)+通すtoosu means to do something to the end. The auxiliary originally means to pass something through another, like running a string through a tube or something. Here, Hamasaki says she will protect her love to the very end. Besides 'protect,' other words often used with toosu include 引く (主張を引き通す) 吹く (息・風を吹き通す) and 貫く (我を貫き通す). Linguistics students love to write papers comparing 通す with 抜く, which has a similar meaning and function.
11. -ba ii is a toughy. I translated it here as "need only..." which I think is a great phrase in English. The literal translation is "is good if..." but that is about as clunky as all get out. I could have written "It's good if I stand up again," but that is about as helpful as running this through Google Translate (Sorry, Google-sensei!). Another good translation would be, "should just..." but it depends on the context in which -ba ii appears. Hamasaki has another song, from her second album and which I will translate later, that uses the same construction, where I would translate it as "should just."
And that's it, folks. Hope this is helpful to those who enjoy learning language through music!
