[hanabiwings]

Ah, thanks. As I said, it was just a translation I did while listening to the lyrics. There are some parts I don't think I could express well in English, especially in the first stanza. Because she uses a lot of relative clauses, some of which English will not accept (it's a syntax problem). I was thinking of ways to split them up into different phrases. We'll see how Masa interprets them.

A more literal translation of the first stanza looks like this:

無邪気に笑う僕の大好きなその笑顔についさっきまで　涙が君の頬で光っていた事を知っているよ
ありのままを見せてとかなんて簡単に言わないけど　こんな君を見ちゃっても受け止めて行ける自 信があるし

Smiles innocently, That smile I love, until a just a moment ago, Tears glistened on your cheeks, I know
Show your real self, such things, I won't easily say it but, Even seeing this side of you, I am confident I can accept it

As you can see, she has described the person's smile using several relative clauses and a complementizer clause. So I tried to present it more naturally in English. English will not easily allow several relative clauses on the same noun as Japanese does. But I will redo this translation and post a better one later on.

Also, I took quite a liberty during some of it, especially when I wrote "my dear" on one of the lines. She says in Japanese, "なんだもん", which doesn't translate as anything particularly. It is an ending for emphasis, kind of giving her view of the reason for why "we aren't perfect." It sounds really cute and like she's speaking to someone directly. Like "Hey--you know we're not perfect. It's that we're human, you know?!" So I put "my dear" to convey that kind of 'cute' stance she has there. But I may change it if I redo this translation. It's a delicate balance between making it natural and trying to keep the original nuances.

When I was studying translation more, I always said that we should translate as directly as possible, but I don't know if I believe that any longer. It's better to try to capture the feeling of the original but kind of 'import' it into the target language. In this case, English. That's my feeling now. Anyway, thank you for looking at my poor translation. ^^*

I hope that people who didn't know how they felt about this song at the beginning will take another listen and glance over this interpretation to see what kinds of things Ayu is singing. I think it's a very hopeful song. It's the kind of song that she sings that gives me 'genki' to keep going and believing in love and humanity. Because we're not perfect and we can't be natural all the time. But we just keep going because that's what makes us lovable. I really think so. I think she communicates it very well!