PSYCHO-PASS: Providence - According to Japanese Twitter

After a long wait (or maybe it just felt long to me), PSYCHO-PASS: Providence finally hits North American theaters this week (14 July 2023), before becoming more widely internationally available in early August.

Unfortunately, as I'm not currently in Japan, I've not yet seen it. Fortunately, I speak Japanese, so I've read pretty much everything I could find about what happens. If you're like me and can't wait to see it in cinemas/don't mind major spoilers, this post is for you.

What follows is a compilation of everything my sister and I know about PPP -- drawing from fan talk on Twitter, director and writer interviews and tweets, and other official promotional materials only available in Japanese -- without actually having seen it.

We also explain some of the major plot points and go into detail on the real-life works referenced in the film, so if you watched it but feel like you could still use some clarification (as many Japanese fans did), this post might be for you too.

Once again, this post is nothing but spoilers (to be taken with several grains of salt as there is a certain amount of guesswork involved), so read on at your own risk.

*Note: "SN" denotes tweets/quotes by director Shiotani Naoyoshi.

I took this, when a group of us did a day trip to Mutorashanga in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland West Province. Its the area’s green pool quarry that lures people to experience something different I suppose. There were a few of us, mostly if not all youth. Music, drinks, snacks, beach wear and babes all rising up to the occasion. 

Locals would stop and watch us from the horizon. Hence our hero in the image. From up above, bike leaning, arms crossed and gazing at us - out of towners frolic (innocently) in his hood. I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking. Judging from his body language, I had to teleport to his possible perspective... And ask myself through his lenses...

1. Why would they come all this way to do this, when they have their own swimming pools in the city?

2. If only they knew what people use these pools for?

3. They don’t know the local stories of what has happened here?

To give you more context - I did not, at any moment, discern any shade of envious green from the young king. He just peacefully watched. 

Now, the question that has stuck with me since then has been - what would it take for everyone in a country to be socio-economically, spiritually and mentally wealthy? 

Everyone?

I was particularly struck this week by the notes from Fenollosa included in Ezra Pound’s Cathay – reading the word-by-word glosses conjured up the visual potency of the ideographs (as noted in “The Chinese Written Character…”) as distinct images in a way that a traditional “translation” incorporating grammar, syntax, etc. did not. The experience was more along the lines of Walter Benjamin’s montage-effect – images dreamily arising and fading, with the connections between each image/word/character left to the reader’s imagination (at least in translation; obviously in the original Chinese they are linked to form grammatical sense, but I have no access to the language). For example,

faint waves dragon scales water-grass green

         ripples                          floating

versus “The small ripples resembled the scales of dragons, and the water grass was green” or Pound’s “With ripples like dragon-scales, going grass green/on the water” – there’s an economy of language in the gloss that doesn’t spell out the relationship, say, between “ripples” and “scales” – perhaps there’s a marker for the language of simile (“like”) in the original, but I rather liked the way the necessity of literal glossing just juxtaposes the two things without saying that the water is scales or is like scales, but lets the reader hold the two images together in the mind’s eye.

So, for this week’s exercise I chose to return to an Urdu ghazal that I’ve attempted to translate before and found my efforts to be clunky, thinking that perhaps what seems like the clunkiness that would result from literality might in fact produce new effects and connect the reader more viscerally to the montage of images present in the poem. The following is a very famous ghazal by Mirza Asadullah Khan “Ghalib,” which has in fact been translated multiple times into English (notably in the 1971 volume Ghazals of Ghalib with versions by Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, W. S. Merwin, David Ray, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Strand, and William Hunt, who used a similar process to Pound for their translations since none had access to the original Urdu). I’ll include the original for the first couplet to make clear how the gloss progresses, and then just leave it in English for the rest. A few working notes – the ending verb, hota, of this ghazal is not just “been” but more along the lines of “would have been” or “had it been” – it’s irrealis, suggesting that the action of the poem has never and will never occur (but is nonetheless instantiated by the poem itself). Also, the izafa contruction in Urdu and Persian, consisting of the sound “e” between words (like in “wisal-e yar”) is something that is written as a diagonal slash underneath the word and delineates a relationship of possession (it’s typically translated “of”); but I thought it might be fun to play with the closest visual analog in English, the dash. Also, it was interesting to literally translate idiomatic compounds literally (i.e. “grief-swallower,” rather than “someone who sympathizes” – I think the former packs a bigger poetic punch), but in some places I included both meanings (for example, towards the end, in Urdu “do-char” is literally “two-four,” but idiomatically means to meet or encounter someone, but in this poem Ghalib is clearly numerically punning and juxtaposing it with the “one” of unity).

  yeh    na thī    humārī qismat  keh   wisāl-e yār       hotā

this   was not our       fate        that beloved-union been

agar aur    jītē    rehtē    yehi         intiẓār   hotā

if      more living stayed this very waiting been

your promise on live we then this life lie know

                                                             dear one

that from happiness not dying if trust been

from your fragility know that bound was the vow weak

never you could have broken if strong been

                                                        knotted tight

someone my heart ask to your arrow-half-drawn

this frisson from where that gone past the liver been

       rankling                             shot through

what is this somewhere friendship that became friend advisor

someone remedy-maker, someone grief-swallower been

from rock-vein dripping that blood which again not stopped

                                                                          never

this which grief you understand this if sparks been

grief although life-breaking is on where we escape for the heart is

if not love-grief been world-grief been

                                     time-grief

should I say to whom what is grief-night a calamity

to me what harm was to die if once been

having died we who disgraced became why not sea-drowned

not ever funeral rising not anywhere tomb been

who could have seen that one since singular is that oneness

         able to see

that twoness-scent also been where two-four been

                                                                 encounter

these Sufi-problems this your discourse Ghalib

to you we a saint would understand if not wine-drinker been