Translucent Silver Hair (Page 3)

Now, let me start with the very first of the "Poe no Ichizoku" series - "すきとおった銀の髪 (Translucent Silver Hair)." This is the cover art.

This story feels like a pilot episode - it is still pretty much in the traditional mold of shojo manga, featuring a girl and a boy, surrounded by flower petals and veils blowing in the wind.

Here we are introduced to Marybel and Charles, and Edgar and the rest of her family remain in the background. The "Poe" series later takes a turn toward more boy-centered stories, but here we have Marybel as the heroine of the story.

A bit about names of the characters. Naturally, the names are given in Katakana in the original, so the translator has to come up with the English spelling. Most of the conventional names, such as Charles, are easy. Marybel, or メリーベル, is a made-up name. I chose "Marybel" because of its association with Edgar Allan Poe. Characters in the series have names like "Edgar", "Allan" and "Poe", so it is hard to miss this connection. One of the famous works of Poe is "Annabel Lee." So I settled on "Marybel". Another possibility is "Merrybel", because her birth mother's name is "メリーウェザー", or "Merryweather". I know, I know, it is a family name, but "Merry-" and "Mary-" is written the same way in Katakana, so to a Japanese audience those names sound related.

It comes with a short verse - "とばりの影には 永遠の美 永遠の命" which I translated as "In the shadow of the veil lies eternal beauty, eternal life." Actually "とばり" doesn't mean "veil" - it is a word usually used in a figurative way in a construction like "夜のとばり" and signifies the abstract action of hiding something. I just used "veil" because it's present in the cover art. There is a lot of poetry in "Poe" so that is going to be the source of some headaches.

By the way, page numbers are based on "Shogakkan Sosho - Poh no Ichizoku 1" published on July 1, 1988.