Welcome to this little slice of translation theory in motion!

My motivation for working with Ningen Isu’s work is not particularly easy to trace. I’ve had a long, storied history with the entire genre of hard rock and heavy metal. There are photographs of me as young as ten in standing-room only pits for metal shows in Tampa, Florida. Which, mind you, is practically the “fertile crescent” of American heavy metal. My understanding of Japanese was piecemeal up until just barely three years ago, due in part to growing up with all of the digital exports of the late 2000s. I was well aware of a number of Japanese rock bands and artists, but Ningen Isu did not reach me until roughly 2021 due to a random suggestion from a music streaming service.

The task of translation, and I mean translating something, initially had me more guarded than I expected. When it comes to my Japanese education, I tend to place myself further back in the conversation, as small as possible as not to go haplessly bounding through the entire process and stepping on every toe along the way. I chose Dunwichi no Kai as my song to translate specifically because of my familiarity with the band. Something about engaging with an incredibly niche genre of music from a globally-niche band is much less daunting than taking on an acclaimed text or body of work. But herein lies the complexity: Dunwichi no Kai is foremost, an allegorical retelling of H.P Lovecraft’s Dunwich Horror, sung in a specific regional dialect of Japanese, with literary voice, and applications of Edo-era vocabulary. From the actual aspect of translation, it is utterly impossible to bulldoze my way through it with a textbook and a dream. So much so, that this document recounts several instances throughout my translation process.