As promised, some info from the JP dub of the donghua from 2021.
T/N: Personal names don’t get glossed but sobriquets and place names do. The anime’s approach to personal names is in line with the novel; the audio drama is an outlier for overlocalization. This whole thing is 5 pages. Alt text added for all images.
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Red banner: “Madou soshi” Japanese dub starts airing January 10, 2021 on WOWOW, TOKYO MX, and BS11
Bottom text: (TV scheduling information.)
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The world was fed up with the limits of the Kizan Wen clan’s tyranny, and the people were wheezing with anguish. The disciples of the cultivation world—the Koso Lan clan, Unmu Jiang clan, Ranryou Jin clan, and Seiga Nie clan—joined forces for the “Sun shot campaign” and succeeded in subjugating the Wen clan.
Wei Wuxian, the Iryou Elder, contributed greatly to the success of the “Sun shot campaign,” but due to the fact that his mastery of kidou (鬼道) made him the most powerful, he was feared by the people, slandered, and ultimately beckoned the total destruction of his body.
And now, 13 years later…Wei Wuxian, who was supposed to be dead, is brought back to life by magic, and reunites with his old friend, Lan Wangji of the Koso Lan clan, and his brother Jiang Cheng of the Unmu Jiang clan. However, the mysteries of the past have not yet vanished, and society begins to doubt him all over again.
All stories start with a chance encounter during their youth.
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(T/N: I’m not going to rekey the relationship chart. It doesn’t say anything you don’t already know. Full cast list in the Wikipedia link below.)
Wei Wuxian caption: An innocent, uncontrolled free-spirit. Frivolous, but has the makings of a genius. Manipulates corpses with the sounds of a flute, and creator of “kidou” (鬼道), [a technique that] utilizes yin energy. Subjugated 13 years ago, but brought back to life with magic. Also called Wei Ying.
Lan Wangji caption: The second son of a famous cultivation household, the Koso Lan clan. Remarkably excellent, and of irreproachable conduct. Extremely serious and fastidious. Long ago he had many skirmishes with the free-spirited Wei Wuxian. Excels at using the Lan clan’s secret technique with the guqin. Also called Lan Zhan.
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Panel 1 WWX: Lan Zhan! Our story’s finally going to start in Japan! WWX: Let’s introduce some of the difficult-looking vocab so everyone can enjoy [the show] LWJ: …
Panel 2 WWX: Alright, start by explaining “cultivation clans” and “cultivators” right off the bat. LWJ: “Cultivators” are disciples who exterminate ghosts and evil spirits and protect people’s safety. LWJ: Cultivators are affiliated with “cultivation clans”, and discipline themselves in order to further their knowledge and hone their craft.
Panel 3 LWJ: “The Five Great Clans”—the generic term for each cultivation clan is the “the cultivation world”; of those, the best are the Koso Lan clan, the Unmu Jiang clan, the Ranryou Jin clan, the Seiga Nie clan, and the Kizan Wen clan, thus the “Five Great Clans”. WWX: That’s too long-winded!
Panel 4 WWX: If you think there’s too many kanji, you can just tell everyone apart by color. WWX: Like, the Jiang clan’s purple! JC: Hey, that’s crude.
Panel 5 WWX: Zombie-like monsters called “corpses” will appear, but I can manipulate them with mu flute. WWX: Lan Zhan can defeat them with his koto!
Panel 6: WWX: Make sure to tune in for the Japanese dub broadcast this January!
Kimura Ryouhei (voice of Wei Wuxian)
—Tell us something you find fascinating about the original work or characters.
It’s the most exciting world with a combination of the air of another country and fantasy. Please look forward to the drama depicted between characters who are so finely chiseled they’re true-to-life living there!
—Do you have a message for viewers awaiting the dub broadcast?
You’ll probably be perplexed by all the names and factions, and proper nouns you’re not used to hearing, but that’s okay! The story will lead you along. If you stick with it, you’ll surely have a wonderful time. I’ll be happy if you fall in love with the vivacious cast!
Tachibana Shinnosuke (voice of Lan Wangji)
—Tell us something you find fascinating about the original work or characters.
No matter how many times I say it, the art is absolutely gorgeous! There’s a beauty to the Chinese style coloration, but I feel like the work’s atmosphere can be conveyed just by looking at the art. And the characters move a lot. I feel like I can perceive the vitality and ambiance on my skin. Also, there are a ton of hot guys (laughs).
—Do you have a message for viewers awaiting the dub broadcast?
