夏草や兵どもが夢の跡
Natsu kusa ya tsuwamonodomo ga yume no ato
The summer grasses, for many brave warriors the aftermath of dreams
-Basho (trans. by Donald Keene)
Just in time for the DVD and Blu-ray release, we’re happy to bring you subtitles for the musical, Touken Ranbu Tsuwamonodomo ga yume no ato. These subtitles are available for both the Delayed Stream and DVD versions. Everyone’s capture of a stream may have slightly different timing. If you find your subtitles are off, you can use VLC to shift the timing to match your video. Instructions can be found here.
If all you wanted was the subs, you can skip the rest of this rambling. If you’re a little more curious about this project, which probably seems like it came out of nowhere, feel free to keep reading.
So who are we? Why did we do this? We’re just a couple of kids caught up in sword hell and especially Toumyu hell, and after being so thoroughly impressed with this particular production we wanted to take this project on as a labor of love. Perhaps more than any other Toumyu, Tsuwamono digs deep into the details of the Genpei wars, and even more than that, the semi-fictional literary account of Heike Monogatari. It is filled with dozens of little references, like the flight of birds that signaled the turning point of the war, or the lotus flower seeds that were found buried with Fujiwara no Yasuhira and made to bloom nearly a millennium later in the temple gardens of present day Hiraizumi.
Some of the themes that make Heike such an enduring piece of theatre and literature, one that we ourselves were already very fond of, are also present here in Tsuwamono. Even the name is drawn from Matsuo Basho’s famous poem, which is generally accepted to have been written about our tragic Genji heroes, Yoshitsune and Benkei, on the very land where they made their last stand. As you will see, it is a fate that is both mirrored in and subverted by the adventures of the Touken Danshi in this show.
As such, we very much wanted to bring these elements of Heike Monogatari, as well as other famous standards like the kabuki play, Kanjincho (Temple Donation List) into our translation of Tsuwamono. At times, there are even whole phrases taken from these celebrated texts. To a Japanese audience, these might be as familiar as perhaps Shakespeare would be to a western audience. Of course, it is absolutely not necessary to be familiar with them to enjoy Tsuwamono. However, we hoped to keep things consistent with them and maybe even, as best we could in English, convey some of the depth that they add to this musical.
This project perhaps dragged on a little longer than we would have liked, but we’re very happy with the finished product, and we hope you will enjoy it too!
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