Repository path: workshop/translations/botchan/R04-v2/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-botchan-R04-v2 — the five Kiyo paragraphs of Botchan chapter 1, close

Source. 夏目漱石「坊っちゃん」(1906), 一, paragraphs 8, 9, 10, 14 and 20 whole — 2,597 non-space Japanese characters, read in Japanese. Copy-text Aozora Bunko 000148/752_14964; span at workshop/translations/botchan/source-ja-span2.txt.

Regime. R04 v1.0 — the R06 source-only draft (T-botchan-R06-v2, frozen and committed at d9f5bab before this revision began, per R04 §2a), then self-revision against the source. Cost $0 (charter §3, A4).

Why these five. With T-botchan-R04-v1 (paragraphs 1, 7, 12, 21, 22) this completes the Kiyo thread of chapter 1 in one hand. Every deferential utterance in the chapter is now rendered by the lead: five in the S126 span, eight here.

Contamination: suspected, and the exposure is specific. Before translating, the lead had read A-morri-botchan, which quotes Morri's English for one utterance inside this span (「あなたは真っ直でよいご気性だ」, §6) and his handling of the three-yen privy sentence (§8), plus his preface and title. No other line of Morri's chapter 1 was read before this file and T-botchan-R06-v2 were written and committed. Measurement after freezing, against Morri's corresponding chapter-1 text (tools/dependence_check.py): reported in workshop/experiments/E-20260807g-indirect-deference/materials/contamination.json.

A second contamination, of a different kind, and it is why this artifact is not the primary. The lead wrote these renderings knowing the question the session was going to ask of them — whether deference survives conversion to indirect discourse. The renderings are therefore hypothesis-aware, and E-20260807g reads its primary on utterances frozen before the design existed (T-botchan-R04-v1, S126; T-saigo-no-ikku-R04-v2, S128). This file's eight utterances are an extension arm, reported separately and flagged.

At that point I resigned myself — there was nothing for it — and was ready to be disinherited exactly as he said; but Kiyo, the maidservant who had been ten years in our service, went to my father in tears and begged his pardon, and at last his anger loosened. Even so I did not think of my father as particularly frightening. If anything I felt sorry for this maidservant Kiyo. She had come, they say, of a family with some standing, but was ruined at the Collapse and came down at last to going into service. So she was an old woman. This old woman, by what karma I do not know, was extraordinarily fond of me. A strange thing. My mother had given me up three days before she died — my father found me a nuisance the year round — in the neighbourhood they flicked their fingers at me for a rowdy and a young devil — and this same me she prized without reason. I had given up on being the sort anyone likes, so to be handled by other people like a chip of wood was nothing to me; on the contrary I thought it suspicious to be made much of, the way Kiyo made much of me. Now and then, in the kitchen when nobody was about, Kiyo would praise me: "You are straight through and through, sir, and you have a fine nature." But I did not understand what Kiyo meant. If I had a fine nature, I thought, then somebody besides Kiyo would treat me a little better. Whenever Kiyo said this sort of thing I would answer, as a rule, that I disliked flattery. And the old woman would say, "That is just why you have a fine nature, sir," and gaze into my face, delighted. She looked as though she were proud of having manufactured me by her own power. It was a little uncanny.