This internationally acclaimed work has finally touched down in Japan with the Japanese anime dub! I hope you enjoy a host of characters who bustle around, their sentiments and exchanges, and the subtleties of Wei Ying and Lan Zhan’s hearts. I look forward to enjoying this magnificent story together with everyone ☆
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Full staff and cast list (T/N: again, I’m not rekeying that. Here it is on Wikipedia instead.)
Chapter 2 荒狂 Rampage [ExR trans: Aggression Part 3]
While I continue to struggle with not having enough hands to both live blog MDZS and pet a dog, and that autosave bug that kept eating my edits, I’ve been worrying for the last couple days about how I might be shoving a key into the ignition of a clown car with the license plate “pandora’s box”. You guys have been great so far, and I really appreciate it.
I must humbly thank one of my fandom elders for reminding me that translation is a form of transformative work, and therefore subject to Death of the Author (and Skoposof the client).Translation theory and translation studies in general is mostly done at the graduate level; of what I’ve been exposed to at the undergraduate level, Skopos theory is the only one that did not strike me as totally self-indulgent. I’ll do my best to lay out the facts as much as can be done, and leave the literary analysis to you.
Today we’re looking at the tail end of Chapter 2, Frontier Works pg. 41-53, and a tiny bit of the audio drama, Season 1 Part A Episode 1 first 12 minutes. After this, I’ll be taking a short aside to translate another Japanese audio drama article from PASH! magazine, and a supplementary PDF from the anime’s ad campaign website before moving on to Chapter 3. Strap in, this is a LONG POST.
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I spent these past 12 pages fixated on a particular notion: “I don’t think Mo Xuanyu is necessarily insane”. I will get back to that in a bit. Let’s talk about everything else first.
I know I’ve mentioned this before there’s been a bit of ambiguity regarding whether the body part rampaging Mo Manor is a hand or an arm.
bt. In that moment A-Ding suddenly burst into tears. “His hand… A-Tong’s left hand–!”
It’s a hand in this one segment. I’m using “burst into tears” to indicate more clearly that “cried” here should be the weeping kind, not the shouting kind.
On the next page
Suddenly saying this… It doesn’t seem like a coincidence. (ExR)（突然こんなことを言うなんて……まぐれとは思えない。）(FW pg. 45) bt. (Suddenly, saying this sort of thing [out loud]… I can’t think of it as a fluke.)
Clunky, but within a reasonable margin of error.
Moving forward a few pages to when Wei Wuxian turns the deceased Mo manorial lords into his minions… Do you think he is allowed to swear? やがる is an auxiliary verb meaning “to have the nerve to do X”, and in a lot of cases, it can be used as a free pass for an emphatic and/or expletive.
“Wake up!” (ExR)
「起きやがれ！」 (FW pg. 49)
“Wake the fuck up!”
In case you were wondering, he was politer to the first batch of corpses.
We finally get our first instance of 凶屍 kyoushi/xiong1shi1 on FW pg 50! I’d been wondering when that word would show up. I really hate “fierce corpse” but ExR’s use of “cruel corpse” instead doesn’t make it any better. I don’t think this term translates. As far as I know, zombie lore in English comes out of Central African mythology via the Caribbean. I worry that there are not enough similar base concepts between these two cultures that we even have the vocabulary to express the concept with words that are not Chinese.
And finally, 含光君 han2guang1jun1 = gankoukun. Sobriquets don’t get glossed. What’s it mean? May I direct you to this post? At some point I will revise the Chinese-to-Japanese table of proper names to include monikers and place names. Once I figure out a good way to format it for web…
Alrighty, now time for the thesis part. One of the central motifs of MXTX’s writing style is setting up a characterization based on third hand accounts, and then using the characters’ actions to subvert those expectations. The very first instance of this is in MDZS is the irony of Wei Wuxian, in the body of Mo Xuanyu, being the smartest person in the room despite never taken seriously. What do we actually know about Mo Xuanyu himself? What has he actually told the reader? He hasn’t. He’s very dead at this point. Everything we know is filtered through A) Wei Wuxian, and B) a third person limited POV narrator, both of whom are notably not omniscient. What we can take away from the diary entries is only what Wei Wuxian can surmise (FW pg. 18-19).
Mo Xuanyu is homosexual.
He is a famous cultivation clan leader’s bastard, clearly out of favor with his father’s clan.
His grandfather is the Manorial lord Mo.
The Manorial lord’s legitimate wife birthed his oldest daughter. Oldest daughter’s husband was legally adopted into the Mo clan. Oldest daughter is Mo Ziyuan’s mother.
The Manorial lord’s second daughter, Mo Xuanyu’s mother, was a maid’s daughter. She was good looking, so the Manorial lord had planed on marrying her off anyway.
