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!
DA
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