New Year's Poem 2019

[Iscah]

In light of the Paris Fan Festival version of the trailer, with Y'shtola being addressed as "Matoya", it opens up a new and interesting reading of the prophecy - particularly the third line.

In its various translations:

(E) "As scion joins to stock of withered bark"
(J) "The foliage of a dying tree grafted to the tree that replaces it."
(J) "From a rotten tree a branch is taken, to be given to it's successor." (post #13)
(G) "But the tree of history shall bloom" (can "Baum der Geschichte" be translated a different way? "Ancient tree"?)
(F) "Like green growth sprouting from a doomed trunk"

This seemed to be just a metaphor, but now I'm thinking it might refer to a literal event: Matoya's soul somehow being bound to Y'shtola.

Putting all the translations side by side, they seem inconsistent about what's actually happening though.

English: the scion (grafted branch or shoot) is attached to "withered stock" (the roots).

Japanese: the scion is a cutting from a dying tree, grafted to new stock so some part of the old tree lives on.

German: doesn't seem to match the others

French: a "doomed tree" putting forth new growth; no mention of joining things together. I suppose it could follow that the new growth is taken and grafted (as in the Japanese) but it's not said outright.

The Japanese version seems to make the most sense. English seems back-to-front (why graft a new cutting to a dying tree?) but perhaps got swayed by the tempting wordplay of "scion" - does that carry over in translation, or is it only the English name for the organisation that carries that double-meaning?

So anyway. Assuming Japanese is correct: part of an old tree grafted to the new one that replaces it, so part of it lives on.

It certainly seems very appropriate for the currently-theorised situation that Matoya may have transferred her soul into Y'shtola's body.


In which case....

Guess at meaning:
I assume the comparative words are a hint. As scion is grafted to stem, so we embrace the Dark. "Like a healthy branch grafted to a dying tree do we make an ally of Darkness."

You've used the English version of the translation so even if it's just a metaphor, it might need to be the other way around. "Like a cutting from an ancient tree, we will graft a piece of the Darkness onto ourself."

If the third line is not a metaphor, it becomes clearer again. "As what happened when Matoya placed herself within Y'shtola, so shall we take Darkness within ourself."





I also have to wonder about the prophecy itself: the "anachronistic journal". (How does the Japanese version attribute this? Or doesn't it say anything? It hasn't been included in the translations.)

Urianger seems to have shifted from studying prophecies to actively making them as an astrologian.

And what might get a found journal labeled "anachronistic"? The writer's vocabulary seeming a few centuries out of line with the apparent age of the book...?

[RicaRuin]

"Baum der Geschichte" can't be ancient tree or the likes, I fear.

[Iscah]

"Baum der Geschichte" can't be ancient tree or the likes, I fear.

That's strange then. It doesn't seem to match what's being said in the other poems at all. I wonder why?

[Mansion]

Getting back to the French translation there. Last line : fatalité is not strictly "the End" and not so much "doom" either. Fatalité is a relatively neutral word compared to doom. It essentially means something that can't be changed; it would be closer to "fate" in English, same etymology by the way.
Third line condamné is far stronger than "withered". In French it's hopeless, while "withered" is a weakened state, but it's not doomed.

The third line in French really means the growth is born (that's the verb used in french, naissant) from the tree. Grafted would be greffée. So it is something made from that tree. The French metaphor is something like "[as unexpected] as a new leaf on a dead tree, we will embrace the Dark to challenge our fate". The "unexpected" part is what is suggested by how the sentence is built.

[Mordoni]

Anachronistic Journal?

Kind of like the one that Goblin found, 3 years before it was written, in the Alexander Quests?

[Iscah]

Bumping this post-5.3 because the tree metaphor has taken on another layer of meaning AND might explain how the English version got it backwards, as I noted earlier:

English: the scion (grafted branch or shoot) is attached to "withered stock" (the roots).
Japanese: the scion is a cutting from a dying tree, grafted to new stock so some part of the old tree lives on.

Of course our first understanding of the metaphor became clear once we got to play Shadowbringers - the "cutting from a dying tree" being the Exarch, sent from a dying future and becoming part of the new version of events that would replace it.

And now... well, it's the Exarch again but in an entirely different way, with his soul and memories grafted on his younger self.

And that younger self happens to be a newly invited Scion, so "scion joins to withered bark" may have been too good a pun to worry about things like getting the definitions the right way around.

(Which, funnily enough, is more or less what I suggested as a possible interpretation in my earlier post - though regarding Y'shtola and Matoya, based on what information we had at the time.)


Meanwhile the part about Darkness is interesting, given our recent discoveries about our own character.