Spice and Wolf Light Novel Discussion

[Vexx]

If you've noticed... the light novel adventures are somewhat episodic - though each leaves the relationship between Lawrence & Horo changed. The end of the series anime adaptation could easily have them just riding off to the next town after the second adventure. And the OVA could be just a fun omake "on the road" moment (no onsen, but Europe does have its share of hotsprings).

I'm not quite getting the marks you describe but they're probably block parentheses Japan-style　「」　which can get used for quotes. Someone hit me if I'm wrong.

[seaghyn16]

So they don't have to finish the series....but that's alot of ideas for AMV's that could be put out if they continued it...But I look forward to each episode as well. As for the block parenthesis Japanese-style, that's exactly how they look, so I guess that's right. I've never had trouble reading something as far as I can remember, so the fact that I'm struggling to figure out a sentence is a new feeling for me. How did I ever graduate from kindergarden ^_^

[Westlo]

Originally Posted by Vexx

And the OVA could be just a fun omake "on the road" moment (no onsen, but Europe does have its share of hotsprings).

I'm thinking that the OVA will be one of the stories from Volume 7: Side Colors.

[Ryunatta]

No offence right but this is the LIGHT NOVEL discussion not the episodes...

[Matt122005]

I read the Prologue and Ch. 1 translation and I......AM HOOKED!

I must read more, I must read more. lol

Keep up the translation!

-Matt

[AlephNull]

Hey, nice to know that there's a comrade in arms Yeah, I'm trudging through the text sentence by sentence in places, it feels so... alien at times, compared to normal reading.

Personally, I'm using JWPce, which has an inbuilt Japanese-English dictionary, to transcribe the text and do preliminary look-ups for the meanings of kanji compounds and connectives. For things I'm not sure about, e.g. the definitions in JWPce are vague, or they seem to run counter to what I've picked up from watching anime, I go to WWWJDIC and Yahoo!辞書 to look them up furthur and see usage examples. For grammar, I mainly learned it through Tae Kim's guide. It's also very handy as a reference, since the table of contents lists the hiragana suffixes of many of the grammars covered.

I wouldn't recommend using machine translation as a base, since it can influence your parsing of a sentence (and often in the wrong way). I'd say try to do what you can from scratch, and maybe use Babylon as a fallback. As for using my translation as a check, apply large and many grains of salt. Even after review, there may still be errors floating around. I've tried to keep the translation literal, but there are parts which I've had to restructure and change the interpretation to keep the English smooth. Feel free to ask anything in the Discussion Page itself, in fact I was hoping to run the whole thing like a discussion.

[AlephNull]

Some things regarding the prologue:

Horo seems to be speaking in 3rd-person. There's only one use of 自分, and none of 私 or any other pronoun.

I don't quite know how to phrase this next thing. There's this sense of sadness throughout, not an open sadness, but something quieter. There's also this sense of large time and space. Things like 来る年も来る年も, not merely 年がら年中 or 連年. Things like その雲の流れる先、北の故郷のことを思い出してため息をつく. Is this 物の哀れ?

The last three lines seem verse like.


Anyone else gets these impressions, or is it just me?

[Vexx]

It is pretty standard Japanese to speak of oneself in the third person or just leave the noun out completely because the subject of the sentence is understood from context.

And with Horo being a goddess, I'd expect her to speak of herself in the third person. There's also the aspect that she's using a speech style common to Edo period courtesans. It is considered vaguely erotic just to read or listen to her (sophisticated flirting style).

The author has managed to combine that flirtiness with a sense of vast time (hundreds of years) and the sadness of watching all the humans you know age and die while you remain.

I'm crunching through my own translation and then comparing it with the project translation (so far I don't have much to say outside of style suggestions for each character).

[Matt122005]

Just so you know Alpha null, the first ever Spice and Wolf forums have been created and we have a topic in the novel section about your translation. We also ofcourse have the discussions for the japanese novels themesleves too.

http://s15.invisionfree.com/Wolf_and_Spice/

Just thought you'd want to know.

-Matt

[AlephNull]

Thanks Matt

I know that the 私 is often implicit, but is Horo's voice in the prologue here unusually detached, compared to other such 'narrative thoughts' elsewhere? I haven't read enough of Japanese books in general to be able to judge. The reason why I'm asking this is because I don't know whether I should introduce 'I's in the translation. E.g. 'I think', 'I feel' etc for と思った. I'm also finding the line その雲の流れる先、北の故郷のことを思い出してため息をつく difficult to translate without introducing an 'I' or 'my'. If Horo's voice is indeed detached here, I'd like to keep it that way in the translation, just have her describe things but not draw the reader's attention to herself. This is the approach I'm currently going with, except for the last two lines of the first page, where she seems to 'come back down to earth', literally and figuratively. And yeah, her being a goddess lends more weight to this.

