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

T-botchan-R04-v1 — five spans of Botchan chapter 1, close

Source. 夏目漱石「坊っちゃん」(1906), 一, paragraphs 1, 7, 12, 21 and 22 whole — 1,507 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), fetched 2026-08-07. Working span workshop/experiments/E-20260807b-botchan-register/materials/src-spans.txt.

Regime. R04 v1.0 — the R06 source-only draft (frozen separately as T-botchan-R06-v1), then self-revision against the source. Cost $0 (charter §3, A4).

Why these paragraphs. They are the five in chapter 1 that carry both poles of the chapter's register system at once: the narrator's plain 俺-register narration, and Kiyo's deferential speech, including the chapter's highest form (遊ばせ) and the address term that is the book's title.

Contamination: suspected, and measured. Two exposures are declared: the lead read Morri's 1918 translator's preface before translating — a statement of his register programme, not his text — and knew his title, Master Darling. No line of Morri's chapter 1 was read until this file and T-botchan-R06-v1 had been written and committed. Measured afterwards against Morri's corresponding chapter-1 text (tools/dependence_check.py, cells and verdict in workshop/experiments/E-20260807b-botchan-register/materials/contamination.json): 4 shared 7-grams, 0 twelve-grams, longest common run 9 tokens — clean, and below an independent published pair on every column both at full length (160 / 27 / 24) and length-matched to 900 words (41 / 7 / 16). The suspected declaration is kept rather than downgraded, because the preface exposure is real and a measurement against one comparator cannot retire it.

(text as frozen: workshop/experiments/E-20260807b-botchan-register/materials/r04-spans.txt)

[P01] Reckless from birth — I got it from my parents — and it has been losing me something ever since I was a child. In grade school I jumped out of the second storey and lost the use of my legs for a week. There may be people who ask what I did anything so rash for. There was no deep reason. I had my head out of an upstairs window of the new building when one of my class sang out, for a joke, that swagger as I liked I would never get down from there. Yellow-belly! Ya-a-ah! So I jumped. When the janitor carried me home on his back my old man made his eyes big and said, what sort of fellow jumps off a mere second storey and loses the use of his legs — and I answered, next time I shall jump without losing it.

[P07] After my mother died the three of us lived on together, my old man, my brother and I. My old man was a man who did nothing whatever, and he had only to see your face to say, you're no good, you're no good, the way another man says good morning. What it was that was no good about me I do not know to this day. A queer sort of old man to have had, that. My brother said he was going to be a businessman and was hard at his English all day long. He had a womanish streak in him to begin with, and he was sly, so we did not get on. We had a fight about once in ten days. Once we were at chess and he laid a cowardly waiting-piece, and when I was stuck he sat there enjoying it and needling me. I lost my temper and let him have the rook I was holding, full in the middle of the forehead. The skin split and a little blood came out. My brother told my old man. My old man began to talk of disowning me.

[P12] After that Kiyo took it into her head that when I had a house of my own and was independent she would live in it with me. Please do keep me, she begged, over and over. I felt somehow as though I might come to have a house, and I answered, right, I'll keep you — the answer and no more than the answer. But this was a woman with a powerful imagination, and she would lay out plans of her own all by herself: which quarter would you like, sir, Kōjimachi or Azabu; you must be pleased to have a swing put up in the garden; one Western room will be quite enough. At that time I did not want a house in the least. A Western house and a Japanese house were both entirely useless to me, so I always answered Kiyo that I wanted nothing of the sort. Whereupon she praised me again, and said I had few wants and a clean heart. Whatever I said, Kiyo praised me.

[P21] When it was settled at last, I called on Kiyo three days before I was to go, and found her lying ill with a cold in a three-mat room facing north. She sat up the moment she saw me come in and asked, young master, when will you be setting up your house? She was under the impression that money wells up in a man's pocket of itself the moment he graduates. To collar a man of that eminence and still call him young master was idiotic beyond anything. I said shortly that I would not be having a house for the present, I was going to the country; and she looked bitterly disappointed and kept stroking the loose hair at her salt-and-pepper temples. I was sorry for her, so I comforted her: "I am going, but I shall soon be back. I shall certainly be back in next year's summer holidays." She still had an odd look on her face, so I tried her with, "what shall I bring you back, what would you like?" and she said, "I should like to eat the bamboo-leaf candy of Echigo." Bamboo-leaf candy of Echigo — I had never heard of it. And in the first place it was in the wrong direction. When I told her so — "there does not seem to be any bamboo-leaf candy in the country I am going to" — she asked back, "then which way would it be?" I said, "westward," and she asked, "beyond Hakone, or this side of it?" She was a fair handful.

[P22] On the day I left she came in the morning and fussed over everything. She had bought toothpowder and a toothbrush and a towel at a notions shop on her way, and she put them into my canvas bag. I told her I did not need such things, but she would not hear of it. We took rickshaws side by side to the station, and when I had got out on the platform and into the carriage she looked hard at my face and said, in a small voice, "This may be our parting. I wish you very well indeed." Her eyes were brimming with tears. I did not cry. But I came very near to crying. When the train was well under way I thought it would be safe by now, and put my head out of the window and looked back, and she was still standing there. Somehow she looked very small.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-07, before the study limb of E-20260807b-botchan-register was designed and before any line of Morri 1918's chapter 1 was read.

