"The frost performs its secret ministry / Unhelped by any wind"

Our local arthouse theater is doing another Studio Ghibli festival -- this time focusing the non-Miyazaki movies. Last night, we saw Whisper of the Heart, my favorite Ghibli movie not directed by a Miyazaki (tho' Hayao wrote, storyboarded, and produced it). It has a lot of good things to tell young creative artists, especially writers. I love love love that the novel Shizuku writes is, based on the snippets we see, a hot mess. One that, now that she's finished it and so knows she can finish a novel, she can sit back and revise. And, yanno, go back to studying for exams. Also, somehow being a stalker with a library card manages to be more charming than ye typical teenage stalker with a crush.

What particularly struck me this time through was the translation of "Country Roads" that Shizuku does for her friend in the school choir. Her first version is more-or-less literal (to order of a few miscontruals), and also stilted and even more trite than the original, as she herself recognizes. For her revision, she aims for lyrics that match the spirit and the general situation of the original, and gets something that's much better. (This is even obvious in subtitles.)

No lessons for older creative artists to learn here, nope ...

(Eventually, I'll have something more coherent to say about Only Yesterday, which I finally saw, beyond "ohmygawdsthesceneryporn." But not quite yet.)

---L.