[subbed] Dir en grey - Behind a vacant image

At last here's the live sub version of "Behind a vacant image"!

Notes:
This song gave me a lot of trouble back then and it really took me a long time to finish it. Sometimes I had no idea whether some lines were supposed to be one sentence or if they stood on their own or if they were all connected to each other somehow. I almost didn't want to finish this. I tried, I really did. And hopefully I could do the original justice.

1) 0:53 - "I listen and chase after a song without substance."
Kyo actually creates a very interesting image here by using the kanji "唄" for "uta - song", which is made up of a mouth and a shell, and then uses "漁り - asari" which means "searching/rummaging" but is also an Archaism for "fishing" or "collecting shells" in his sentence.
He describes an empty song that he listens to and rummages for. But just like when you're fishing for shells, they're sometimes empty when you open them. Though in this case, he seems to be aware that he is only fishing for empty shells.

2) 1:57 - "空像に口無し。Kuu-zō ni kuchi-nashi." reminded me of "死人に口無し。- Shinin ni kuchi nashi." which is a Japanese proverb that means "Dead people can’t talk." or more literally "Dead people have no mouth." However, in Kyo’s sentence he talks about emptiness or vacantness (as the song’s title suggests) of a certain image, though "像 - zō" is more like the figure/picture/portrait kind of image. Which leads me to the final roundup: "A vacant image (of a person) can not talk."

3) 2:08 - Because Kyo didn’t use any specific kanji for “kaketa” it could pretty much stand for anything. I picked “to hold” for this translation, because it seemed like the most logical, but I have no clue which word he was actually going for.

4) 3:50 - "刻" has a double meaning. Kyo sings it as "toki" which gives it the meaning of "time". The kanji itself can also describe a "wound" or a "scratch". Which would imply a "The washed away wounds question equality" sense.

5) 3:58 - "Wishes that come falling down and pile up." Think of snow falling down here.

~This is my translation.

Thank you, show-me-your-lewd-self@tumblr, for helping me out with the video file! ♡


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