MXY’s mother’s pregnancy at age 16, and his entire existence was seen as a mark of shame upon the manor until the Manorial lord realized how to use this new relationship for financial and political gain, i.e. the alimony stipend from the paternal cultivation clan and the allure of cultivation to boost the manor’s standing. This lasted until Mo Xuanyu was 4 years old when his biological father ceased visitation. MXY and his mother then fell out of favor for a decade.
At age 14, MXY was taken in by his paternal cultivation clan for training. Within the Mo manor, he returns to being in favor based on an expectation of success in a skilled profession. He loses favor again when he failed to meet that expectation, and is sent home.
The legitimate Mo manorial lords and their servants are verbally and physically abusive towards him. (FW pg. 14, 26)
Mo Xuanyu committed suicide to enact vengeance against his abusers via dassha of Wei Wuxian. (FW pg. 16)
He is older than Mo Ziyuan. (There are a couple different ways to spell “cousin” itoko, and relative seniority is built into the word: 従兄 older male cousin Mo Xuanyu vs 従弟 younger male cousin Mo Ziyuan.)
Mo Ziyuan’s exact age was never confirmed. Wei Wuxian just guessed “17” and the reader has to roll with it.
bt. And to make matters worse, what on earth happened to Mo Xuanyu when he returned to Mo Manor, he had become completely funny. Although on rare occasion he returned to sanity, it was as if he may have seen something dreadful and whether his mind suffered damage–Perusing up to this point, Wei Wuxian cocked an eyebrow. Better gay than touched in the head. This is what he made out.
Note 1: おかしい okashii means “funny” in both the comical and the eccentric sense. It runs the gambit from “amusing” to “strange” to “wrong.” It gave me a slight headache trying to translate Lan Jingyi’s 「あいつは本当におかしい！」 “aitsu wa hontou ni okashii!” in Aggression part 1. I almost went with “What a weirdo!” but decided against it because I wanted the double entendre. I am being overly literal above to demonstrate ambiguity.
Note 2: The green highlight is a two part subjunctive. I am highlighting this because it’s the strongest “if” in the entire info dump. Everything up until this point is a “based on evidence, WWX concludes that” sort of subjunctive. Japanese can get pedantic with subjunctives.
Note 3: 気が触れる ki ga fureru = to go mad; to go crazy; to lose one’s mind. Also see 気が狂う ki ga kuruu (via Jisho.org)
Preliminary conclusion: Despite the commonality of polygamy at this time, there are clear political advantages that he does not have due to his lack of blood relation to either the legal or favorite wife in either the Jin or Mo clans, combined with his discontinued apprenticeship. Anything Mo Xuanyu does is going to be an uphill battle. Untreated trauma is definitely involved. Do I trust a normal teenager to tell me they’re insane? No. Would I trust a fictional one? Even less. Sanity is relative.
(I don’t think anyone in this readership cares if I spoil Trails of Cold Steel IV. There’s a boss rush segment right before the final dungeon where one of your parties is about to take on a massive beast of a thing, and one of the mages says “um how about we not? Maybe let’s go get the giant robots and circle back?” and everyone else, including one woman whose only goal left in life is to fight GOD, like any good JRPG hero, is like “nah, we can take it as is.” This lady–who can wield a Zweihänder single-handedly if she wants to–honestly could have taken down the beast by herself. She’s one of the most powerful characters in the franchise, so desperate for a challenge that her moniker includes reference to a Buddhist man-eating demon, an all-but-confirmed war criminal, and you cannot tell me she’s sane. Sane people do not nip at the ankles of a dragon with a big fucking sword and call it a mild workout.)
Now what does everyone else say about him?
I genuinely don’t know what the original text has to say. I cannot read Mandarin. Nor do I have access or the skill to listen to the Chinese audio drama. CQL is off the table as there is no accessible JP dub as far as I am aware. Between Death of the Author and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis,I’m already too many layers removed from “original intention” for it to matter. Japanese novel!Mo Xuanyu is effectively a different character from every other instance of Mo Xuanyu in every other medium and every foreign language translation.
In rewatching the first episode of the donghua, the term used appears to be 瘋子 feng1zi5. Lin Yutang’s Chinese-English dictionary of Modern Usage defines 瘋子 as madman, half-crazy person, a “nut.” This is not a Japanese word. In fact, the only word I can find that uses the same character is 瘋癲 fuuten, which can be either insanity, or a vagabond/wanderer (Jisho.org). The Green Goddess offers 1) 狂気 lunacy, mental derangement, madness, insanity 2) 家出した若者 delinquent youth, a youth vagrant.
