Rinkaku - a proper translation
I trace the silhouette,
of my dreams and love as they lose their colour,
while the vows we made now speak of their own end.
In those burnt fields, I harvest emptiness,
gifting this poem
to your pale, translucent white skin, (1)
to its phosphorous fire.
From dreams,
from dream to dream I walk down a glass road,
from dreams even tears evaporate (2)
from dreams,
from dreams I am awakened into a world
where even memories become dreams.
Something takes flight - a reflection -
and my heartbeat points the way,
playing out a lie.
Like a realist painter,
painting reality down to its every detail,
I plead “I want you by my side”,
and still, I smile. (3)
My haphazardly scattered hopes,
were never for anyone’s sake -
a mere reflection of my weakness.
This me that is stranded here -
what shall I sing about now?
“I’m not even allowed hope…”
O devil, come to me when I clap my hands,
we shall play tag,
and I shall switch places with you… (5) (6)
(1) The original does not specify “your” in this line. In Japanese possessives are often left up to interpretation. I chose to use the pronoun “yours” here because the poem includes allusions to vows and later “I want you to stay with me”, so I assumed the narrator is addressing someone else.
(2) It’s hard to convey the subtleties of this verse in English, but what the narrator means is that dreams become an idealised form of memories, that we eventually forget the bad moments.
(3) This stanza was very hard to translate accurately because the writing is very abstract. The painter is implied to be the narrator, but it’s unclear if “I want you by my side” is something the narrator says or if this is said to him. It’s also unclear if it’s him who smiles or the person he is addressing. This is my best attempt at making sense of it: the painter is the narrator. He draws very realistic pictures of the person they want by their side. Obviously the pictures cannot replace the real person, so they hide their grief by smiling along.
(4) Minerva was the Roman goddess of the Arts - among other things. She overlaps with the Greek Athena. You’ll notice that this poem contains a lot of references to the arts: poems, silhouettes, reflections, a painter, dreams, singing.
(5) I translated “鬼” (oni) as a devil, but Oni in Japanese mythology are not exactly the devil as we know it in Abrahamic religions. Japanese Oni are a mix of a devil, a troll and an ogre. Oni supposedly live hidden and never reveal themselves. In this stanza, the narrator is daring the Oni to reveal itself and play 鬼ごっこ (Oni Gokko) with him. Oni Gokko is a popular children’s tag game where one player is tagged as the Oni and has to catch the others blindfolded by following the sound of their clapping. This is a reference to an innocent children’s game but it takes a darker turn when the narrator asks the Oni to switch places with him - they become “it” - implying that their life is a kind of hell better fit for a demon.
(6) In this stanza, the verb “switch” is deliberately left unfinished (変わ… ). In album version and live performances, Kyo also leaves the verb ending hanging mid-air. This is a stylist choice, I presume to imply that the narrator got snatched away by the devil before they could finish.
This is a very beautiful poem, one of my favourites by Dir en Grey. I’m bummed that I can’t even begin to transpose its structure and imagery onto English - I had to make some changes so the logic is understandable by English standards. The original uses a lot of metaphors from the semantic field of transparency and ghostliness: silhouettes, things that lose colour, pale translucent skin, phosphorous fire, a glass road, tears, playing a game blindfolded.. all these things are almost transparent, hard to see. The original structure of the stanzas (hard to reproduce here without making it even more cryptic) is also deliberate to reinforce the airiness and transience of its vocabulary and theme.
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