Is that flirtiness present in the prologue? I know it's present later on in her dialogues, but here her manner of speech (thought) seems pretty normal.

[Vexx]

Third person passive? hmmm, there's no real right answer here. You're going to have to develop a style for Horo when she's in those "storytelling" moods like that.

The flirtiness vanishes when her melancholy seeps out.

EDIT: the remainder and continuation of the translation discussion was separated into its own thread by Skyfall (thanks!). Further translation hair-pulling should occur there whilst this thread returns to story content chatting.

Thanks for the thread sorting, Skyfall. Yeah, we're talking about the light novels story but with all the varying skills in reading Japanese, the plotline discussion quickly diverged into "what did that sentence mean?"

[AlephNull]

The melancholy aside, which parts in the prologue are flirty? Is it pin-pointable, e.g. specific grammar she uses in certain lines, or the meaning of the lines? Or is it just a general sense you get?

I'm now going through the fist few pages and trying to pick up nuances. Posting these questions here since they're a continuation of my earlier ones, should I move them over to the translation thread in future?

[Vexx]

This thread should probably stick to story content. The kinds of questions being asked... seem more translation-oriented to me. My recommendation is that they go in the new thread, but the speaking-styles of the characters fit equally well here (in my opinion ).

I'm still trying to decide what sort of english-style would work well to convey a sense of Edo-period courtesan speech. It would probably require adding words not literally present in a raw basic translation.

[seaghyn16]

Wow, as soon as the new thread started up, this lost action real quick. Last post was 12 days ago....HAHAHA.

Anyway, as far as the novels go, theres just one thing I'd like to know. By novel 7, how close are Lawrence and Horo to the north, and is their relationship still not fully known by either of the characters, but has progressed "subconciously?"

I wonder if this should be put in a spoiler quote....

[Masanori Ota]

I just got volumes 1 through 6 in the mail. Interesting ads in them for the DS game, and damn are they small books. I was expecting something larger, lol.

Horo and Lawrence are getting closer together, yes, and acknowledge it. As for what direction they're headed, I'm not sure. By the clothes they're wearing I infer that either winter snuck up on them (wheat harvest time was recent, wasn't it?) or they're going further north.

[seaghyn16]

@Masanori Thanks!

PS: to me, because it takes a day or two to go through an entire page, these are LOOONG books. =) but light novels are supposed to be alot quicker to read than normal books, but take much longer than manga.

[Matt122005]

Can't wait to read them. I'm trying to learn japanese as fast as I can, I want to read light novels. They are so good. Wonder when book 8 comes out.

-Matt

[Vexx]

yeah, I kind of expected them to be small... my SHnY volumes are like postcards. I'm hoping to stop by Kinokuniya and see if they're in stock before I go and have them shipped half way across the world.

[Tri-ring]

Originally Posted by AlephNull

Some things regarding the prologue:

Horo seems to be speaking in 3rd-person. There's only one use of 自分, and none of 私 or any other pronoun.

I don't quite know how to phrase this next thing. There's this sense of sadness throughout, not an open sadness, but something quieter. There's also this sense of large time and space. Things like 来る年も来る年も, not merely 年がら年中 or 連年. Things like その雲の流れる先、北の故郷のことを思い出してため息をつく. Is this 物の哀れ?

The last three lines seem verse like.


Anyone else gets these impressions, or is it just me?

Although I haven't read the novel so I can't be sure but if the anime uses the transcripts she will be calling herself "わっち(Wacchi)" which is a derivative of "私(watashi)" in Oiran kotoba.

Like for example, わっちの名前を言うてみろ、わっちは賢狼ホロじゃ
Say my name, I am the wise wolf Horo.

[Vexx]

Hmmm, looks like I'm going to have them shipped half way cross the world.

We'll give yesasia.com One More Shot since they're offering free shipping. They've been on my no-go list because they so often claimed to have product they actually did not (and then I missed my chance to get it from other sources while waiting).

This seems safe enough (and if I trip across copies elsewhere, meh, I can always ebay them or sell them to someone here).