Spain--You may have heard of Takashi Murakami. His name struck a bell with me so I did a quick Google image search. Oh, that guy. The one that sold the really indecent statue for disgusting amounts of money and reminded us that art was dead*. Anyways, here he is with a creature that looks like it sprang from his mind. The headline: そっくり ( looks just like him).[article]
Tottori prefecture--Also ran across this monstrous guy. Gegege no Kitaro! Remember when I made that video where I started to translate the theme song and then subconsciously switched back to Japanese? The train wreck? Eh? All of my videos are train wrecks? Too true. Anyways, here our protagonist is displaying the winners of a 妖怪 (Japanese monster) 川柳 (joke haiku, or as I like to say, joke-ku) contest . I believe the haiku here are the winners, in case you don't have access to our friend, but I warn you, they are kinda cheesy.[article]
I have been wondering since I saw the live-action movie: why did they cast a half-Japanese guy as Kitaro? I mean, does that mean that he is so Japanese looking that it doesn't matter? Or that yokai look slightly like foreigners? Or that foreigners look slightly like yokai? Or maybe they just choose him for good looks and Japan is at a happy state where such things don't matter...
A contest of my own for Dear Reader: Can you translate this joke-ku (ha ha, get it, see... jyokku is the katakana word... I'm sorry...) into English?: １０年で 嫁は寝肥り オレ河童
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Bonus etymology:
The term for joke-kus came from a haiku critic's name. I wish I could get such an easy job. Anyways, the guy was 柄井川柳（からいせんりゅう).
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*Hey, I was an art major, so I can say these controversial statements with confidence ;) Also, you should take the hint and not do a Google image search if you are easily offended by... seminal works.
The research is in. Here's my translation, followed by an explanation of WHY I translated it this way, followed by an explanation of WHY this is not a very good translation:
ReplyDelete「十年で 嫁は寝肥り オレ河童」
Ten years of marriage.
Watching her sit around and get bigger.
My God. I'm Jack Sprat.
The first line is pretty obvious, and easy enough.
The second line gave me trouble cause I kept thinking of 「寝肥り」 literally: getting fat in your sleep. It's just a way of describing becoming the kind of obese America is famous for: lack of activity obese. I decided to use "bigger" instead of "fat," because I didn't want it to rhyme.
The hardest part was 河童 = Jack Sprat. What? But here's the reason: kappa are figures that are such a huge part of Japanese folklore culture, that their name has permeated all sorts of non-folklore aspects, the かっぱ巻き (named because kappa love cukes) or the raincoat, just to name a few. But another thing, that I learned since you issued this challenge, is that 河童 are perceived not only as Sumo-loving, well-mannered, butt-munchers (that's LITERAL, so don't censor me CLAY), but they also have a pretty malnourished, broke down, impoverished image. You could describe someone as a 河童, and it would NOT be flattering. As the Japanese person who explained it to me described it: 細い、ぼろい、貧乏のイメージ. So when I told them the haiku, they said "なんとなく分かる。可笑しく面白く。”
Jack Sprat is by no means the equivalent of the kappa in the western imagination, but he was the best I could come up with from a folklore (is Mother Goose folklorish?) setting who keeps the super thin man image, and luckily, matches up with the fat wife. I felt like I had to include the "My god," to indicate dissatisfaction, because Jack Sprat and his wife were content with their situation. This author is probably not.
The problem is that Jack Sprat matches the undernourished thin guy image too well. He doesn't have ANY other associations that I can think of, while the kappa has TONS, which is what makes this a good entry for an obake related haiku contest.
Can anyone think of anything better?
Ceiling cat is okay with butts. And even those butt balls that kappa love.
ReplyDeleteVery good job; I never knew about the malnourished image that kappas have!