Utena Fansub Ep 28 Translation Notes

Revolutionary Girl Utena Episode 28 Whispers In The Dark.mkv

Juri: ずっと言葉にできない思い。でも、私の心はいつも囁き続けていく。そして、あなたも…

Juri: Feelings I could never put into words. But even now, as always, my heart continues to whisper. And you… You must feel…

Juri waxing poetic over her impossible love is peak queer teenage angst. The language she uses is pretty dramatic and it was important to get this across in the translation. One part of this line that was very tricky was the end: そして、あなたも… This line, translated literally, is “and, you, too…”, which not only has a strange sound to it, it also doesn’t convey the meaning it does in Japanese. In English, we would probably put “too” at the end of the sentence (e.g. “and you must feel something too”), while Japanese puts it as a particle next to the noun. So how can we get across the “too” meaning without saying it outright? I opted to infer what Juri’s sentence was going to be about, and cut that short instead. It’s clear that she’s talking and thinking about her own feelings, and the も (too) particle therefore must imply that she’s thinking about Shiori’s feelings too.

Nanami: でもあいつ、どうして今になって…？
Ruka: 酷いじゃないか、ななみ。それは病み上がりの先輩に言う言葉かい？

Nanami: But why is this jerk back now?
Ruka: How rude, Nanami. No respect for someone who’s fresh out of the hospital?

I went back and forth on this line with Anya a lot. The difficulty is in the word 病み上がり (yamiagari), which means “recovering/recovered from an illness”. The 上がり part of the word is used in other contexts to mean “finished up with X”, for example with お風呂上がり (just got out of the shower/bath) or 教員上がり (ex-teacher) or 雨上がり (just stopped raining). 病み上がり implies that while the sickness has been completely overcome, the body is in a weakened state.

So the meaning is something like: “Is that a word you’d use for a yamiagari senpai?”. I originally had this as something like “Is that any way to speak to your elders? And a sick one at that.” But I didn’t like how this implied he was still sick, especially because Nanami later says 全快…おめでとうございます (lit. “congratulations on your full recovery”). 病み上がり is such a short word, and the spoken dialogue is actually quite brief, so it was very difficult to get all the right nuances across while still being short enough to read before the line is over.

I translated it slightly differently in this line which occurs shortly after, for variety in language and to emphasise the loss of bodily strength.

おいおい、僕は病み上がりだよ。(lit. I am yamiagari)

Slow down, I’m still getting my strength back.

Ruka: ま、しばらく、気ままな学園生活を味わせてもらうよ

Another line where a quirk of Japanese grammar makes it hard to get all the subtlties of power dynamics across in translation. 味わせる means “to let (someone) experience”, and connected with the てもらう “to receive” helper verb, the whole thing comes out to something like this:

For now, I’ll receive the favour of being allowed to experience a selfish/free academy life.

But who is he receiving the favour from? He doesn’t say — the giver is not specified and therefore implicit in the original sentence. You could say he’s receiving the favour from the council, or you could say it’s from the student body in general. In addition, the use of てもらう implies that he’s receiving a favour, but also that he’s imposing the favour onto them — he’s going to live selfishly and freely anyway, but he’s giving them the opportunity to take the credit for any happiness he gets out of it. It’s an extremely shifgrethor-heavy move (reference for any Le Guin heads out there). I ended up going with

For now, I’d appreciate it if you just let me indulge in the freedom of academy life.

Thank you as always to my wonderful editor @dontbe-lasanya!

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