Repository path: workshop/translations/botchan-ch3/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-botchan-ch3-R06-v1 — 「坊っちゃん」chapter 3 whole

Source. 夏目漱石「坊っちゃん」(Hototogisu, April 1906), 三 — the whole chapter, 8 paragraphs, 5,821 non-space Japanese characters, read in Japanese. Copy-text Aozora Bunko 000148/752_14964 (底本『ちくま日本文学全集　夏目漱石』筑摩書房), re-fetched 2026-08-17 with tools/fetch_aozora.py; the chapter text as used is stored beside this file as source-ch3-ja.txt. Sōseki d. 1916: public domain.

Regime. R06 v1.0 — lead single pass, source only, no return pass. Cost $0 (charter §3, A4).

Length. 5,821 Japanese characters → 3,410 English words.

Why this chapter. It is the chapter that follows the one the project translated yesterday, at almost exactly the same length (5,821 against 5,981), and it carries nine 擬音語・擬態語 sites under the same morphological rule — the census is §Mimetic census below, written while translating and before any study of it was designed. ARM-mimetic-carriage needs a second, independently generated site set for its step 2, for a specific reason: RS-20260816e §5's count of the sites where no depictive English could be built is one translator's report on one chapter, and a chapter translated to the same rule on a different day is the cheapest thing that can tell whether that report is a property of the device or a property of that afternoon.

Continuity with chapter 2 is deliberate and is a constraint, not a convenience. The nicknames fixed in T-botchan-ch2-R06-v1 are kept: Badger (狸), Red Shirt (赤シャツ), Porcupine (山嵐). RS-20260816e §9.5 records that Badger is wrong — 狸 is a tanuki, not a badger — and that a frozen artifact is not silently corrected. This chapter is a new artifact and could have corrected it; it does not, because the two chapters are one novel and a nickname that changes between them would be a worse fault than the one it repaired. The error is therefore carried knowingly and declared here as well as there.

Contamination: suspected, and the basis is specific. The lead has previously rendered Botchan chapter 1 (S150, T-botchan-R22-v1; R04/R06/R21 spans at S126) and chapter 2 (S199, T-botchan-ch2-R06-v1), and has read Morri's 1918 preface and — after the S199 freeze — Morri's chapter 2 at fifteen loci. It has not read Morri's chapter 3, or any other published rendering of this chapter, before freezing this text and this log: the Gutenberg file of Morri's full translation was fetched to a scratch path at the start of the session and left unopened, and is opened only after this commit. The measured overlap is reported on the arm page after the freeze. Note (bhb) — the lead matches itself at up to 37 contiguous tokens — is live in a way it was not for chapter 2: chapters 2 and 3 share no prose, but they share a narrator, a set of nicknames and a stock of tics, so any self-overlap measurement here is a measurement of an idiolect and not of recall, and is reported as such.

The translation

1. So at last I went in to the school. The first time I got into a classroom and stepped up onto the platform it felt somehow strange. Lecturing away, I wondered whether even I could hold down being a teacher. The pupils are noisy. Every so often one of them says Sensei in an outrageously loud voice. Sensei got to me. Up to now, at the Physics School, I had been calling out sensei, sensei every day myself, but there is all the difference in the world between saying it and being called it. Somehow the soles of my feet prickle and creep. I am not a coward. I am not a timid man either, but the pity of it is that I am short on nerve. When somebody lets off a loud Sensei at me, I feel the way you feel hearing the noon gun in Marunouchi on an empty stomach. The first hour I got through anyhow, one way and another. But at least nobody put an awkward question to me. When I came back to the staff room, Porcupine asked how it had gone. I answered with a simple Mm, and Porcupine seemed relieved.

