Betting The Pride That Only I Understand

This post contains all three of Quatre's image songs--Brave Eyes, I'm Your Friend, and Stars' Look. Brave Eyes is another one of my favourites, which has a lot to do with why I decided to do Quatre before Duo and Heero. I really don't like Duo's voice... or the style of his songs. Unfortunately, Quatre apparently makes for some of the mkost boring lyrics of all the possible image songs...

( Brave Eyes )

( Stars' Look )

( I'm Your Friend )

Far Off Dawn was one of my favourite songs six or seven years ago, at least as far as lyrics went. Unfortunately, both Zechs and Treize only have the one image song apiece, so they're sharing a post. For the record, Far Off Dawn is Zechs' song and Stardust Soldiers/Stellar Soldiers is Treize's.

I actually wanted to include Une's Brightness and Darkness in this post because all three are thematically linked, but that would leave Dorothy's Joy To My Life completely stranded so I'll be doing those two tomorrow.

All punctuation in Far Off Dawn is from the original copy I have. I would never punctuate like that and I have no idea what the deal is with the five hyphens in a row, but I guess that's a personal thing. Treize's song here is a good example of a song whose translator very likely spoke English as a second language--it's very poetic, the phrasing is sometimes stunning, but it's so terribly awkward and disjointed that it doesn't... always make the sense that it easily could have. This is one of those songs that make me want to attempt a revised translation on my own. Still, I think you can make out the meaning just fine.

( Far Off Dawn )

( Stellar Soldiers )

In trying to get a title and subtitle for this journal, I noticed that most--if not all--of the online translations for Gundam Wing image songs are horrible. And by horrible I mean they're incoherent, nonsensical grammatical monsters.

I was peeved enough to dig up my old red binder full of Gundam Wing reference material out of the basement--I happen to have printed copies of some very nice, somewhat poetic English translations of most of the Gundam Wing songs... translations that are actually regularly coherent. They're not perfect (in fact, sometimes the translations are a little silly) and they're not my translations (I don't know whose they are), but I really don't think I could do a better job without using them and I think the fandom needs to have them back, if only as a point of comparison.

I have removed the odd word or two on linguistic grounds ("then that is the justice" is the same as "then that is justice," just saner, I get the feeling some of the translaters might have spoken Japanese as their first language) and fixed what appear to be a couple of spacing errors, and while I feel a little bad about altering them, the point is to make them accessable, not provide a perfect transcription of some lyrics found on the internet seven years ago. If this offends anyone, let me know and I'll un-alter them, but since I am not actually changing a lot of things (including things that could probably stand to be changed if my purposes were different), I'm just gonna try to be as accurate and coherent as simultaneously possible. Removed words will be noted in a parenthesis, for your... enjoyment or something, I don't know.

I'll be posting these at a rate of maybe one or two a day, although I'm kicking off with all three of Wufei's image songs because oh hey, this is Wufei's journal.

Anyway, here they are:

( Let Into Top )

( Knock on Morning's Door/Asu e no DOA wo Tatake )

( Grasp the Truth )