I love Vairy. He was so fun to read, I just love his character. He's definitely one of my top favorite princes. Though I will admit, there is a major Beauty and the Beast vibe from this story. Like, major. If you look at Vairy's MOON Awakening, it kind of looks like the Beast. And if you read the story…well there's a curse, and I'm sure you can guess what breaks the curse. There's even a part where they get attacked by wolves! All it's missing is a talking teapot and a French candelabra. Anyway…
Vairy was a little difficult to translate because he speaks similar to Sky. If you read my post on Sky, you'll recall that he speaks really casual and masculine. His grammatical way of speaking is very different from standard Japanese, but thankfully, my translating of Sky gave me a better idea of how to deal with Vairy, and I think I handled it well enough! Here's an example of his speech in Japanese: ヴァイリー「聞いてねぇぞ！ この国にコイツを招待したなんて」
聞いてねぇぞ is a very masculine way of speaking, as it drops the typical fully conjugated negative form of聞いて, which would be 聞いてくれなかったよ。It means the same thing ("I didn't ask you!") but is written very differently to emphasize Vairy's masculine way of speaking. He also uses コイツ when referring to the butler, which is a derogatory way of saying 'this person,' and that aspect is emphasized by it being written in katakana.
To make the story even more difficult, there's an exchange in Ch.2 where first off, a villager says this:
街の人「ヴァイリー様もスミにおけないねぇ、こんなかわいい子連れて」
· Village Man: "Lord Vairy, you're in for it now, taking a cutie like this out."
Then a little later, Vairy says this:
ヴァイリー「ったく……油売ってていいのかよ、おっちゃん」
· Vairy: "Geez…don't you have work to do old man?"
For both of these lines, I had to do some searching as they both appear to be Japanese idioms. The first one, I really couldn't figure out. It references スミ which is black ink, but I searched through idioms and proverbs and couldn't find a proper translation. So honestly, that line's translation is a guess. As for Vairy's line, he says more literally "You sure it's alright to be selling oil old man?" The phrase 'oil peddler' can also be translated as 'lazy person' so Vairy is calling the man out on shirking his duties. That one was easier to find because dictionaries will often give both meanings. If anyone has any ideas on how to properly interpret that first line, please leave me a comment about it!
The final interesting aspect of Vairy's story that I wanted to point out is this term: 獣化の呪い. Translated directly, it means 'curse of changing into a beast' but that's too long for my tastes, and let's be honest, doesn't sound nearly cool enough. It's kind of similar to lycanthropy, but lycanthropy specifically refers to the transformation into a wolf, the Greek root being lukán, meaning 'wolf'. Since this is a beast, we can't use that term. Google translate gives me 'curse of beastialization' and…beastialization isn't actually a word. The most applicable translation I could think of is 'curse of therianthropy' as therianthropy is the ability of a human to transform into any animal. The Greek root word, theríon even translates to 'wild animal' or 'beast', so it's kind of perfect. But I realized people may not know that word, and who wants to go through the trouble of looking it up when you're in the middle of Vairy's awesome story? …and to be fair, I didn't know the word until I looked it up myself. So I decided to go with the easily understood, and still appropriate, 'curse of the werebeast'.
Comments