After my mother died Kiyo grew fonder of me than ever. Sometimes, with a child's mind, I wondered why she should be so fond of me. It was pointless, I thought; she had better stop. I thought it a shame. Still Kiyo was fond of me. Now and then she would buy me kintsuba or kōbaiyaki out of her own pocket money. On cold nights she would lay in buckwheat flour on the quiet and, before I knew it, bring hot buckwheat gruel to the pillow where I lay. Sometimes she even bought me nabeyaki udon. And not food only. I got socks from her. I got pencils, I got notebooks. This was a good deal later, but she even lent me some three yen once. It was not that I had asked for a loan. She brought it to my room herself and said, "You must be in difficulties with no pocket money, sir. Please use it." Of course I said I did not need it, but she pressed me to take it, so I borrowed it. In fact I was very pleased. I put the three yen in a purse, and with the purse inside my kimono I went to the privy, and plop, dropped it down the pit. Nothing for it: I came slouching out and told Kiyo the thing was so-and-so, whereupon Kiyo went straight off and found a bamboo pole and said, "I shall get it out for you, sir." After a while there was a splashing at the well, and when I went out she had the purse hooked by its cord on the end of the bamboo and was washing it in the water. Then she opened it and looked the one-yen notes over: they had gone brown and the pattern was on its way to disappearing. Kiyo dried them at the brazier and held them out: "That should do now, sir." I gave them a sniff and said they stank, at which she said, "Then be so good as to hand them over, sir; I shall go and change them for you," and — by what dodge and where I have no idea — she came back with three yen in silver in place of the notes. What I spent that three yen on I have forgotten. I said I would pay it back presently, and that was that: I never did. Now, when I would gladly pay it back tenfold, I cannot.

When Kiyo gave me things it was always, without fail, when neither my father nor my brother was about. Of all the things I dislike, there is nothing I dislike so much as doing well for myself alone behind other people's backs. Of course I was not on good terms with my brother, but I did not want to take sweets and coloured pencils from Kiyo behind his back. Sometimes I would ask Kiyo why she gave to me alone and not to my brother. And Kiyo, cool as you please, would say, "Your brother has his bought for him by the master your father, so it does not matter, sir." This is unfair. My father was stubborn, but he was not a man to play favourites like that. Still, to Kiyo's eye it must have looked so. She was drowned in her affection, past any doubt. Come of good family or not, she was an uneducated old woman, and there was no helping it. And it was not only this. A partial eye is a frightening thing. Kiyo had got it into her head that I should rise in the world by and by and become somebody fine. And yet of my brother, who did study, she settled it all by herself that he was nothing but a pale face and would never be the least use. There is no dealing with an old woman like that. She believes that whoever she likes is bound to become a great personage and whoever she dislikes is certain to come down in the world. As for me, I had at that time no particular notion of becoming anything. But since Kiyo kept saying I would, I did think I should turn into something after all. Absurd, looking back on it. Once I even asked Kiyo what sort of thing I would become. But it seems Kiyo had no particular idea either. She only said that I should certainly ride in a hand-carriage and build myself a house with a splendid entrance hall.

So my brother and I parted in this fashion; what was awkward was where Kiyo should go. My brother was of course in no position to take her, and Kiyo had not the least intention of trailing at his heels all the way down to Kyushu; while I, at that time, was shut up in a four-and-a-half-mat room in a cheap lodging house and, if it came to it, would have to clear out of even that at once. There was nothing I could do. I asked Kiyo. When I said, did she mean to go into service somewhere, she answered, with the air of one who had at last made up her mind, "Until you have a house of your own, sir, and have taken a wife, there is nothing else for it: I shall be a charge on my nephew." This nephew was a clerk at the courthouse and got by well enough for the present, so he had two or three times invited Kiyo to come if she liked; but Kiyo would not have it, saying that even if she must serve as a maid she preferred the house she had lived in all those years. But as things now stood she must have thought it better to be a charge on her nephew than to change service to some strange household and begin all over again with constraint she had no need of. All the same she keeps at it: get a house soon, take a wife, and she will come and look after me. She must be fonder of me, an outsider, than of her own flesh-and-blood nephew.

