Repository path: workshop/translations/aru-shokko/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-aru-shokko-R04-v1 — Miyaji Karoku, 「ある職工の手記」, the opening

Source. 宮地嘉六「ある職工の手記」, 「改造」1919 (大正8) 年9月号; copy-text Aozora Bunko 001446/50533_40585.html (底本『現代日本文學大系 49 …宮地嘉六…集』筑摩書房), fetched as Shift_JIS and decoded cp932 per CLAUDE.md, ruby and Aozora annotation markers stripped by tools/fetch_aozora.py. Span: the opening → 「…家を離れると朝夕父のことを思はずにゐられなかつたのだ。」, 795 non-whitespace characters, SHA-256 a54f2751f57eb6de… (full hash in workshop/experiments/E-20260807-narrator-unknown/materials/sources.json).

Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source only. Draft frozen first as T-aru-shokko-R06-v1 (§Procedure 2a). Translator: lead. Cost $0, never ledgered.

Contamination: none, on an absence of comparator. No English translation of Miyaji Karoku was reachable; tools/dependence_check.py has nothing to run against and the declaration is unmeasured, which is stated here rather than left implied. The search run was: Project Gutenberg full catalogue, and archive.org's English-language holdings for Miyaji Karoku and 宮地嘉六 — 0 hits for either.

Lineage. T-aru-shokko-R06-v1 → this. Evaluations: E-20260807-narrator-unknown (profiled as a source–target crossing item; not judged for quality anywhere).

For some reason my family has had trouble inside the house over stepmothers, generation after generation. When I say generations, I know nothing of what went on before I was born, but it was already so in my father's time. My father lost his own mother early and was left in the hands of a stepmother. That stepmother had a whole run of boys, and my father stopped finding any pleasure in being in his own house and in the end bolted out of it. He was the eldest son, but he was not able to come into his dead father's property properly. That was the stepmother's contriving.

That I should have gone the very same way as my father — what a piece of fate that is. I was the eldest son. My stepmother had two girls. I could not look on calmly while those girls were brought up and made more of than I was. My stepmother was a woman of poor stuff, and the more she came to understand my jealous feeling toward my sisters, the more she made a point of putting it in front of me. Not that it was like that all the year round; at any rate I found no pleasure in being at home. And on top of that even my father began to look to me like one of her kind. Year by year, as I grew, my observation of my stepmother grew harder and more sardonic, and toward my father it turned into a sneer. At the same time her hatred of me grew coarser, and more biting with it. My father fell in behind her. My father was rather the sort of man a second wife can wind round her finger. Since treating me — the first wife's eldest son — coldly inside the house was no small thing in the second wife's favour, my father had a habit of treating me coldly with a will, to fawn on her. Whether he was aware of it himself I do not know; I was still a boy of twelve or thirteen then, but I saw my father's contemptible folly for what it was.

Out of consideration for his second wife my father would not even keep me in the house, and put me out as an apprentice at my aunt's, the tailor's. There too I was ill-used by my aunt's spiteful husband; I stuck it out for more than a year all the same, and then fell ill and went home. There is no telling how much I fretted over my father the whole time I was at my aunt's. At home I did not think of him particularly, but once I was away from home I could not help thinking of him morning and evening.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-07 (S125), at translation time, before the study limb of E-20260807-narrator-unknown was designed. Decisions and alternatives; no quality claims. Any evaluative sentence here is internal-judgment-only.

1. 「継母」 twelve times, and English's pronoun problem. The source says 継母 (mamahaha, stepmother) again and again without any sense of repetition, because Japanese does not require a pronoun and the compound is a plain kinship term. English has to choose each time between my stepmother, she, and the stepmother, and each choice carries something the Japanese does not: she creates a running character, the stepmother creates a type, my stepmother keeps inserting the narrator. I have used the possessive for my father's stepmother and my own where the referent could be either, and she only inside a sentence that has already named her. The result is that English has a hierarchy of nearness in this paragraph that the Japanese does not have.
2. 「内輪がごたくさした」 → "trouble inside the house". 内輪 is the inside of a household, and ごたくさ is a colloquial word for a mess or a squabble — not literary, and slightly dated even in
3. Options: there was upset in the family (too smooth), the household was in a mess (right register, wrong subject: the source's subject is the house's inside, not the household). Chosen phrase keeps the location word and loses the colloquialism. English's lowering shelf again offers nothing for narration — the only informal words available (a right mess, ructions) are dialogue words, which is the asymmetry RS-20260806g §6 measured on a different pair.
4. 「何と云ふいんねんだらう」 — 因縁. A Buddhist word (causal linkage from a former life) worn down in ordinary speech to something between fate and a curse on the family. Options: what karma that is (imports a word English readers now use for something else, and foreignises a phrase that in 1919 Japanese is entirely unmarked); what a strange entanglement; "what a piece of fate that is" (chosen). The chosen phrase is unmarked English for unmarked Japanese and loses the doctrine. I record that the doctrine is what makes the sentence's fatalism not a figure of speech.
5. 「質のよくない継母」 → "a woman of poor stuff". Literally "a stepmother of not-good quality" — in Japanese this is a flat, almost clinical judgment. Not of good quality (draft) is unidiomatic English about a person; a bad sort is idiomatic and warmer than the source; "a woman of poor stuff" keeps the substance-word 質 and stays cold. It is slightly literary, which the source is not.
6. 「父もそれに随従した」 → "My father fell in behind her". 随従 is a stiff Sino-Japanese compound (to follow, to be subservient) dropped into a plain sentence, and the stiffness is the point: the narrator uses an official-sounding word for his father's capitulation. My father went along with it (draft) is plain and loses it; my father was compliant in it keeps the stiffness and kills the sentence. Chosen the plain-but-military "fell in behind", which trades the Sino-Japanese register for a metaphor the source does not use.
7. 「愚劣さ」 → "contemptible folly". 愚劣 is stronger than stupidity (draft): it carries contempt as well as judgment, and a boy of twelve using it about his father is the sentence's whole shock. Two words for one, and an explicitation, taken deliberately.
8. 「後妻に巻かれる」 → "the sort of man a second wife can wind round her finger". The Japanese idiom has the husband being wrapped up; the English idiom has the wife doing the winding, round a finger. Same relation, opposite agent, and I could find no English idiom that leaves the man as the grammatical patient without sounding invented.
9. What the register does across the passage. The source is 大正 colloquial written in historical kana (ゐる, あつた, かゝつた), which for a 1919 reader is simply how prose was spelled and for a modern reader is a period mark. I have not archaised the English at all: the passage reads as plain modern narration. That is a decision, not an oversight — archaising would have marked as old-fashioned a text whose original marking is workman's plainness, which is the thing the title claims.