I’m not going to review this song. We’ll just say I rather like it and leave it at that. But I do want to point out something interesting about it.
One of the central musical themes of this song is a contrast between staccato and lyrical. The part of the chorus that starts “hikasura seiya soiya” are very sharp, cut off, and aggressive, while the part that is “wow” is very lyrical. These two things contrast off of each other to make the music more effective than it might otherwise be. I think it actually represents the tension and release of the fight that is being described in the lyrics, and on the video.
But one of the things that makes this possible is the rapid fire nature of the Japanese syllabic structure itself. I saw a video where a girl tried to do an English translation, and it was lacking. Not because the words were bad, and she wasn’t even a particularly bad singer, but the rapid fire staccato didn’t translate well and she didn’t seem to understand why it was necessary to try to keep that character. So, instead, she did it lyrically, and didn’t attack it hard enough, so her voice was wavering. It didn’t work well.
When translating Japanese, things can be lost in translation, even when all the words are correct.
That’s the worst trap to fall into. Japanese are people like me, yes, but theirs is a very different culture, and a very different way of looking at the world. If one doesn’t see and accept that for what it is, one runs the very real risk of losing something important in translation.