I always wanted to write my own rhyming translation of this, but I never got any further than "Innocent in a sense / born by chance / in this icy, bitter, boreal expanse" before the quality started to drop off

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  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
    hexagon
    ·
    5 months ago

    The lyrics did stand out to me as sort of stereotypical...

    Well, it's said that the past is a foreign country, which means that 40 year old songs from another country will go through no fewer than two layers of cultural/linguistic telephone. A similar thing actually happened with the "oh my gah" bit in Azumanga Daioh, incidentally...

    Kärki määrää

    So is that some sort of wordplay that would lead to the lyrics being transcribed wrong, or was it just a screw-up with nothing else to it?

    • BelieveRevolt [he/him]
      ·
      5 months ago

      I'd say it's just a really common misheard lyric, I also thought it was "kärkimäärä" for years before finding out what the real lyric was (even though kärkimäärä isn't really a word that'd make any kind of sense in this or most other contexts).