1. The chapter is built on a two-pole register opposition and English has one pronoun for both ends of it. The narration runs in the plain, blunt 俺-register: おやじ for the father (not 父), 婆さん for Kiyo, 奴 used of people and of chestnuts alike, ぬ/ん negatives beside slangy lexis (無鉄砲, 馬鹿気ている, 持てあました). Against it stands Kiyo's speech, which is deferential throughout — あなた, お/ご prefixes, なさいます, 下さい, and at its top 遊ばせ — and which addresses the narrator by an honorific that is the book's title. The father's 貴様 is a third point, contemptuous-familiar, below the narration. English has one first-person pronoun, one second-person pronoun, and no morphological deference at all, so none of the four positions can be carried where the Japanese carries it.
2. What I expect to have failed at, written down before anything is measured. RS-20260806g found, on Italian→English, that English's raising shelf is deep and available in narration while its lowering shelf is almost entirely dialogue-shaped. If that is a fact about English and not about Verga, then in this passage the pole I will have failed to carry is the low one, in the narration, and the pole I will have carried is Kiyo's high one — because the deferential end has English devices (archaic politeness formulae, vocatives, elaborated syntax) that work in any position, and the low end has almost nothing that works in narration without turning the narrator into a dialect speaker. I record this as the prediction it is; I am not entitled to score my own output against it. (internal-judgment-only.)
3. 坊っちゃん → young master, and the choice is the whole problem in one word. Options considered: (a) keep 坊っちゃん untranslated; (b) Master alone; (c) young master; (d) a name-substitute. (c) was taken. It is an English domestic-service register word, which is the right social position, and it is not an English nursery word, which 坊っちゃん also is — the affection in the Japanese is carried by the diminutive ちゃん and by nothing in the English. Loss declared. (Exposure declared: Morri's title, Master Darling, was known before the choice was made; it is why (b) was considered and rejected as reading like a name.)
4. 貴様 was flattened and there was no alternative. 「貴様は駄目だ駄目だ」 became you're no good, you're no good. English second-person you is register-neutral; thou is archaic-elevated, not contemptuous, in any register a modern reader owns; and a vocative (boy, you) would supply an address the Japanese does not use. The contempt in the pronoun goes entirely into the repetition and the simile I did not add. Loss declared.
5. The narrator's own ます-form to his father is lost. 「この次は抜かさずに飛んで見せます」 is the one place in P01 where the narrator himself speaks upward, and it sits three clauses after the schoolyard jeer. In English both come out in the same plain register. I considered sir and rejected it: it would state a deference the Japanese marks morphologically, in a slot the Japanese leaves empty, and P01 is not about the boy's manners.
6. 遊ばせ found the one English slot that fits, and it is archaic. 「お庭へぶらんこをおこしらえ 遊ばせ」 is the highest form in the chapter — a deferential imperative. English has one: be pleased to. I took it (you must be pleased to have a swing put up in the garden), knowing it dates the English by about a century more than the Japanese dates itself. That is the trade the low end never once offered me: no English lowering device sat waiting in the same way.
7. Kiyo's sir is an addition, and it is displaced marking. 「あなたはどこがお好き、麹町ですか 麻布ですか」 carries deference in あなた and お好き. English carries servant-to-master deference in the vocative, which the Japanese sentence does not have. Adding sir moves the marking from morphology into a slot the source leaves empty — framework/v0.1 §2's displaced marking, with the cost that the English says something (a form of address) the Japanese does not say. Taken once, at P12, and not repeated at every Kiyo line, on the load argument that decided 吾輩 in T-wagahai-R04-v1.
8. 腰を抜かす occurs three times in P01 and the repetition is the joke. The father's reproach and the son's answer are the same verb, and if English varies it the exchange stops being an exchange. Held on lose the use of (his/my) legs → without losing it, at the cost of a phrase heavier than 腰を抜かす.
9. 擲きつけてやった → let him have. The てやった is the malicious benefactive: the act is done at someone, with satisfaction. English has no auxiliary for it; let him have it is the nearest idiom that carries the satisfaction, and it is idiom rather than grammar, so it can be spent only once.
10. 飛車 → rook, 将棋 → chess. The revision considered shōgi with the piece kept as hisha. Rejected: the sentence is about a brother cheating and a rook to the forehead, and two glossed words would make it about a board game. Loss: the game is Japanese and the English says it is not.
11. 越後の笹飴 was kept and glossed inside itself — the bamboo-leaf candy of Echigo. It has to stay a place-name plus an object the narrator has never heard of, because the joke in P21 is that he has never heard of it and does not know where Echigo is.
12. Revision changes from R06, all in the same direction. knocks his legs out from under him → loses the use of his legs (item 8); threw the rook … at → let him have the rook …, full in (item 9); Yah, coward! → Yellow-belly! Ya-a-ah!; a strange sort of old man → a queer sort of old man to have had, that; She was a great deal to put up with → She was a fair handful; you must have a swing put up in the garden for yourself → you must be pleased to have a swing put up in the garden (item 6). Six changes, five of them lowering the narration or raising Kiyo — which is to say the revision pass spent itself almost entirely on register.