2. When I left the staff room with my chalk for the second hour, I somehow felt as if I were riding into enemy country. Out in the classroom this lot were all bigger fellows than the last. I am a Tokyo man, slight and small-made, so however high up I stand I carry no weight. In a fight I would take on a sumo wrestler, but I have no skill for lining up forty great lads like these in front of me and cowing them with nothing but one flap of my tongue. Still, I thought that if I let country people like these see a weak spot it would become a habit, so I made my voice as big as I could and lectured with a bit of a roll to my tongue. At first the pupils were smoked out and sat there vacant, so I got more and more pleased with myself — there, take that — and when I had really got going in downtown Tokyo style, the strongest-looking fellow, sitting in the middle of the front row, suddenly stood up and said Sensei. Here it comes, I thought, and asked what it was, and he said, "It be too fast, we can't follow, could you not go a bit more slowly, please now, sir." Could you not, please now, sir is a lukewarm way of talking. If I am too fast I will say it slowly, I answered, but I am a Tokyo man and I cannot use your language, and if you don't understand it you had better wait until you do. At that rate the second hour went better than I had expected. Only, on my way out, one of the pupils came at me with a geometry problem I had no hope of doing — could you not just explain this one, please now, sir — and I broke into a cold sweat. There was nothing for it, so I said I don't know what that is, I will teach it to you next time, and beat a quick retreat, and the pupils set up a whoop. Somewhere in it I could hear voices saying he can't do it, he can't do it. Blast them. Of course a teacher can't do things. What is there to wonder at in a man saying he can't do what he can't do? If I could do a thing like that, would I come out to the country for forty yen? — and with that I got back to the staff room. Well, how was it this time, Porcupine asked again. I said Mm, but Mm alone did not satisfy me, so I told him the pupils at this school are blockheads. Porcupine pulled an odd face.

3. The third hour, the fourth hour and the hour after noon were all much of a muchness. In every class I went into on that first day I came a little unstuck. Teaching is not the easy thing it looks from outside, I thought. The lessons were all got through, but I still could not go home: I had to wait there, blankly, until three o'clock. At three the pupils of the class you have charge of clean their own room and come to report it, and you are supposed to go and inspect. Then you look through the attendance book and at last you are let off. However much a man's body has been bought with a monthly salary, what law is there that ties him to the school in his free hours as well and makes him sit staring a desk out of countenance? But all the rest of them were meekly doing it by the regulations, and I thought it would not do for the newcomer alone to make a fuss, so I put up with it. On the way out I complained to Porcupine — I say, it's idiotic keeping us at school till gone three whatever happens — and Porcupine laughed, quite so, ha-ha-ha, but afterwards turned serious and said something rather like advice: look here, it won't do to grumble too much about the school. If you must, say it only to me. There are some very odd people about. We parted at the crossroads, so there was no time to ask what he meant.

4. Then, when I got back to my lodgings, the master of the house came along saying let me make you some tea. When he says he will make tea I think he means to treat me, but what he does is help himself freely to my tea and drink it. By the look of things he may well be carrying out this let-me-make-you-some-tea on his own while I am out. What the master says is: I have always been fond of paintings and old things, and in the end I have started up a bit of a trade in them on the quiet. You look to me like a gentleman of considerable taste yourself. Why not take it up for a hobby? — an outrageous piece of touting. Two years ago, when I went to the Imperial Hotel on an errand for somebody, I was taken for a locksmith. When I went to see the Great Buddha at Kamakura with a blanket over my shoulders, a rickshaw man called me guv'nor. I have been mistaken for a good many things in my time, but nobody until now has ever fixed on me and said I was a gentleman of considerable taste. As a rule you can tell from a man's get-up and his manner. A gentleman of taste, even in a picture, either wears a hood or is holding a poem-slip. A man who says seriously that I am a gentleman of taste is no ordinary rogue. I told him I don't care for the sort of thing idle old retired gentlemen go in for, and the master laughed, he-he-he, and said, well, sir, nobody likes it at the start, but once a man is into this line of country there is no getting out of it again — and poured himself another cup and drank it with a curious set to his fingers. The truth is I had asked him the evening before to buy me some tea, but I do not like this bitter thick stuff. One cup of it and it gets to my stomach. Buy something less bitter next time, I said, and he said certainly, sir, and squeezed out another cup and drank that too. A fellow who drinks without stint because the tea is somebody else's. When the master had withdrawn I read up for tomorrow and went straight to bed.

