Utena Fansub Ep 11 Translation Notes
Revolutionary Girl Utena Episode 11 Graceful And Ruthless; The One Who Picks The Flower.mkv
だめだめ。そんな味気ないお昼じゃ、つまんないでしょ？
No, no. Don’t eat that, it’s just packaged junk.
This line when literally translated is actually closer to “a tasteless lunch like that is boring, don’t you think?”. However, つまらない is more versatile than the English “boring”, and it can also kind of mean “not very good”. Plus, I can’t imagine a middle schooler like Wakaba saying “tasteless”. I tried rephrasing the whole line in a way that would make sense being spoken by a kid who’s trying hard to be an adult.
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基本はレトルトだけどフォルムが超プリティーでしょ？
It’s mostly pre-made ingredients, but doesn’t it look super pretty?
This line took me AGES to hear correctly. I had to write it down as I heard it to make out all the words, and even then I still had no idea what レトルト (retoruto) meant.
Crazy! I’ve used and seen these in Japanese grocery stores my whole life and never known they had a proper name.
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俺なら君をここから出さないな。永遠に。
If it were up to me, I’d keep you here… for eternity.
If it weren’t for the pause, I think I might have translated this line as “If it were up to me, I’d never let you out of here.” However, I think I like that I was forced to work around the pause, because it made me think about how I could end the sentence with “eternity” while still phrasing it in a natural way. The Japanese version of the line works as a complete sentence without the last word addition, which I kind of wanted to keep in the translation (cause then the ETERNITY has more of a gut punch), but I think I did the best I could given the constraints.
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そうだ。僕が姫宮を守らなければ。僕なら姫宮を普通の女の子に戻すことができるんだ。他のやつに渡すわけいけない。たとえ、僕の王子様であろうと。
That’s it. I have to protect her. I’m the only one who can help her get back to normal. I won’t let anyone else take her. Not even my own prince.
I think it’s important with these lines to start to show how Utena’s well-intentioned chivalry is warping into something that resembles the attitudes of the student council. Here Utena is showing that they can be possessive like Saionji, self-important like Miki, and ruthless like Juri.
I love this, and Akio’s round up of the duels in the next episode makes me think about it more - I think that Revolutionary Girl Utena is all about competing 世界観 (views of the world). I like the duels as a metaphor for philosophical debates. In this episode, the negative influences of the other duelists’ worldviews on Utena’s naive and righteous view of the world starts to really show. I think that the text intentionally shows this change right before Utena’s first loss to signify that this change is a weakening, a corruption, and that their previous worldview was “better” (for lack of a better word).
This is a bit of a tangent but I also think that the times when Utena is led down paths of heteronormativity and normative forms of gender are when they are shown to be weakest in-universe. This episode is a perfect example. Utena commits to two normative ideas - 1. being heteronormatively enamoured with Touga, and 2. the idea that Anthy, a feminine girl, can’t do anything herself and needs a masculine hand to help her and protect her.
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Thanks as always to @dontbe-lasanya for their editing!
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