I was playing Shin Megami Tensei Vengeance now that it came out and I encountered a riddle that I found interesting while talking to one of the NPCs. The dialogue is as follows:
ノズチ 物知リアクマ 天竺ノ書物震旦ノ書物ゼンブヨンダ
デモコンナアクマ知ラナイ…..
オマエオレサマノシラナイコト知ッテル？ マサカオレサマヨリ物知リアクマ？
…..グルルゥ ソンアハズナイ！
オマエ オレサマ 仏法勝負！
オレサマ仏法ノ知識ヲ試ス問題出シテヤル オマエ答エテミロ
有ル路カラ 至ル
帰リハ 何の路？
Possible answers:
* 寄り路
* 無い路
* 歩き路
And the answer is… 無い道
グゥ…..ソノトオリ
衆生ハ有カラ無ニ帰ル…..
I actually found this to be pretty clever. Because the difficulty here is that you'd normally be interpreting the lines as "You come from a certain path. What is the path of return?" but here 有る路 is used to state that this is literally the "path of existence", instead of to indicate the nuance that it's a "certain" path, which is how you'd normally read that. And the "path of nonexistence" (無い路) is the return.
We've probably all encountered some Kanji wordplay that is impossible to translate, but beyond that, I wonder if any of you have seen any other examples of this kind of wordplay where it's the grammar that actually makes it hard to bring to English.
by crezant2