* The official English title of this album is "Falling Angels
with a Flying Soul." I have absolutely no idea what that means,
or why they would choose to give this album such a random title when
there is a perfectly understandable, not to mention lovely sounding,
direct translation of the Chinese title. On that translation: by
all rights, with the character "在" the phrase should be in the English
present progressive tense: "All God's Children Are Dancing."
So why do I use "can"? (In Chinese, it would have to be:
"神的孩子都會跳舞" for that to be the right translation.) Well, the
Album's Chinese
title, 神的孩子都在跳舞 comes from a short
story by Haruki Murakami, published in his book After the Quake.
In my copy of the book, the English translation from the Japanese (by
Jay Rubin of Harvard University) for the story title is "All God's
Children Can Dance," instead of "Are Dancing." I suspect
that it is because of a passage at the end of the story that
reads, "A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form.
But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form,
and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one one
another. All God's children can dance" (p. 60,
Vintage 2003 edition). So, it makes sense to me to follow
suit and name the (unofficial) English title of the album from the same
source as the Chinese title.
