The third translation is for the TENG Ensemble’s arrangement of “Upwards to the Moon” (左手指月), featuring Singaporean singer Moira Loh. This is the ending theme song of a popular Chinese fantasy love series “Ashes of Love” (香蜜沈沈燼如霜), which was composed and originally sang by SA Dingding (薩頂頂), with lyrics written by YU Jiang (喻江).
Including a screenshot of the lyrics below. Rights to this translation belongs to TENG and myself.
(finally got my screenshots aligned at the three round…)
Jotting down a few notes for the translation:
Structure: Initially I thought of introducing a meaning-based only translation by removing the left hand-right hand (左手…. 右手) parallelism (don’t think it consitutes an antithesis though?) completely. After translating halfway I realized that this deliberate avoidance is uncessary because its structure is one of the key unique parts of the lyrics. So the left-right parallelism was maintained all the way until the last stanza (我左手拿起你，右手放下你), whereby it was swapped with “I hold… I let (go)…”
Buddhist motifs and symbolisms: Quite a few imageries, including “picking up a flower” (拈花), “flicking of finger” (一弹指), “River of Oblivion” (忘川河), and “red lotus” (紅蓮), have Buddhist symbolism and meaning behind them. However, looking at the motifs in context of the entire lyrics, the plot, and specific scenes, I realised that the motifs could also be a rather literal representation instead (but of course not denying the implied connotations embedded in the plot itself). So I opted for a close text translation rather than a deeper, meaning based one.
Title: Keeping in mind the structure, “左手指月” was translated as “left hand to the moon” in the lyrics but I did have qualms about it because it sounded very much like “bitcoin to the moon” (which isn’t too far from reality now anyway lol). TENG’s production team however gave the splendid suggestion to keep the lyrics as it is but the changing title as “Upward to the Moon”, which feels way more concrete and 3-dimensional.
Diction: Re-looking at the translation now perhaps I would have revised some word choices, including “changing” (兌換 – not sure to what though, changing is simple and clear but hmmm idk), “strums a chord” (彈著弦) (it sounds nice with a little deftness of action, but it also sounded a bit like guitar, maybe “plucks a string” with be closer to the actions on a qin), and “right hand roams as scales” (右手成鱗片) – in the previous draft i used “glide” but either version has too much sibilance… sounds like the saliva piling up in your mouth eww…
啊啊啊: I spent a lot of time pondering over how to translate the 啊啊啊 lol. Pondered between “ahhhh” and “ah ah ah”, and even came up with an alternative translation of the chorus just to fit the syllables, but it doesn’t feel right. Then Dr Wong suggested “ah~” and looking at the entire MV i think worked just fine 🙂
afloatingeyot 