Introduction
[中文版: 繁
/简]
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:
- if
there is a word repeated in a song, I repeat it in the translation
- if
two different words with the same meaning are used in Chinese, I find
synonyms in English if at all possible
- if
there’s an idiom, I usually put the meaning in the
translation, as I did with all the chicken
idioms
in Mayday’s First
Album 第一張轉輯, unless
the meaning is perfectly clear from a literal translation, as in Viva
Love 愛情萬歲
- Chinese
is much more economical than English, so I often have to add words and
change syntax to make things make sense
- I
translate for meaning; none of these songs are translated in such a way
as to allow them to be sung; that will have to be a project for another
day
- Wherever
possible, I provide the background information/cultural knowledge that
would make the ideas in the song make more sense to a Western audience. I can only do this,
however, on those songs where I actually have that knowledge myself
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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