Moving right along... (1.1.2.3-4)

Here is a recap of 1.2.1-2 of Book 1:

だが騎士の胸当には、主の受難の尊い形見の
血の十字架がつけてあり、この主のために

But as for on the breastplate of the knight, a crucifix of blood of a holy reminder of the suffering of the Lord has been affixed, for this Lord...

And here are lines 3-4:

この輝く記章を身につけ、亡くなられた主を
生きておられるものとして崇めていた。

I like the Japanese period: 。It's called a "maru" which means "circle" as does 円 which also means "yen" which the Japanese pronounce "en" (they certainly can't say "ye" as my unflagging but ultimately fruitless efforts to get even one of my students to pronounce "year" correctly attest). The yen is, obviously, the Japanese currency (currently at 90-92 to the dollar, whereas it was on average 119 when I lived there, and I am annoyed about this). This non-sequitur is going somewhere now.

The word "yen" is clearly (I think?) derived from the Chinese pronunciation of this character, which is "yuan" (the Koreans call it "won"). Money was historically circular, so... QED. Today, the Chinese use 元 when listing their outrageously elevated prices. I don't know why. This character is pronounced "gen" in Japanese and also "yuan" in Chinese and means "origin, source, base, foundation" (when pronounced "moto") or "Chinese money" ("gen") in Japanese.

I don't think, for my non-specialist readers, I ever bothered discussing how to read Japanese kanji. Briefly, there are two types of reading: om-yomi and kun-yomi ("yomi" means "reading"). The om-yomi is the so-called Chinese reading of the character. As in Chinese itself, there is usually only one of these, though there are often multiple, related variants, sometimes for the sake of euphony (i.e., a character might be pronounced with an initial velar, fricative, or sibilant that is voiced when in the middle of a word, such as 山 "san" "mountain" which is occasionally pronounced "zan" as in English "civilization," the 'z' actually an Americanization of the 's' in British "civilisation," since the rules of linguistics demand that sibilant fricatives be voiced when not in initial position, or something like that). That's not complicated.

The kun-yomi is the Japanese reading, of which there may be many, since Chinese characters were only ever awkwardly adapted to the very different and unrelated Japanese language. The Koreans had the same problem and ditched "hanja" long ago in favor of the elegant Hangul syllabary. The Japanese have their own native scripts, hiragana and katakana, both adapted from kanji, but they are cumbersome to read in long chunks and, without the kanji to clarify meaning, ambiguous (though the Tale of Genji was originally written entirely in hiragana). I, for one, hate reading the katakana menus that proliferate in Japan today. Katakana syllables are blocky and all look the same: アイウエオカキクケコナニヌネノ... Kanji, by contrast, are easy to read (if you know them--which is why this may seem counter-intuitive), because you can just look at them and "grab" the meaning (this is the exact word many of my Japanese acquaintances used to describe the idea). I think this is applicable to all languages to some extent, but there is no arguing that you either know what 薔薇 means, whether or not you can "read" it, or you don't. Being able to read the word "rose" doesn't mean you understand that by any other name it would smell as sweet. Likewise, you may hear the word "hana" spoken in Japanese, but without knowing which "hana" is being referred to, 鼻 or 華, you can't know for sure, without context clues, whether the intended meaning is "nose" or "flower." This is why many Japanese TV shows and movies are subtitled... in Japanese! I may not be able to read 狂犬病, but the meaning of the kanji are "crazy-dog-disease" which I might construe as "rabies" (I learned this when I had to get the vaccine in Japan and found the literal meaning--probably a Chinese scientific construction along the lines of similar Greek and Latin learned terms in English--very funny). This sort of thing was often helpful when I was traveling in China. I couldn't read anything, but I could often figure out meanings.

Anyway...

When defining a kanji, the om-yomi is given in katakata, typically used for foreign words (though the om-yomi are not identical to real Chinese pronunciation, since Japanese is not a tonal language), and the kun-yomi are given in hiragana. For the most part, the om-yomi is used in compound words made up of multiple kanji, while the kun-yomi is used when the kanji is stand-alone or used as a verb. Example:

火山 is pronounced "kazan" and means "volcano"
火 on its own has either the "ka" om-yomi or "hi" kun-yomi and means "fire"
山 is "san/zan" (om-yomi) or "yama" (kun-yomi) and means "mountain"

Mt. Fuji is a "kazan" and is called "Fuji-san" by the Japanese.

