Introduction                            [中文版: /]

Mission Statement
Who is Mayday?
Philosophy of Translation/Resources
Plans for the Site
My Life as a Mayday Fan
About Me

 



Mission Statement

The goal of this website is to make my favorite Taiwanese band’s music accessible to the general, non-Chinese-speaking public.  Well, that, and everybody should have a hobby; you’ve stumbled upon mine.

 

Who is Mayday?

Mayday (五 月天), is a rock/pop band from Taiwan that dreams of being the “Beatles for Chinese People” (華人的披頭四).  I’ve often wondered why they’d limit themselves to just the Chinese.  The band has five members:  Lead singer Ashin  阿信, Guitarist/Band Leader Monster 怪獸, Guitarist Stone 石頭, Bass Player (+random other instruments) Masa 瑪沙, and Drummer Guanyou 冠佑 (formerly known as Yanming 諺明, or just Ming.  He went through a phase in 2007 in which he tried to get reporters from English-language newspapers to call him "Ryan," but I'm ignoring that). 

For English-language information on Mayday, including album reviews and news, there is no better place than Mayday Blue.

The basics (information about band members, band history, and discography) can be found on Wikipedia.

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Philosophy of Translation

Translating song lyrics can be like translating poetry – there’s a certain rhythm and beauty to the flow of the words that you want, if at all possible, to preserve.  I rarely achieve this (the closest I've come, in my opinion, is with With Love to the End 反而) , but I think it’s important to try.  Other “rules” I try my best to follow:

I have a few key resources that have made my translations possible.  In both my academic life and my fangirl life, I live on 中文.com.  Best online Chinese-English dictionary, full stop.  Because I don’t speak Taiwanese, nor have I ever studied the language, I once relied heavily on Daiwanway’s online Taiwanese-Mandarin-English dictionary, though that link no longer seems to work.  Luckliy, these days I work with other fans in Taiwan, especially one fantastic co-translator named C.C.  Then, of course, I also make great use of the translator’s best friend, which has helped me with the wide variety of proper nouns found in Mayday songs, everything from Descartes to Half Life.  I am in love with my electronic Chinese-English dictionary, a BESTA 無敵CD-95 that I picked up in Taipei a few years ago.  I’ve carted it all over China, dropped it on hard surfaces from great heights, spilled a wide variety of beverages on it, and it’s never given me a moment’s trouble.  I charge it roughly three times a year, and it’s on most of the time.  My most-used Chinese dictionaries are 東方國語辭典 and 新 华成语词典.

Many of the translations for All God’s Children Can Dance 神的孩子都在跳舞 have been checked over by Chinese or Taiwanese friends, and some of the others have as well – but there are still lots of mistakes, big and little, sprinkled throughout the site.  Needless to say, mistakes of any kind are mine and mine alone.  But when you find them, please let me know.

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Plans for the Site

As of summer 2008: I'm working on an overhaul, adding the Chinese lyrics to the pages that only have English, increasing the function of the site as a discography and not just source of translations. Pages that are "done" for now have a blue background with album cover images on top; anything else is in the queue for revision.  I'm also slowly (very slowly) working my way through sodagreen's song catalog, and then I'd like to do translations for artists I love, like Fusion Band, Peng Tan, more from A-yue, and so forth.  I also maintain a blog of Mayday and Mandopop news translations - with commentary that is often snarkier than I really intend it to be - which is here.

In terms of Mayday translations, I have a few old Ashin-penned song and concert covers left to finish, and I conquer those as the spirit moves me.  It will all be done eventually. Whenever Mayday puts out a new album, that becomes the instant priority.  


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My Life as a Mayday Fan

When I started studying Mandarin full time in 2002, my philosophy was simple: total immersion.  For 15 months, I gave up everything in my life that wasn’t about Chinese, moved to Taiwan, and dove in.  I went to class 15-20 hours a week, practiced writing characters on a dry-erase board for a few hours every afternoon, moved in with a non-English speaking woman, watched lots of television soap operas and dubbed Hong Kong movies, read cheesy paperback Chinese romance novels (okay, I still sometimes read these), and started listening to Mandopop. 

My first impression of the world of Mandopop was not pleasant.  I thought it was all too saccharine, too mass-produced, too much about performance rather than actual musical talent.  I found a few things I could handle – a few songs off of David Tao (陶喆)’s Black Tangerine黒色柳丁, two albums by Chen Qi-zhen (陳 綺貞), started collecting Jay's (周杰倫) first few albums – and then wrote off the rest.  I left Taiwan in August of 2003, the week of Mayday’s reunion concert, completely ignorant of the fact that there was actually a proper band on the Taipei popular music scene. 