If I shove 瘋子 into the Weblio’s Chinese-Japanese dictionary, I get the definitions 気違い kichigai = madman, enthusiastic (derogatory) and 狂人 kyoujin = crazy person,lunatic. I’m going to add this additional note from WaniKani. Image transcription in alt text.
Based on this, I can conclude that Donghua!Mo Xuanyu is mentally ill, and being described in a highly derogatory manner.
I have NOT watched the Japanese dub anime so we’re going to put that on back burner for now. I’ll probably get to it later, when I can finally get my hands on it.
The Japanese dub audio drama I only went in to double check what Mo Ziyuan and Madam Mo call Mo Xuanyu in the first 12 minutes. I did NOT bother listening to the whole episode. Transcriptions and translations below. Bold is OP’s emphasis.
Male Baku household servant A: Hurry up, let’s go, or we’ll get infected Female Baku household servant A: That bastard nutcase got out again?
Jisho.org defines いかれる ikareru as: 1) to break down, to become broken; 2) to be crazy, to be nuts; 3) to be infatuated with; 4) to be outdone by someone; to be beaten in a contest. 野郎 yarouBastard in the above instances is simply for its derogatory meaning, and has no implications of linage. So you see how I ended up with イカレ野郎 = bastard nutcase? Japanese audio drama!Baku Gen'u (=Mo Xuanyu) is also mentally ill, and it is being described in a derogatory manner.
Back to the novel! Over these past 40 pages, I’ve seen several different words come up in addition to what was written above.
痴れ者shiremono fool; dunce; idiot (via Jisho.org). This is the most common one, and what the Manorial lords and their servants all call Mo Xuanyu. Even Lan Jingyi calls him this once in frustration. I’m not going to to the full nine yards on this one. I did quite a bit in the Aggression part 2. But just for completeness’ sake, I give you a couple more.
「俺を蹴ったな！この痴れ者め、殺す気？」 (FW pg. 46) (Lan Jingyi speaking) “He kicked me! Damn idiot, you got a death wish?”
From The Digital Denjisen via Kotobank
１ 愚かな者。ばか者。A foolish person. A stupid person. ２ 手に負えない者。乱暴なもてあまし者。An incorrigible person. A violently unmanageable person. ３ その道に打ち込んでいる者。その道のしたたか者。Someone dead set in their ways. A strong-willed person. 「我がものならば着せてやりたい好みのあるにと―が随分頼まれもせぬ詮議を蔭では為べきに」〈露伴・五重塔〉 [類語]（1）愚人・愚物・痴人・愚か者・愚者／（3）マニアック・病的・クレージー・いかれる・神経質・凝り性・モノマニア・モノマニアック・偏執狂・執念深い・アブノーマル・異常・異様・狂的・ディレッタント・物好き・酔狂・好事家・虫・おたく・狂・狂い・気違い・マニア・通・こだわり・こだわる・道楽・凝り屋・執拗・しつこい・サブカルチャー
ばか者、おろか者 a stupid person, a foolish person 一つのことに心を打ちこんで夢中になっている人 a person who has devoted their heart to a singular thing and becomes obsessed.
I am genuinely unsure if there are any unspoken connotations of this word, and thus far I have not been able to dig any up. I need to watch more period J-dramas.
バカbaka idiot; moron; fool (we’ve watched enough anime. I don’t need to provide all 14 definitions listed on Jisho.org)
このバカ、こんな時まで笑うなんて！虚け者なのだから (FW pg. 44) What a moron, laughing at a time like this! Cause he’s an airhead…
虚け者utsukemonofool; blockhead; idiot; dunce (see example above). The more common spelling of this word is 空け者. I like “airhead” for this one because 虚 “void” 空 and “sky” both also mean “empty.” Let’s take a look at a couple more dictionaries.
うっかりしている人。中身のしっかりしていない人。単に「うつけ」とも言う。(Weblio) An absentminded person. Someone who does not take proper hold of their substance. Also said utsuke.
For utsuke because I didn’t get a result for utsukemono 1) 中のうつろなこと。から。からっぽ。2) 愚かなこと。ぼんやりしていること。また、そのような者。まぬけ。(Digital Denjisen) 1) To hollow out the inside of something. Empty. Vacant. 2) Foolishness. To be absentminded/careless. Or someone who is thus. Half-wit.
恥知らずhaji shirazushameless
(Madam Mo in response to Wei Wuxian’s allegation of theft against Mo Ziyuan) 「この恥知らずが、皆さんの前でなんてことを！阿淵はあなたの従弟なのに！」 (FW pg. 28) “What a thing to say in front of everyone, you shameless person! Even though A-Yuan is your cousin!”
