Firstly, thank you SO much for taking your time to answer all our Untamed questions. Secondly: if you don’t mind, maybe you could talk about that iconic line around 4:46 of episode 27, which YouTube translates as “If I am doomed to death, at least I could be killed by you. That would be worth it.” I know it more or less works out to “I trust you more than I'd trust the rest of them,” but it seems an odd thing to say regardless, so I wonder how much I'm missing.
oh hey there! I translated this line super fast in this post, but there’s... a lot going on in that post, and I never delved into this line in particular.
prepare for tears tears tears
Okay so first of all? The slight amount of slow motion on Wei Wuxian’s withdrawal of Chenqing, and holding it out between them? Thanks, I hate it, because it’s reminding me that in this show, there are maybe three instances when Wei Wuxian initiates a fight with Lan Wangji. The first time is the waterfall fight in Cloud Recesses summer school, when Wei Wuxian draws on Lan Wangji and trades a few blows before he realizes who Lan Wangji is (i.e. not an enemy combatant), at which point he promptly sheathes his sword and commences the flirting teasing. The third time is when they stand on opposite ends of a rooftop on the worst night of their lives.
Meanwhile, Lan Wangji starts fights with Wei Wuxian like, all the time -- their first moonlit meeting, in the Qinghe Nie compound (and if I may indulge myself, throughout all of Sunshot); I’m even inclined to give the waterfall fight to Lan Wangji as well, because he sneaked up on purpose, he was so ready for that fight and probably would’ve been too happy to keep trading blows (I firmly believe that bb!Lan Wangji was ferociously competitive).
But I’m getting distracted from the sads. This is the second time we see Wei Wuxian draw on Lan Wangji, and the first time we see him do so with Chenqing. It’s definitely the first time we see Wei Wuxian offer a genuine, heartbroken challenge to fight him for real -- this isn’t a sparring match anymore, this isn’t just another friendly bout between fellow cultivators. Wei Wuxian is prepared to die for what he’s doing, and he’s prepared to let Lan Wangji be the one to kill him.
(and if Lan Wangji had fought him, right there, right then? How far would he have gone? How far would either of them have gone?)
Wei Wuxian says:
蓝湛 / Lan Zhan
如果我和他们之间必有一战 / if there must be a fight between me and them
那我宁愿和你 决一生死。/ then I would rather fight to the death with you.
要死，/ If I must die,
也至少死在你含光君的手上. / then at least I would die by you, Hanguang-jun, at your hands
不冤了。/ I would not be wronged.
Okay! So I’ve gone back and changed some parts of my older translation to be a little more faithful to the text in order to highlight some parts I want to point out:
如果我和他们之间必有一战 / if there must be a fight between me and them
那我宁愿和你 决一生死。/ then I would rather fight to the death with you.
In the first line, Wei Wuxian is fighting the entire cultivation world, one against many. He says 他们 tamen, ‘them,’ the third-person plural pronoun, instead of 你们 nimen, ‘all of you,’ the second-person plural. Then, in the second line, he emphasizes that he doesn’t think of Lan Wangji as one of them. Lan Wangji is different for Wei Wuxian; he’s always been different.
This is barely two episodes after Wei Wuxian says to Lan Wangji in a sunlit forest on Phoenix Mountain, I had once taken you for the one who knew me, and received the answer I still am.
要死，/ If I must die,
也至少死在你含光君的手上. / then at least I would die by you, Hanguang-jun, at your hands
What I glossed over in my translation last time was the fact that Wei Wuxian, in this moment, specifically calls Lan Wangji by his title, Hanguang-jun. The hands are not Lan Zhan’s, Lan Wangji’s -- the hands he would die at are Hanguang-jun’s. Wei Wuxian evokes the idealized, glorified version of Lan Wangji that the cultivation world knows him as; Wei Wuxian calls upon the Lan Wangji who is famed for his unswerving righteousness and impeccable conduct, the bearer of an impartial light that illuminates good and evil, regardless of factionalism or politics. Hanguang-jun is the version of Lan Wangji that Wei Wuxian trusts with the verdict on his life, and Hanguang-jun is the farthest from the Lan Zhan he called his 毕生知己 bisheng zhiji.
(Not to keep shoving this post in people’s faces, but I have a lot of feelings about how Wei Wuxian trusts Lan Wangji to take him down if he goes too far, and I don’t want to repeat them all here because I used up all of my words there)
不冤了。/ I would not be wronged.
This is probably the biggest change I’ve made in this translation -- in a previous post, I translated it as “it would be worth it” because I was leaning on the 达 da and 雅 ya sides of the translation triangle, and I stand by that translation as communicating the essential sentiment of the line with the least amount of confusion.
But we’re not here for easy answers on this blog, we’re here for the most painful ones --
a lot of this sentence hinges on the word 冤 yuan, which means injustice, grievance (thanks Pleco) or, in its verb form here, to be wronged. Before anyone asks, no, it’s not the same yuan as resentful energy -- which is 怨 -- which is a nice instinct, but alas.
I personally have a lot of emotional connections with the word 冤 yuan because it’s one of the central themes of 《琅琊榜》Langyabang / Nirvana in Fire, a show that keeps coming up on this blog and one I love with every fiber of my mortal being. Especially through the context of LYB, you can see how powerful of a force 冤 yuan can be -- whereas CQL, one might say, is driven by 愧悔 kuihui / regret and shame and how to live a life free from it (from Wei Wuxian’s 问心无愧 wenxinwukui to Lan Wangji’s 我有悔 woyouhui / I have regrets), LYB in contrast is driven by 冤 yuan -- from 冤枉 yuanwang / wrongful treatment to 冤案 yuanan / unjust case to 冤魂 yuanhun / the unrestful wronged spirits of the dead to 雪冤 xueyuan / to wash clean the injustice, until what’s left is white as snow.
Okay I’m getting distracted by LYB, but the point still stands -- 冤 yuan is an incredibly powerful word, and Wei Wuxian’s usage of 冤 yuan here encompasses so fucking much:
if I die at your hands, I would not be wronged
I wouldn’t come back as a vengeful spirit
I wouldn’t haunt you for what you’ve done
if I die at your hands, I would not blame you
if I die at your hands, you would be in the right
if I die at your hands, it would be worth it for me
you know me, so I trust you to lay judgment on me
and I will accept your verdict with no resentment or ill-feeling
even if that means that I die at your hands
One last dig of the knife, which is something I didn’t notice until I re-watched this line to write this post: Wei Wuxian says all of that -- Wei Wuxian says a l l o f t h a t -- with the softest, saddest smile on his face
because he knows the monumental scope of what he’s asking of Lan Wangji in that moment -- I trust you, he says in that moment, to kill me -- and so that goddamn smile? That smile says two things:
thank you,
and
I’m sorry
