Anecdotal Evidence of Insurmountable Canadian-Japanese Socio-Linguistic Barriers

Rush's "The Spirit of Radio" Back from Japanese

James B. Endres

Two years ago I was living as a foreign exchange student in Tokyo, and bought a copy of Permanent Waves at the huge Ishimaru record and appliance store in the Akihabara electronics section of the city.

In Japan, it is considered de rigeur to include lyrics with the liner notes of a compact disc (it is almost impossible to even find cassettes or vinyl on sale in Japan today), usually with a Japanese translation in the case of American or British music (which is more popular, by and large, than the domestic stuff).

So, just for the hell of it, I went through the translation of "The Spirit of Radio" and did a pretty accurate re-translation back into English. "Accurate" in the sense that I tried to be literal, to show the humor of the glaring mistranslations; all apologies to Ms. Numasaki, who did the English to Japanese translation that appears in the liner.

Background

• In one or two places of ambiguity, I opted for the funniest translation.
• I did a line-by-line translation wherever possible, but Japanese grammar is such that

  <subject> <verb> <object>

  becomes

  (subject omitted) <object> <verb>,

  and where <object> and <verb> was split over two lines (and in other, similar cases) I swapped those lines so that things would parse in English.

Some explanations:

• In Japanese, the subject, especially when an obvious pronoun (I, you) is almost always omitted. Likewise, possessive adjectives (my, yours) don't explicitly appear unless relevant. Now, when Geddy [Lee; Rush's lead singer, bassist, and keyboardist] sings "the magic music makes your morning mood," he's not singing about your morning mood, or his girlfriend's morning mood, but people's morning moods in general when they listen to the Toronto morning shows on the highway. However, the translation dutifully repeats the express "you" that appears in the English, with the effect that it really sticks out. (The translation is kimi, which is at an informal, rough, level of speech; that pronoun usually appears in Japanese rock when crooners are addressing their sweeties, but guys use it with each other too in everyday speech.) So I chose to emphasize forms of "you" (italics) wherever they expressly appear (technically incorrectly); normal (non-caps) forms of "you" come out of translations of grammatical forms for which we normally use "you".
• The title is a transliteration of the transliteration of "The Spirit of Radio." The "R" should be pronounced something like a cross between "L" and "D".

Translation