Even after the house was broken up I went to Kiyo's place from time to time. This nephew of Kiyo's turned out to be an unexpectedly decent fellow. Every time I went, if he was in, he entertained me with this and that. Kiyo would set me down in front of her and treat her nephew to all manner of boasting about me. She once gave it out that as soon as I finished school I should buy a mansion out Kōjimachi way and go in to a government office. She settled it by herself and talked by herself, and I was put out and went red in the face. And not once or twice, either. Now and then she would bring out the fact that I had wet the bed when I was small, and that floored me. What the nephew made of Kiyo's boasting as he listened I have no idea. Only, Kiyo being a woman of the old style, she thought of her relation to me as that of retainer to lord in feudal times. It seems she had it settled that if he was her master he must be her nephew's master too. It is the nephew who is made a fool of.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-07, before the design of E-20260807g-indirect-deference was written. Decisions and alternatives. Any evaluative sentence here is internal-judgment-only.

1. The eight deferential utterances, and what carries them in English

This span exists because of them. Sōseki marks Kiyo's speech by morphology and honorific prefixes — あなた, お/ご on nouns, 尊敬語 verb forms (お上げなさる, お貰いになる), humble benefactive 上げる, and the polite ending です/ます — none of which English has. What English gave me instead, and what I actually used:

Eight of eight use a vocative. I did not set out to do that; I noticed it while making this table. The reason, so far as I can reconstruct it, is that English has no way to mark the verb for the addressee's standing, so the standing has to be said to someone, and sir is the only thing in the register that can be dropped into any sentence at any point without changing what the sentence asserts. Every other device I found — be so good as to, for you, please, the master your father — is either an imperative softener or a benefactive, and both of those are also things one says to a face.

2. What was lost, named

• 「お兄様はお父様が買ってお上げなさる」 carries three honorifics aimed at third parties (お兄様, お父様, お上げなさる) which place Kiyo below everyone in the household at once. I kept one (the master your father) and dropped the other two. The draft had "Your elder brother has his bought for him by your father, sir, so there is no call for it"; the revision restored one title and corrected 構いません, which is it does not matter, not there is no call for it.
• 「奥さまをお貰いになる」 — 奥さま is an honorific for the wife he has not yet got. English "have taken a wife" has no slot for it. Lost outright.
• 「随分ご機嫌よう」 is in the S126 span, not this one; noted because it is the same problem.

3. Revisions made against the source (draft → close)

1. 「もう仕方がないと観念して」 — draft "gave it up as hopeless"; close "resigned myself — there was nothing for it —". 観念する is resignation, not defeat.
2. 「怒りが解けた」 — "came off" → "loosened". The verb is untying, not falling away.
3. 「無暗に珍重してくれた」 — "prized beyond reason" → "prized without reason". 無暗に is indiscriminately, and beyond reason smuggles in a degree claim.
4. 「構いません」 — "there is no call for it" → "it does not matter" (see §2).
5. 「是非使え」 — "use it" → "take it", because the English press to use reads as instruction rather than as pressing a gift.
6. 「改めたら」 — "looked over" → "looked … over", split so the notes are the object of an inspection rather than of a glance.
7. 「甥こそいい面の皮だ」 — "comes off badly" → "is made a fool of". 面の皮 is being made to look a fool, not merely losing out.
8. Tense: 「仕方がない」 in ¶10 and 「思った」 in ¶9 were pulled back to past. 「信じている」 in ¶10 was deliberately left in the present — Sōseki keeps Kiyo's beliefs in the present tense inside a past narration, and the English can hold that.

4. Realia kept untranslated

金鍔, 紅梅焼, 蕎麦湯, 鍋焼饂飩 → kintsuba, kōbaiyaki, hot buckwheat gruel, nabeyaki udon. Three transliterated, one glossed. The rule I applied: transliterate where the thing is a named confection or dish and gloss where the Japanese word is itself descriptive (蕎麦湯 is literally the water buckwheat was boiled in). 瓦解 → the Collapse, capitalised and unglossed: the narration assumes the reader knows which one, and glossing it would put a historian's voice into a sentence that has none.

5. Where the draft and the close agree, and it matters for what follows

Not one of the eight deferential utterances changed its discourse form between draft and revision. All eight are direct speech in both, and all eight carry a vocative in both. Whatever the revision improved, it did not touch the thing this span was rendered to expose.