Here is a sample definition (the real one has more readings) for yen:

円 -- エン, まる (en, maru): money, circle, round

In addition to all these readings, when the kanji are used in names, they often have altogether different pronunciations: tsubura, nobu, madoka, and mitsu in the case of 円. You can bet the Japanese like to make things difficult!

Note: thank God for Unicode.

That was a longer digression than I intended. Let's try this post again:

Here is a recap of 1.2.1-2 of Book 1:

だが騎士の胸当には、主の受難の尊い形見の
血の十字架がつけてあり、この主のために

But as for on the breastplate of the knight, a crucifix of blood of a holy reminder of the suffering of the Lord has been affixed, for this Lord...

And here are lines 3-4:

この輝く記章を身につけ、亡くなられた主を
生きておられるものとして崇めていた。

kono kagayaku kishou o mi ni tsuke, nakunarareta shu o
ikiteorareru mono toshite agameteita.

For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead as liuing euer him ador'd:

There's the original, of course, at the end there. I have to get ready for a one week trip to Belize, so I don't feel like doing tons of guesswork today. But I will still parse a bit:

この - this
輝く - to shine, glitter, sparkle
記章 - medal, badge, insignia
を - direct object particle
身 - body, oneself
に - indirect object particle
つけ、- hmm.. not sure... maybe "fixed" or from 着ける "to wear" (among other meanings)
亡くなられた - some sort of passive or potential past tense conjugation of "to die"
主 - Jesus!
を
生きておられる - some sort of honorific passive or potential progressive conjugation of "to live"
もの - thing? or a postpositional "thingy" that creates the sense "by reason of"
として - could be a postpositional "as"
崇めていた。- "was being revered"

There is an interesting-looking note after 亡くなられた主を生きておられるものとして:

「黙示録」一‧一ハ「...一度は死んだが、見よ、世々限りなく生きて...」への言及。

Those 「」 symbols are Japanese quotation marks. I like them. The raised dot (‧) between the numbers is like a colon or semicolon. Without bothering to transliterate, this seems to say "Revelations 1:18 '...once he who died -- look! -- is forever and ever living...' to which this is an allusion." The usage of "e no" at the end of this apparently unpredicated phrase has me baffled. Literally, it might mean "allusion of toward Revelations 1:18." Well, it's all clear enough.

By way of comparison, here is the King James Version:

I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen

And just for fun, here is the original Greek:

καὶ ὁ ζῶν, καὶ ἐγενόμην νεκρὸς, καὶ ἰδοὺ ζῶν εἰμι εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων

Guess what? I can read Greek, too. Sort of. This says "and [I am] the living, and I was dead, but look I am living for eternities of eternities." No Amen that I can see.

What the hell. Here's the Latin Vulgate:

et vivus et fui mortuus et ecce sum vivens in saecula saeculorum

And I am living but I was dead and behold I am living into generations of generations.

Oddly, I found a Hebrew version, too:

ואהי מת והנני חי לעולמי עולמים אמן ובידי
מפתחות שאול ומות׃

When was this written in Hebrew? Why was it written in Hebrew? For the Israelis? It's the New Testament! Can't read it... yet.

OK, one more time:

Here is a recap of 1.2.1-2 of Book 1:

だが騎士の胸当には、主の受難の尊い形見の
血の十字架がつけてあり、この主のために

But as for on the breastplate of the knight, a crucifix of blood of a holy reminder of the suffering of the Lord has been affixed, for this Lord...

And here are lines 3-4:

この輝く記章を身につけ、亡くなられた主を
生きておられるものとして崇めていた。

This glittering badge on his person fixed, dead Jesus--
inasmuch for his living's sake--he has been revering.

My version is not exactly "poetry," but this is the closest I can render the Japanese sense. And this was a hard one (perhaps why I kept avoiding it?). I don't envy the English-Japanese translators at all.

So all at once:

だが騎士の胸当には、主の受難の尊い形見の
血の十字架がつけてあり、この主のために
この輝く記章を身につけ、亡くなられた主を
生きておられるものとして崇めていた。

But as for the breastplate of the knight, there a holy reminder of the suffering of the Lord,
a crucifix of blood, has been affixed, for the sake of this Lord
this glittering badge on his person he wears and dead Jesus--
just as for the reason He continues to live--has been revering.

Although I find the phrase "dead Jesus" pretty hysterical, that's what it says. Dead Jesus. I think that allusion to the Book of Revelations makes sense now!