The original text has 蛍火. And while I'm glad to hear you like that clause, I must admit that it was one of the more frustrating ones to work with. I'm still not quite happy with my resulting translation. =_= Here's the original Japanese with a literal, unenglish translation:
ただ、燃え盛る炎が天に届けと言わんばかりに伸び上がり、蛍火のように微細な赤い光芒を散らす
only blazing flames stretch up as if to say "reach/arrive at/be delivered to the heavens," and scatter the delicate red beam of light like the light of fireflies
I'm pretty sure the last part is meant to evoke the image of embers, jumping off the column of flame and looking like fireflies as they do so. As you can see, I compressed the "as if to say . . ." bit and left out "beam/column" entirely. I tried to avoid doing so, but they made an already unwieldy sentence even more so (in English, anyway).
Oh, hell. And it should probably be "their delicate red light," not "a delicate red light." *fixes that*
As far as the incandescence/luminescence thing goes, to me, 蛍火 just seems more focused on the fire-like quality of the light (in the same way as 狐火 or 鬼火), as opposed to the more literal "光" that's used for luminescence--冷光 (luminescence/cold light), 発光 (luminescence/radiation), and 夜光 (nocturnal luminescence). It may just be me reading too much into things, but there you are.
. . . of course the most important factor in obsessing over that bit of translation was my not wanting to use "light" two times in the same clause. XD;
no subject
ただ、燃え盛る炎が天に届けと言わんばかりに伸び上がり、蛍火のように微細な赤い光芒を散らす
only blazing flames stretch up as if to say "reach/arrive at/be delivered to the heavens," and scatter the delicate red beam of light like the light of fireflies
I'm pretty sure the last part is meant to evoke the image of embers, jumping off the column of flame and looking like fireflies as they do so. As you can see, I compressed the "as if to say . . ." bit and left out "beam/column" entirely. I tried to avoid doing so, but they made an already unwieldy sentence even more so (in English, anyway).
Oh, hell. And it should probably be "their delicate red light," not "a delicate red light." *fixes that*
As far as the incandescence/luminescence thing goes, to me, 蛍火 just seems more focused on the fire-like quality of the light (in the same way as 狐火 or 鬼火), as opposed to the more literal "光" that's used for luminescence--冷光 (luminescence/cold light), 発光 (luminescence/radiation), and 夜光 (nocturnal luminescence). It may just be me reading too much into things, but there you are.
. . . of course the most important factor in obsessing over that bit of translation was my not wanting to use "light" two times in the same clause. XD;