5. After that, every day, every day, I went out to the school and worked by the regulations; every day, every day, I came home and the master came out saying let me make you some tea. In about a week I had a general idea of how the school worked, and I had the measure of the couple at my lodgings as well. When I asked the other teachers, it seems that for anything from a week to a month after your appointment you worry yourself sick over whether people think well of you or badly; but I felt nothing of the kind. When I made a mess of a lesson I felt bad about it at the time, but half an hour later it had gone clean away. I am a man who cannot worry about a thing for long however hard he tries. What effect my blunders in class were having on the pupils, and what reaction that effect was producing in the principal and the head teacher, I was wholly indifferent to. As I said before, I am not a man of much nerve, but I am uncommonly good at making up my mind. If this school would not do I was ready to go somewhere else at once, and so neither Badger nor Red Shirt frightened me in the least. Still less could I bring myself to flatter or make up to the young monkeys in my classes. School was all very well, but the lodgings were another matter. If the master had only come to drink my tea I could have borne it, but he brings all sorts of things along. The first thing he brought was seal-stones of some kind, ten or so of them, which he laid out and said, three yen the lot, cheap at the price, do buy them. I am not some bungling painter doing the country rounds, I said, I have no use for such things — so the next time he came with a hanging scroll of flowers and birds by a man called Kazan or something. He hung it in the alcove himself and said, isn't that a fine piece? and when I answered off-handedly, is it? — he delivered a worthless lecture: there are two Kazans, one is So-and-so Kazan and one is Such-and-such Kazan, and this scroll is by the Such-and-such Kazan; and then he pressed me, well, sir, for you I will make it fifteen yen. Do buy it. When I refused on the ground that I had no money, he was quite immovable: money, sir, will do at any time at all. I have money and I still won't buy it, I said, and drove him off for that time. Next he lugged in an inkstone the size of a demon roof-tile. This is a Tankei, he said, a Tankei — and he Tankei'd away at me two or three times over, so half for the fun of it I asked what a Tankei might be, and he was off lecturing at once. Tankei has an upper stratum, a middle stratum and a lower stratum, and everything nowadays is upper stratum, but this is certainly middle stratum. Look at these eyes. Three eyes is a rare thing. And it takes the ink beautifully — do try it — and he thrust the great inkstone under my nose. When I asked how much, he said the owner brought it back from China and is anxious to sell, so I will make it cheap for you, thirty yen. This man is a fool and no mistake. The school looks as though I shall manage it somehow or other, but at this rate of persecution by curios I shall not last long.

6. Meanwhile I began to dislike the school as well. One evening I was walking in a place called Ōmachi when I saw, next door to the post office, a signboard with SOBA written on it and TOKYO added underneath by way of a note. I am very fond of soba. Even when I lived in Tokyo, if I passed a soba shop and caught the smell of the seasonings I could never help ducking under the curtain. Up till today mathematics and curios had made me forget soba, but seeing a sign like that I could not walk past. I might as well have a bowl while I was about it, I thought, and went up. It was not what the sign promised. If you go so far as to give notice of Tokyo you might make the place a little cleaner, but either they do not know Tokyo or they have no money: it was outrageously dirty. The matting had changed colour and was gritty with sand into the bargain. The walls were black with soot. The ceiling was not only smoked with lamp-oil but so low that you found yourself pulling your head down. The one thing that was completely new was the price-list, with the names of the soba written large and gaudy and pasted up. They must have bought an old house and opened two or three days ago. Number one on the price-list was tempura. Here, bring me a tempura, I called out in a loud voice. At that, three men who up to then had been huddled in the corner slurping and sucking at something all looked round at me together. The room was dark and I had not noticed at first, but when we came face to face they were all pupils of the school. They said good evening, so I said good evening back. It was a long time since I had had soba, and it was good, so I got through four bowls of tempura.

