A wolf that wore the flayed hide of a sheep
Went flying at a crone who delivered a poison apple
“I COULDN’T HOLD IT BACK ANY MORE. hold it back! Hold it Back!”
Tumble about, in a wild-eyed noontide ¹
Get rid of that screw in your head and let’s dance,
Our sights set on the exposed fruit of wisdom
Frolic like hell ²
A wolf that wore the flayed hide of a sheep
Was head over heels for a girl in a red dress
“I COULDN’T HOLD IT BACK ANY MORE. hold it back! Hold it Back!”
Yeah, take flight on a plane boarded by pigs —
The luggage got chucked out long ago
Why’re the crows cawing on pylons?
A knife can’t cut the cards
Instead it stripped off the mask of hide
Cleanly exposing your wicked-as-hell heart ³
.
NOTES / INTERPRETATION:
Blue font indicates text originally written in English in the official booklet.
oo1. Wild-eyed noontide is paraphrasing. The actual wording in Japanese didn’t have as good a flow in English. Literally translated, it would be something like, “Tumble about, in the insane-seeming afternoon”. The paraphrasing gives it the same amount of oomph as the Japanese line without changing the meaning too greatly.
oo2. Like hell and as hell (in the last verse) are not literal translations. I chose an intensifier in English that I felt matched the sentiment in the Japanese lines (which have no direct equivalent in English). I think it works for the cool, quirky lyrics of the song! Plus the dainty image of “frolicking” juxtaposed with “hell” is somehow both cool and comical.
oo3. The final line is very interesting and was particularly challenging to translate into English. This was paraphrasing as well. There are some words dropped in Japanese, which is more or less grammatically fine, but in English I needed to take a gamble and guess what sort of word might have been dropped. So please take that last line with a grain of salt! I may one day experience a eureka moment about it and come back to modify it.
Afterthought. This song contains a fair bit of fairytale imagery, undercut with other fantasy elements. Of course we have the Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood, though the Wolf is the protagonist in this case, and is literally clad in the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” metaphor. We have the Crone (likely the Evil Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves), who delivers a poison apple, and the strange mental image of a plane filled with pigs. Whether these are literal or metaphorical pigs is not clear, but for me, the image of the pigs from the movie Spirited Away popped into my head (i.e. humans who were turned into pigs due to greed). Short as they are, these lyrics were incredibly difficult for me to make sense of when I first read them in 2011; it’s not just the wording that is difficult, but the cryptic nature of some of the lines. That being said, the punch of these lyrics, along with the music itself, is incredibly cool. It’s just a hell of a track.
.
アリス九號. ★ RUMWOLF → GEMINI (将・2011)
ALICE NINE. – RUMWOLF | From GEMINI (Show – 2011)
Original text translated from Japanese.
Purchase via itunes.