I just made it in time to do my second monthly post! It’s been all hands on deck for a while, so I haven’t had much energy for stuff outside of my children and work. Anyway...
Let me tell you what I mean by “living in four-hour increments.” This is common knowledge to anyone who has raised a baby, but you need to feed a baby every few hours. The clock starts as soon as the bottle goes in the baby’s mouth, upon which the cycle of drink-burp-sleep begins. But as with everything, it’s not usually that simple. The baby might not drink so quickly, or might fall asleep in the middle. There might be a “number two blowout” in the middle of feeding. The baby might just not burp, despite having a visibly bulging belly. And yet the clock keeps ticking down until the next time for feeding... Not complaining; that’s just how it is. The first month of life has three-hour cycles for feeding and that’s the toughest, so it’s kind of a blessing that the NICU took care of him for that first month.
There’s a good song in Japanese that often comes to mind:
Genkotsu-yama no tanuki-san
oppai nonde, nenne shite
dakko shite onbu shite mata ashita
The tanuki in the rolling mountains
Give the baby milk and help him get to sleep
Carry him, give him a piggyback, and then do it all again tomorrow!
It’s a very simple song but it resonates. When trying to translate it above, I was wondering whether the “tanuki-san” is referring to just the baby, just the parent, or maybe both the parent and baby. I’m still not completely sure. Here, the baby is a “he” like our own. I also find it very hard to translate “genkotsu-yama” which basically means “mountains shaped like fists.” I’m not that good at translating songs, I’m afraid.
Work has been very busy this summer—it often gets busy at this time of year. Some translators are on holiday too, so it puts more work on the ones who are not. On the other hand, this does give opportunities for new translators to get their hands dirty with new jobs too. A schedule slip meant that I had to work over the obon holiday which I had originally intended to take off, and that was a real downer. I got to take it a bit easy in the week before obon while I was waiting to receive the source text files, but still.
A cool little tool called Soan was released recently, letting you input text to generate images that mimic old Japanese movable type. The image data is based on one rare edition of Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) printed around 1600 CE. You can take a look at it here via the Japanese National Diet Library’s Digital Library There are a few other books printed in the same style, and these are referred to as Sagabon. The text in these prints almost look hand-written or woodblock printed but they are actually made using movable type with multiple varieties of hiragana and also many ligatures with joined-up hiragana.
The images created with Soan do have imperfections that I’d like to write about sometime (though the team is still working on updates and improvements), but the tool is a lot of fun to use.
I watched the whole of the Revolutionary Girl Utena TV series and the film too. I really liked it!! I somehow managed to watch it without any spoilers this whole time, and while it had some rather shocking scenes that I wasn’t expecting, it was just really nice. It has a great sense of humour, too.
I’ve been immensely excited about the upcoming release of Radirgy 2 on 7 Dec (there’s an event featuring a demo of the game, and an hour-long talk segment with the devs going on today in Tokyo—I wish I could be there but it’s just not feasible), and I’ve had a bit of fun with a brand new VS arcade puzzle game called Yumeiro Yuram (I’ve already written/shared posts about both over on cohost: Radirgy 2 post 1 and post 2; Yumeiro Yuram post 1 and post 2 but otherwise I’ve just been plodding along with the usual things.
Hope to see you again next month!
By mojilove on 2023-08-27