7. When I went into the classroom the next day without a thought in my head, there on the blackboard, in letters as big as the whole board, was written TEMPURA SENSEI. They all looked at my face and laughed. It was too absurd, so I asked what was funny about eating tempura. At which one of the pupils said, "But four bowls be too many, sir, now." Whether I eat four bowls or five, it is my money and I eat it — what is there to complain of? — and I rattled through the lesson and came back to the staff room. Ten minutes later I went out to the next classroom, and on the blackboard was written: item, tempura, four bowls. Provided that laughing is prohibited. The first one had not particularly angered me, but this time it got on my nerves. A joke carried past a certain point is malice. It is like the burnt crust on a rice-cake — nobody praises it. Country people do not understand where the line is, so their notion is that you can push on as far as you like. Living in a cramped little town where an hour's walk exhausts the sights, with no other accomplishment to their name, they go about broadcasting the tempura affair like the Russo-Japanese war. Poor devils. Being brought up like this from childhood is what produces these nasty stunted little men, like maples in a flowerpot. If it were innocent I would laugh along with them, but what is this? Children, and full of a queer venom. I said nothing, rubbed out the tempura, and asked, is this sort of trick amusing? It is a cowardly joke. Do you fellows know what cowardly means? — and one of them answered, "Being laughed at for what you did yourself and getting angry, that be what's cowardly, now, surely." A disagreeable fellow. To think I had come all the way from Tokyo to teach a fellow like this — it was too dispiriting. Don't waste your breath on back-talk, get on with your work, I said, and began the lesson. Then in the next classroom I found written up: a man who eats tempura becomes given to back-talk. There is no dealing with them. I was so angry that I said I do not teach impudent fellows like you, and walked straight out and came home. The pupils were delighted at getting a holiday, I hear. At this rate the curios are better than the school.

8. After the tempura soba I went home and slept a night, and it did not gall me so much. When I went in to school the pupils were there too. I don't understand it at all. For about three days after that all was quiet, but on the evening of the fourth I went to a place called Sumita and ate dumplings. Sumita is a town with hot springs, about ten minutes from the castle town by train and half an hour on foot; there are restaurants and hot-spring inns and a park, and a licensed quarter besides. The dumpling shop I went into is at the entrance to the licensed quarter and has a great name, so I stopped on my way back from the baths and tried some. This time I met no pupils, so I thought nobody would know; but when I went to school the next day and into the first hour's class, there it was written up: dumplings, two plates, seven sen. As a matter of fact I ate two plates and paid seven sen. What a plaguey lot they are. In the second hour, thinking there was sure to be something again, I found: the dumplings in the licensed quarter are good, good. Insufferable creatures. I thought that was the end of the dumplings, and then a thing called the red towel got about. When I wondered what that meant, it turned out to have a trivial history. Ever since I came here I have made a rule of going to the Sumita hot spring every day. Everything else here is not fit to stand at Tokyo's feet, but the hot spring alone is a splendid thing. Having come all this way I mean to bathe every day, so I set out before supper, partly for the exercise. And when I go I always take a big Western towel dangling from my hand. Once the hot water had stained this towel its red stripes ran, so that at a glance it looks scarlet. I carry the towel dangling from my hand going and coming, on the train and on foot, always. So it seems the pupils call me the red towel, the red towel. Living in a narrow place is a tiresome business. There is more. The bath-house is a new three-storey building, and for the upper class they lend you a cotton robe and give you an attendant to sluice you down, all for eight sen. On top of that a girl brings out tea in a tenmoku bowl. I always went in at the upper class. At which they began saying it was extravagant to go upper class every day on a salary of forty yen. It is none of their business. There is more. The bath itself is built up of granite, walled off to about the size of a fifteen-mat room. As a rule there are thirteen or fourteen people soaking in it, but now and then there is nobody. It is deep enough to come up to your chest standing, so swimming about in the hot water for exercise is a great pleasure. I used to watch for a time when there was nobody there and swim round and round the fifteen-mat bath in high delight. Then one day I came down smartly from the third floor and looked in past the low bath-door to see whether I could have a swim today, and there was a great notice pasted up in thick black letters: NO SWIMMING IN THE BATH. There cannot be many people who swim in the bath, so this notice may have been got up specially for me. From then on I gave up swimming. I had given up swimming, but I was startled, when I went in to school, to find NO SWIMMING IN THE BATH written up on the blackboard in the usual way. It began to seem to me that the whole body of pupils was keeping detectives on me alone. It left me thoroughly out of sorts. Not that I am the sort of man to give up doing a thing because pupils say something about it; but when I thought why I had come to a cramped place like this, where the end of your nose is up against something, it was too dispiriting. And when I get home, the persecution by curios as usual.

