Where Are You Honey?

Where are you Honey?

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Text, extensive translators note, and general remarks with a bit of meta under the read more

Text id:

Where have you gone

I’m looking for you in the night*

This night like every night

I want to still believe you.

Embrace you this one time**

this absolute last time.

lightning strike me***

I’ll be moving on at dawn

****

But where are you hiding,

I’m looking for you when it’s too late.+

Tonight as a last hope I want to finally catch you

to tell you what’s on my chest now++

to tell you all my mistakes now

to tell you how much I’m scared now+++

to tell you how many tears I’ve shed

I’m begging you

come back to drink them. °

Here there’s everything to see

Here it’s daytime you know

you can have more than just the night.°°

You won’t ever regret if you come back to sit here

where no one knows better than me

how to look at you°°°

Translator's notes:

*night in the og text is actually 'dark'.

** I'm deliberately mistranslating here, in french "embracer" means to embrace and to kiss, but commonly it just means to kiss

*** god this gave me a tough time. French is "promis juré craché" which basically means cross my heart and hope to die. The literal translation would be "I promise, swear, spit on it" and there is a kind of gradation to it. You can say promis or promis juré by themselves. It's also a bit childlike to say the three, which I think fits well the song, someone making a desperate, almost pathetic bid to get their lover closer to them. I didn't find a good equivalent in English, and I didn't want to use "cross my heart" bc I feel like it brings up images of boy scouts. What I used is what I found to be a rough equivalent in mandarin to the french version and then retranslated to English do with that what you will.

**** I deleted a full verse! But I actually have a translation for it :

I once again got fooled,

by your sugar-coated words

and your half backed promises

lulling me to sleep too early

I'm looking for you in the night

where the stench of all this sham

ends up on the boulevards,

in our hopes and without coats.

I didn't really see a point in including it and it was just more words to illustrate, but I did like the whole sugar-coated words (words with water in french) and the literal "bastard promises" haha. Let Lan Wangji be angry and resentful in his grief 2k21.

+ Literally, it's "I'm looking for you in the too late". It is also grammatically incorrect in french but it's even more awkward in English. Also in french it's just "I'm searching for you" but I liked the "looking" motif bc I thought it paralleled well with "seeing you"/looking at you at the end

++ In french it's "to tell you what's on my heart" which is what inspired the art for this specific illustration

+++ as someone remarked in the tags scared and scarred are very close in English, sometimes stuff just works out.

° Still not satisfied with the English for this. The singer for this song actually said he didn't want the lyrics for his song written down officially because he plays on homonyms a lot. Here the word used in french both means to recount a story and to count numerically. And 'boire' (drink) much like 'croire' (believe) is kind of an odd choice to end a singing phrase with? It's not really pretty, and it feels very raw, it really annoyed me that I don't think the rawness of it comes through at all in English.

°° also really stretching the og text here. In french it's "coup d'un soir" meaning literally "one night hit" but it means one night stand. @/pumpkinpaix and @/hunxi-guilai (who you should follow bc the work they do is extremely helpful and god I imagine so time-consuming and draining) both wrote a long post about the translation of 知己 zhiji in English, which you should read but I think the main idea was "the one who understands me" would be an accurate enough translation. I was actually working on this before I found those posts but I like how "looking"/"seeing" someone in English can be used to convey understanding the person (you see me for who I really am, etc). Idk I'm just fond of how "to look at you" means both in the physical sense "I want to see you" and also, no one else will know you as I do.

°°° last TN but I missed "au grand jamais" from the original text. It's just a superlative, it kind means, like never ever in any time or world or something in that spirit. But I really like that the song ends by looking.

In the spirit of things I really wanted to say a few words about the translation ha. I think maybe the first thing that I kinda miss from the french is that eddy de pretto (the singer) has a very uh, crude? way to sing. He is known for being both from a lower-class background (in french I would say from the "cité" which wordreference translates to ghetto) and homosexual. A lot of it is french "argot", which basically means french slang, but it's very difficult to translate because my knowledge of english doesn't necessarily include that much slang, and also it just doesn't hit the same haha. A lot of words are contracted, "r'viens" "j'te cherche" etc, which carry a sense of urgency.

This is maybe turning into a Lan Wangji meta post but I think a lot (or used to) about how he had to have his character growth mostly of-screen, in the years where he had to reconcile being alive and raising a son. One of my interpretations is that Lan Wangji was probably more aware of his feelings in the first place, but when we meet him (post 13 or 16 years whatever), we meet someone who has come to terms completely about who he is as a person, what he feels etc. Like this is a man who probably has lived through some of his worst-case scenarios (his home got destroyed, the person he loved died in front of him). And I'm always thinking of what it is to try to grow and reconcile your teachings while raising a kid and mourning you know? I think that's why Honey (the song) resonated with me in that light when I listened to it, just like. God man's had a rough life.

Also, I wanted to say I'm misinterpreting the point of the song, in context Honey is. Kinda complex (there's nuance), but basically the singer is talking about his partner, who's at the time of the song sleeping with someone else. Personally, I think it's unclear if the person the singer is talking about is cheating on him or if they are just in an open relationship, but the singer overtly yearns for a deeper connection for that person.

Omg not me editing a post that's already too long for people to engage with but I forgot! what the whole point of doing a TN was! It's to show ppl how much gets lost or missed on purpose between two languages that are super close. And it's like, maybe 10 sentences! And yet I some stuff I genuinely could not translate correctly. And not only I am a native french speaker living in an English-speaking country but I've done like, actual translation before. It terrifies me sometimes to think how much is lost, and how much is added, in the translation process, which is rarely examined as even being relevant. (edit edit: it was pointed out to me that it is a very active field of research haha, I meant specifically in fandom spaces it's deffo being examined in academia)