babygriffith:

bthump:

babygriffith:

i’ve talked about these lines before but let’s examine them again

グリフィス(あいつ)への執着を振り切って
ここまで辿り着いたはずが･･･

I’ve come this far by letting go of my obsession …

i’m gonna gloss this in an unconventional way just to make it easier to understand what’s going on here grammar-wise

[griffith (him) – particle for direction – possessive particle – obsession (noun)] – object particle – [shake off/break off (verb in -te form)]
[here] – particle for destination – [arrive (verb in past tense)] – suffix (?) that means sth like “should have” – particle that means “but”

or, simpler,

obsession with griffith – object particle – shake off/break off (te form)
to here/this far – arrive (past tense) – should have – but

the key here is the -te form of the verb 振り切る, which is used for a number of things, among which are: connecting phrases, listing successive actions, and uhhh idk how to explain this but doing something by doing something else first. you know, sentences like “taking off my clothes, i entered the bath” and similar.

that last function of the -te form i mentioned is, i believe, the one used here. “i let go of my obsession with him, and i came this far,” or, more accurately, “letting go of my obsession with him, i came this far.” then there’s the はず part too, where guts expresses his uncertainty (meaning that he hasn’t really let go of his obsession and moved on), but that’s a little hard to translate accurately without it sounding weird in english. 

the other thing is, 辿り着く is in past tense. so i really don’t understand what in the world the translators of OP’s photo were thinking. he’s come this far, and he did it by letting go of his obsession. there’s nothing that indicates this was his past hope or whatever, at least from what i can see.

So what I understand is that this translation includes the uncertainty but in doing so basically changes the overall meaning, whereas the version I have “I’ve come this far… by letting go of my obsession…” gets the tense right but misses the uncertainty? Which yk seems fair because it does sound hard to convey without losing the flow of the sentence, plus it’s kind of… infused into the panel just from the fact that Guts is thinking about that glimpse of Griffith on the hill, but obviously that’s the most intriguing part to me lol so I’m glad it’s there somewhat in the original text.

honestly that’s a good way of putting it, that might be what they were trying to do. they just kind of made it sound like this was a past goal of his, which is not really the case. はず is like a … an expectation, but with certainty. expectation that something took place/is going to take place/is currently the case etc. you would use it to say “the shop should be open right now” if it’s like 8 pm and you know that the shop works until 9. it’s like, based on everything i know/have seen, this is how it should be … but it might still not.

that’s the sort of uncertainty guts is expressing here. “i should have let go of my obsession with him by now, but … (did i?).” there’s nothing in this line in original japanese that indicates that he set that as a goal for himself and then failed to achieve it. honestly i have to say i really feel like rather than choosing to focus on the uncertainty, this translator or translation team simply wildly misunderstood the grammatical structure of the sentence, and in doing so accidentally achieved something that the official translators weren’t able to. but who’s to say.

According to @murdersounds apparently this is the official translation lol. I hadn’t realized it’d been released, but I guess so. The one I was quoting is a scanlation, but one of the more reputable ones afaik.

So… ?? not like I’m going to complain much about dark horse either accidentally or purposefully helping push my griffguts agenda lmao, but this does make me wonder what the translator’s thought process was.