January 13, 2008

• New
  Caption

  Not much has been going on lately. Thought I’d change a couple
  minor things around, though.

  For starters, I thought I’d finally change the tagline
  underneath the title at the top (the Japanese text under ‘Chronic
  Jetlag’). The original was taken from an old poem by Ariwara no
  Narihira (explained in
  this post):

  月やあらぬ 春や昔の 春ならぬ 我が身一つは 元の身にして

  Tsuki ya aranu Haru ya mukashi no Haru naranu Waga mi hitotsu wa Moto no mi ni shite

  Is this not the moon Is this spring not the same As the spring of long ago I, my singular self Am as to my original self

  My intention with the original caption was, in the spirit of
  Japanese literary tradition, modify the meaning of two lines of text by
  changing the surrounding concept. So, where the original poem used it
  as a question, I used it as more of a statement.

  Anyhow, I thought it might be time to change it around a
  little. I thought I’d pick a line from one of the Lunar: Silver Star
  Story novels (by Kei Shigema). The main character and his friends
  encounter a person who spends his life always journeying from one place
  to the next; they ask him why he does so and he responds:

  きのうと違うきょうを、きょうとは異なるあしたを見てみたいから

  “So that I can see a today unlike yesterday, and a tomorrow that is unlike today”

  Later on (two volumes and a few hundred pages later), when
  they relate the story of this person to someone else, they reiterate
  his motto, paraphrasing a little bit, to something like:

  きのうとちがうきょうを旅したいからだ

  “Wanting to travel so that today is unlike yesterday”

  I thought this was a bit more concise, and thought I’d borrow
  it for the tagline below the title. KF

  • 3:35 pm
  • Leave a comment