Translator's log — frozen 2026-08-17, before any evaluation of this text was designed

Decisions and alternatives. Not quality claims; the two evaluative sentences below are marked.

(a) The narrator's tense. Sōseki slides between past narration and a present that is the narrator's standing opinion — 生徒はやかましい, 亭主が云うには, 主人が…来る — and chapter 2 kept that slide rather than regularising it. This chapter keeps it too: The pupils are noisy, What the master says is, And when I get home, the persecution by curios as usual. The alternative was to put the whole chapter into the past, which would make the English smoother and would delete a feature the source uses at least a dozen times.

(b) The pupils' dialect. 「あまり早くて分からんけれ、もちっと、ゆるゆる遣って、おくれんかな、 もし」 is Iyo dialect, and its most conspicuous marker is the sentence-final もし, which the narrator then quotes back with contempt (「おくれんかな、もしは生温るい言葉だ」). The dialect must therefore be visible in the English or the joke does not exist. The choice made is a light, non-regional rustic English — It be too fast, we can't follow … please now, sir — with もし carried by now, sir. Rejected: a named English dialect (West Country, Yorkshire), which would locate the pupils in England; and leaving the speech standard, which kills the paragraph. The same please now, sir is used at all three of its occurrences so that the narrator's quoting-back reads as quoting back.

(c) 先生 and 「先生には応えた」. Sensei is kept untranslated and italicised where it is being used at the narrator, because the whole passage is about the word as a sound directed at him (Every so often one of them says Sensei in an outrageously loud voice), and Teacher! in English is a schoolroom vocative with none of the weight. 応えた here is こたえる "to tell on, to get to" and not 答える "to answer" — the same verb returns in ¶4 at 「一杯飲むと胃に答える」. Both are rendered with get to: Sensei got to me / One cup of it and it gets to my stomach, so that the echo survives. Lost: the graphic pun by which Sōseki writes the first 応え and the second 答え.

(d) 端渓がる. 「端渓です、端渓ですと二遍も三遍も端渓がるから」 makes a verb out of the name of the inkstone. English will take the same move — and he Tankei'd away at me two or three times over — and the alternative, and he went on so about its being a Tankei, loses the fact that the source coins a word. Kept the coinage.

(e) Realia left standing. 物理学校, 丸の内の午砲, ケット, 短冊, 端渓, 天目, ざくろ口, 遊廓, 花崗石の十五畳敷. Rendered as the Physics School, the noon gun in Marunouchi, a blanket, a poem-slip, a Tankei, a tenmoku bowl, the low bath-door, a licensed quarter, walled off to about the size of a fifteen-mat room. ケット is Meiji clipped English for blanket and the clipping is lost. ざくろ口 is the low crawl-in entrance of an old bathhouse; the low bath-door states the shape and drops the name.

(f) The nicknames. Badger, Red Shirt, Porcupine — fixed in chapter 2 and not revisited here; see the front-matter note on 狸.

