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Let me tell you how I see you.
Your eyes are iris
Your voice is violet
Your lips are lilac, mmmm;
Your smile is cobalt and your touch, tungsten light
Your heart is coral sea,
Or cerulean, or a shade I haven't seen;
Your mind and body are the whole spectrum.
We live between the sky and ocean,
And you are every blue emotion.
Anata no kyou me wa kon desu
Anata no onsei wa taisei desu
Anata no kuchibiru wa mizuiro desu, mmmm;
Anata no isshou wa kobaruto desu,
Anata no furi, fujiro, Anata no shokkan, shikon
Anata no kokoro tamashii wa sangokai desu,
Wa sorairo, wa fukashi iro;
Anata no zenshinzenrei wa renzoku supekutoru desu.
Ichi ten, ichibou senri omoi desu,
Anata aoi desu.
Your searching eyes are deep blue
Your voice is twilight
Your lips are liquid, mmmm.
Your smile is cobalt,
your touch a darkening bruise
Your heart is coral sea,
sky-blue, invisible color;
Your devotion is a continuous spectrum.
The heavens and ocean encompass all emotion
And you are every blue.
I welcome comments, especially from those of you who actually know Japanese (and who probably got some unintended laughs).
Comments
I had to try it after I saw this post.
Edited at 2009-06-20 02:31 pm (UTC)
Hm. Maybe I should try Elvish.
Getting the real meaning while keeping the rhyme and scan correct -- that's work, IMO.
Everything sounds grandiose in Elvish. :)
tungsten becoming darkening bruise probably the most (no pun intended) striking metamorphosis.
Your touch / feel / impression (of a person) is wysteria (associated with nobility)
Your sense of touch / sense of being touched / tactile sense is bluish purple.
When I went into the Japanese, I wasn't trying to translate the English directly; I was rebuilding the poem the way I did it the first time, by looking for alliteration and internal rhyme. "Shokkan / shikon" is so much more poetic than "furi / tangusuten", but furi is the meaning I used in the original, so I just went with both.
I worried about using the term bruise without expounding on how it's a nice evocation of the blood rushing to the skin to meet the other's fingertips, a lasting impression, a high sensitivity. It's an evocative word, and it'll provide something for people who have different triggers.
I need to take another shot at rendering it back into English. There's a lot of subtext that I didn't recover.