阿保 ahofool; idiot; simpleton
(Lan Jingyi speaking) 「え？あの阿保を捜してどうするんだよ？俺に殴られるのが怖くて、どこかに逃げたんじゃないかな」 (FW pg. 52) “Eh? What’re you gonna do if you go searching for that dimwit? He probably ran off somewhere cause he was scared I was gonna punch him.”
変人 henjineccentric. Truth be told, I’m not sure why this is in my notes. Past me didn’t leave a page number.
There is a specific word for madness I was looking for, something containing this character: 狂. And there is only one instance I found where it shows up (not counting the chapter title).
With nails that multiplied in length, foam gathering at the corners of her mouth, and shrieks that were enough to uplift the ceiling, she [the animated corpse of Madam Mo] looked extremely insane. (ExR)
bt. The nails on the five fingers of her long hand extended by several times, white foam spewed from her mouth, her screeching roar had the force to blow a roof clean off, and she was already in a state of madness.
TLDR: Japanese novel!Mo Xuanyu is generally described by other people as a dunce, not necessarily a lunatic. The only “insanity” to be had is a dead person’s fighting style.
A little thought experiment I keep finding myself in, as I’m sure a lot of people do who are reading literature in a language they are learning, is “if I were to translate this into my first language, how would I say X?” I would need a word that
encompasses “stupid”;
does NOT encompass “clinically insanity”;
is derogatory;
and most importantly, destroys all credibility.
“Oh, don’t listen to him. He’s just ___.”
“Idiot” is the clear choice, as it is the most common denominator of all of the above, but I feel it’s not strong enough to devalue all of MXY’s credibility. “Simpleton”, “airhead,” “dimwit,” “halfwit,” “moron,” “blockhead” again, not mean enough. “Dunce” or “fool” might be on the right track, but they’re not really in the modern vernacular, so still not strong enough on their own without going out of my way to make the rest of the setting and everyone else’s speech patterns artificially archaic. “Maniac” doesn’t seem accurate to the characterization. “Deluded” perhaps? “Deranged” feels too close to “raving mad”. “Beyond help” or “lost cause” or “unreasonable” would work in the above instance, but not necessarily in other instances, like “He kicked me! Damn ___!”
…and this is how I found myself up the creek without a paddle, and asking whether I have to start looking at yesteryear’s terms for the disabled to find a label mean enough to destroy credibility. FOR EXAMPLE, I would not be opposed to an autistic reading of the character based on the above amalgam of terminology, but endorsing such a reading would be going into head canon territory and straying too far from the original text. I don’t know what’s going on deeper in the fandom. I see a lot of arguing I don’t want to deal with, and the less I know, the better I feel.
All I can and will say about Japanese Novel!Mo Xuanyu is that no matter how he is labeled by his relatives and household servants, the kid is caught between a rock and a hard place on multiple fronts. Being homosexual in a homophobic world isn’t helping, nor is whatever enduring trauma he experienced right before his return home from cultivation training. His anger and frustration before his untimely demise were likely justified. It is highly unfortunate he found catharsis in death, but without it, this story would have no protagonist.
Translation discourse online always leaves me a little nervous because anyone can and usually does say anything, and it’s nigh impossible to check credentials. I keep thinking back to this article from 2016.
I also did follow up with Jay Rubin sensei about the introductory quote in this article. (Rubin sensei is an American Japanologist and translator most noted for bringing the works of Haruki Murakami 村上春樹 into English. Also if you’ve never has the opportunity to try translating Murakami, let me attest that it ranked #3 on my college struggle bus after Genji monogatari and the kanbun bits of my capstone project.) The closest he was able to track down was a passage from a “Critic’s Notebook” piece he did for the magazine AMERICAN THEATRE in February 2006 (p. 36). Sensei attests the 99% figure comes from someone at the theater, not himself.
Sitting in the darkened hall and listening to the lines of Steppenwolf Theater Company’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short-story collection after the quake, I had a thrill unavailable to anyone else in the audience–even to Murakami himself, had he been there (which may never happen)–because I was the one who wrote those very lines the actors were speaking. True, Murakami was author of the original work I had translated, but those were my words. When, in the well-attended post-performance discussion, a member of the staff assured the audience of the fidelity of the adaptation by noting that “99% of the words you heard were Murakami’s,” I sat in the back of the theatre, violently shaking my head. Okay, translator’s tantrum aside, it really was a thrill to hear those familiar words being spoken by a live cast, to rediscover the dramatic force of the original, and to see the audience’s openly emotional response to one of Murakami’s most affecting works. It was a wonderful night of theater.
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