Utena Fansub Ep 38 Translation Notes
Revolutionary Girl Utena Episode 38 The End Of The World.mkv
歳月を得て、君はもうただ王子様を目指す魂ではなくなっているはずだった。
As the years go on, the unadulterated will to be a prince will fade from your soul.
Not much to say on this line besides I think I’m a genius for coming up with “unadulterated” here. The literal translation is more “your soul will no longer desire only to become a prince” (as in, you’ll desire other things as you get older). Unadulterated just has the beautiful juicy double meaning of being unspoiled by any other desires, and literally un-adulterated — “not yet adult-like”!
This was probably the hardest line to translate in the whole episode.
Akio: 素晴らしいプラネタリウムだろう？
Akio: 永遠の物や
Akio: 奇跡の力が存在してほしいという
Akio: 青臭い願望を持つものに、
Akio: この装置は、おとぎ話の幻を見せてくれるんだ。
Each line above represents a new subtitle line. One of the difficulties of this line is that it’s quite a long sentence, so it had to be split over multiple subtitles. This is usually fine, but the way it’s split made it very hard to convert to English, since the word order is so different between languages. Let’s see a very direct translation:
A splendid planetarium, isn’t it? To people who have immature wishes for something eternal or the power of miracles to exist, this device will show a fairy tale illusion.
As you can see, the word order is kind of cooked because the first thing Akio says after “A splendid planetarium” has to be a short line, and based on speech tone it kind of needs to be the first item in a two item list (so it has to be “something eternal” or an alternative translation of that). That was the big restriction of this puzzle — given that I need to list “something eternal” and “the power of miracles” in the Japanese word order, how can I make the translation work?
I spent a good while on that puzzle, but eventually I got something I was happy with:
Akio: A splendid planetarium, isn’t it?
Akio: “I wish it would last forever.”
Akio: “I wish a miracle would happen.”
Akio: Such childish wishes.
Akio: This set will show them what they want. The illusion of a fairy tale.
Another interesting point on this line is the word 装置 (souchi). By itself, it means “device” but it can also be an abbreviation of 舞台装置 (butai souchi) which means “stage setting/theatrical scenery”. In order to keep this ambiguity, I decided to translate 装置 as “set”. It could mean the planetarium lighting set or it could mean the set of a stage performance.
Akio: 君はいい女さ。
Akio: 女の子でいるべきなんだ。
Akio: You’re some catch, you know.
Akio: What’s wrong with just being a girl?
Oof, that second sentence hit me like a brick. A more direct translation would be “You should be a girl” or “You should live your life as a girl”, but the word “be” just didn’t hit hard enough, in my opinion. I really wanted to depict the blatant (and textual!) attempt at detransitioning Utena, and I thought “What’s wrong with just being a girl?” really sold it. Combined with the first sentence for a “noo don’t transition you’re so pretty” type vibe, it really sounds like something a transphobic parent might say.
Akio: A child like you could never comprehand my vision.
Akio: 君のような子供に俺の理想は理解できない
The key word here is 理想, which seems to be often translated as “ideals”. But Akio isn’t talking about his ethical philosophy, he’s talking about his ideal outcome. “Ideals” is a direct dictionary translation that misses the actual meaning of the word. If we look up 理想 in a Japanese dictionary instead of a bilingual dictionary, we see another definition:
人が心に描き求め続ける、それ以上望むところのない完全なもの。そうあってほしいと思う最高の状態。⇔現実。
Something perfect, that one imagines and desires. An ideal state that one wishes would come about. Antonym: Reality.
To me, this sounds much more like a “vision” than “ideals”.
Thank you @dontbe-lasanya for your all your hard work on the editing! ONLY ONE MORE TO GO!!
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Rose divider taken from this post.