Just before I left, a friend had me listen to a song he liked, called Tenderness (溫 柔).  He had purchased the album because he found the name of the band, Mayday, and its perfect Chinese translation, 五月天, hilarious (it really is funny, though I can’t explain why).  I liked what I heard, and so just before I left town, I picked up the first album by Mayday that I could find: We are Mayday 我們是 : )五月天.  I liked it enough to buy their next album, Time Machine 時光機.

It wasn’t until I got back to Taiwan the following summer that I made an exciting discovery: Mayday also sings in Hokkien/Taiwanese (閩南話/台語).  What’s more, there were three earlier albums out there for me explore.  I quickly became addicted.

In spite of the fact that I claimed I was listening to Mandopop to help my Chinese, when I first got into Mayday, I didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics.  I grew up a huge fan of the Beatles, ABBA, 80’s power ballads, and (later) grunge.  My first live concert was Poison and Warrant at the Target Center in Minneapolis (Bret Michaels was disappointingly drunk and off-key; Jani Lane mooned us... but my contemporaries were going to see New Kids on the Block perform, so I was at least exhibiting slightly better taste).  I went to see Bon Jovi, and knew every lyric by heart, but then I also saw “1964” (a Beatles tribute band), and twisted and shouted alongside an audience mostly twice my age.  I’m no expert on music (and though I spent many, many years in band, orchestra, and drumline, my status as a percussionist didn’t lead to any profound understanding), but I know what I like.  Mayday fits easily and painlessly into my musical preferences.  Some of their songs are very, very Beatles (I can’t hear Bullshit 黑白講 without picturing Ringo dancing in the Hard Day’s Night movie).  More recently, Clenched Teeth牙關 is a classic power ballad, and fits nicely on my iPod in between Damn Yankees’ “High Enough” and Tesla’s “Love Song.”

If anything, translating Mayday's lyrics has made me love their music even more. Though I generally understand what I hear in Mandarin (or I think I understand...), I’ve discovered all sorts of little nuances through translating.  And, of course, all kinds of new vocabulary.

For years, it was a sad fact of my life that although I had lived in both Taiwan and China, and visited Hong Kong and Singapore twice each, I’d never been to a Mayday concert.  When I was first in Taiwan, Masa was in the army.  When I returned to Taipei, they were in China.  When I went to China, they played in the U.S.  When I came back to the US, they were in Taiwan.  They visited Nanjing while I lived there… but I was in Hong Kong for a conference.  When I got back to Nanjing, they’d left for Hong Kong.  I was in Singapore, they were in Taipei.  I returned to Taipei, and they were in Singapore.  There’s a marvelous way to describe this in Chinese: 我們沒有緣份.  We were not fated to be.   All that changed in 2007.  My travels have left me with copious supplies of frequent flier miles, so when Mayday appeared in Las Vegas for a Chinese New Year show that year, I  made  a quick trip down with some friends to hear them play.  It was, as I have noted elsewhere, not quite the greatest concert event of my life, but that was for reasons that had nothing to do with Mayday.  That little taste of a live show made me all the more determined.  Luckily for me, they included North America on their 2007 Jump! The World Tour, and I flew up to Toronto for my first Mayday concert.  It will not be my last...

Since I started this site back in the spring of 2006, I've gotten to know a lot of new music (not to mention a lot of interesting people from all over the world).  These days, I'm listening to Mayday (obviously), but also sodagreen, Leehom Wang, Cheer Chen, Chang Chen-yue, Peng Tan (and his former band, The Dada), Fusion Band, Tizzy Bac, Totem Band, Echo Band, P.K.14, Secondhand Rose, Deserts Chang, Mrs. This, Won Fu, Khalil Fong... and dozens more.  I still listen to my handful to David Tao albums every now and again, and although I've gone off Jay Chou for the time being, one fantastic album from him would be enough to draw me back into the fold.  In the end, there really is a lot of good stuff out there in the Mandopop industry, and that has been true for a long time.

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About Me

Do I just have way too much time on my hands?  I wish.  The translations here are the product of several years of slow work – I’ve done a lot of traveling for school or work in the last six years,  so whenever I’ve been on a plane or train, or in an airport or a bus station, or a hotel in a strange city, I’d pick out a song and try to work out the English. 

I have a Ph.D. in history, specializing in U.S.-Chinese relations.  Writing my dissertation required a great deal of Chinese language source material, and it brought me to archives in Taipei, Nanjing, Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, London, New York, and Washington.  The fact that I have this website is probably a testament to the sort of lengths to which grad students will go when they want to avoid their research for a little while.... I admit, now that I have a job I'm somewhat slower with updates.  

I'm from Minnesota (USA) originally, and I try to get back every year for the State Fair and family holidays.  As of September 2008, I'll be based in China for a few years.  I can't wait to discover new music there.  

If you want to contact me, email me at: merry@onedayinmay.net

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