Japanese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Japanese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
So I am going through song lyrics, and the new grammar and vocab that I learn from them goes into my studying. One song I came across was “Wolf Boy” (ウルフボーイ) by Morning Musume (モーニング娘).
The first line of the song is:
本気になれぬウルフボーイ
and is translated to be:
"You don't show the real you, wolf boy"
Is this translation correct? Because I don't know what なれぬ means, and I don't understand how this translates. Someone please explain it to me. Maybe it's slang that I am not getting.
As a literal translation, it's wrong.
本気になれぬ
≒本気になれない
≒(You) can't get serious.
(Side note: if you look at the rest of the lyrics, it's pretty clear that at least some of the clauses before 「ウルフボーイ」 don't act as relative clauses, so I don't think the meaning of this line is "The wolf boy who can't get serious", but just "You can't get serious; wolf boy.")
But, most song translations are not literal, and rightly so, so expect to find a lot more things like this if you're trying to learn from them.