(g) Where the English is longer than the Japanese, and why. 5,821 characters → 3,410 words, a ratio close to chapter 2's (5,981 → 3,407). The additions are almost all connectives the Japanese carries by juxtaposition (so, but, and with that), plus two glosses that are one word each (demon in demon roof-tile, licensed in licensed quarter).

(h) 「三時までぽつ然として待ってなくてはならん」. Rendered I had to wait there, blankly, until three o'clock. The comma-flanked adverb is a deliberate awkwardness: the Japanese puts ぽつ然 in front of the verb where English wants it after, and wait there blankly reads as a compound. This is an evaluative sentence about my own English and is internal-judgment-only.

(i) One line I could not make work. 「机と睨めっくらをさせる」 — makes him sit staring a desk out of countenance. 睨めっくら is a staring-match, a children's game, and the joke is that the desk is his opponent. Out of countenance recovers the contest and sounds a century older than the rest of the paragraph. Left standing because every plainer alternative (makes him sit and stare at a desk) deletes the game. internal-judgment-only.

Mimetic census — written while translating, before any study of it was designed

The chapter's 擬音語・擬態語 sites, found by the same rule chapter 2 used, quoted verbatim from T-botchan-ch2-R06-v1 so that it cannot drift: a reduplicated bimoraic kana form (ABAB), or a bimoraic kana form with 〜り/〜と, functioning adverbially or as the stem of a light verb. Reduplicated forms that are degree or frequency adverbs rather than depictive are excluded by the rule and not by taste; so are the interjections.

The class column is the translator's own and is not evidence (note (bpt)): it is recorded so that an independent census and classification can be measured against it rather than built on it.

Excluded by the rule, listed so the exclusions can be checked rather than trusted. Degree or frequency adverbs: いよいよ (¶1, ¶5), ますます (¶2), なかなか (¶4, ¶5), とうとう (¶4), いろいろ (¶5), わざわざ (¶7), ちっとも (¶5), 折々 (¶5). Interjections and direct representations of laughter or shouting: わあ (¶2, ¶7), アハハハ (¶3), へへへへ (¶4). Lexical reduplications that are not depictive: 毎日毎日 (¶5), 馬鹿馬鹿しい (¶7), 旨い旨い (¶8), 赤手拭赤手拭 (¶8).

Three declared borderlines, excluded, and this is where an independent census will disagree if it disagrees anywhere. (i) いきなり (¶2) — four morae, not bimoraic-plus-り, so out by the rule; one of chapter 2's two independent raters added exactly this word to that chapter's census. (ii) 麗々と (¶6) and 黒々と (¶8) — reduplicated and adverbial and depictive, but written in kanji, and the rule as chapter 2 wrote it is a rule about kana forms. (iii) ぽつ然と (¶4) is included although its second half is kanji, because its first half is a bimoraic kana mimetic root and the 〜然と suffix is doing the work 〜り does elsewhere; the opposite call was available and is recorded here as available.

The two renderings at each site, written now, before any evaluation of them exists

At each site, the rendering that enacts the sound or manner with a sound-symbolic, phonaesthetic or reduplicative English resource (MK), and the rendering that states the same sound or manner in neutral idiomatic English (PL) — the two arms RS-20260816e §3 found are not paraphrases of each other. Recorded here because they are the choice the translator was actually making at each site, which is what a translator's log is for.

Five sites where no MK could be built, with the candidates that were tried and the reason each was refused. This is one translator's report and nothing more; RS-20260816e §5 withdrew the claim that such a count is a result in its own right, and this table does not reinstate it.

A note on MK at N05 and N07, made now so that it cannot be made later. Gritty and rattled through both do something the Japanese arguably does not: gritty carries a mild negative evaluation, and rattled through carries carelessness. They are entered as MK anyway, because the design's definition of MK is enacts by phonaestheme, not enacts and adds nothing — and whether they add something is exactly what an independent reader is going to be asked.