Repository path: workshop/translations/botchan/R22-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-botchan-R22-v1 — the twelve remaining paragraphs of Botchan chapter 1, placeless low

Source. 夏目漱石「坊っちゃん」(1906), 一, paragraphs 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 whole — 3,482 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), stored at wiki/base/anchors/A-morri-botchan/botchan-soseki-1906-ch1-ja.txt; the span as translated is workshop/translations/botchan/source-ja-span3.txt.

With this file, chapter 1 is rendered whole in the lead's hand. T-botchan-R04-v1 took paragraphs 1, 7, 12, 21, 22; T-botchan-R04-v2 took 8, 9, 10, 14, 20 — the Kiyo thread. These twelve are the remainder, and they are almost entirely narration: the chapter's boyhood catalogue, the father and brother, the six hundred yen, the physics school, the posting to Shikoku.

Regime. R22 v1.0 (placeless low), single pass from the source alone, no published rendering consulted while translating. Cost $0 (charter §3, A4).

Why this regime on this span. R22 is a low-register programme with every locatable means removed, and its rule W5 requires a per-site record of the locatable option it refused. Botchan's narration is the natural test material: a brash 俺-narrator in plain だ/である, colloquial throughout, and the only paragraphs of the chapter with no deferential speech in them. What the log below records is what an English translator has left when the two obvious ways down are taken away one at a time.

Contamination: suspected, and the exposure is specific and old. Botchan has six complete English renderings (S-botchan). Earlier sessions of this project read Yasotarō Morri's 1918 chapter 1 whole (A-morri-botchan, RS-20260807b) and hold Turney 1972 and Cohn 2005 in private-texts/. No line of any English rendering of this span was opened by this session before this file was frozen, and the measurement against Morri is reported in §Contamination below, made after the freeze. The declaration is suspected rather than none because the lead cannot claim independence from renderings the project has read in other sessions.

This artifact enters no primary of any experiment. It is a craft artifact and, where a study limb rates it at all, a quarantined secondary — the lead wrote it knowing the question ARM-register-reach asks.

The translation

¶2

A relative gave me a foreign knife, and I was holding the bright blade up to the sun to show it to my friends when one of them said it shone all right but it didn't look as if it would cut. Not cut? I said, I'll cut anything you like. Then cut your finger, he said. What, a finger? I said, like this — and cut into the back of my right thumb on the slant. Luckily the knife was small and the thumb bone was hard, so the thumb is on my hand to this day. But the scar won't go till I die.

¶3

Twenty paces east across the garden the ground rises to the south into a bit of a vegetable patch, and in the middle of it stands one chestnut tree. That chestnut matters more to me than my life. When the nuts were ripening I'd go out the back door the moment I was up, pick up the ones that had fallen and eat them at school. The west side of the patch ran up against the garden of a pawnshop called the Yamashiroya, and the pawnbroker had a son of thirteen or fourteen named Kantarō. Kantarō was a coward, of course. Coward as he was, he'd climb the fence and come stealing chestnuts. One evening I hid behind the side gate and caught him at last. He had no way out by then and came at me for all he was worth. He was about two years older. A coward, but strong. He put his broad flat head against my chest and shoved and shoved, and his head slipped and went up the sleeve of my jacket. It was in the way and I couldn't use my hand, so I swung my arm about anyhow, and Kantarō's head inside the sleeve rolled from side to side. In the end he couldn't bear it and bit my arm through the sleeve. That hurt, so I pushed him against the fence, hooked his leg and threw him over. The Yamashiroya's ground is six feet lower than the patch. Kantarō brought down half the fence with him, fell head first into his own territory and grunted. As he fell, one sleeve of my jacket tore off and my arm was suddenly free. That night my mother went to apologise at the Yamashiroya and brought the sleeve back with her.

¶4

There was a good deal of other mischief besides. I once took Kane, the carpenter's boy, and Kaku from the fish shop, and we wrecked Mosaku's carrot field. Straw had been spread all over a patch where the carrot shoots hadn't come up evenly, and the three of us wrestled on it for half a day without stopping until every carrot was trodden flat. Another time I filled in the well in Furukawa's rice field and had it brought home to me. They had sunk a thick length of bamboo deep in the ground with the joints knocked out, and the water came up through it and ran onto the rice round about. I didn't know then how it worked, so I rammed stones and bits of stick down the well until I had made sure the water had stopped, went home, and was having my dinner when Furukawa came shouting in, red in the face. I think it was settled by paying a fine.

¶5

My father wasn't in the least fond of me. My mother took my brother's side and nobody else's. This brother was very white in the face and liked play-acting, taking the women's parts. Every time he saw me my father said this one will never come to any good. He's rough, he's rough, there's no knowing where he'll end up, my mother said. Quite right, I have never come to any good. You can see the state of me. There was nothing unreasonable in their fearing for me. It's only that I'm alive and not in prison.

¶6

Two or three days before my mother died of her illness I turned a somersault in the kitchen, hit my ribs on the corner of the stove, and it hurt a great deal. My mother was very angry and said she didn't want to see a face like mine, so I went to stay with relatives. Then word came that she had died after all. I hadn't thought she'd die so soon. If she was as ill as that I should have behaved a little better, I thought, coming home. And then that brother of mine said I was an unfilial son, that our mother had died early because of me. It galled me, so I hit him across the side of the face and was scolded terribly.

¶11

After that Kiyo meant to live with me once I had a house of my own and was on my own feet. Please keep me with you, she asked, over and over. And somehow I felt as if I might have a house, and I answered, yes, all right, I'll keep you — the answer and no more. But this woman had a very strong imagination, and she'd set out her own plans by herself: which part of town would you like, sir, Kōjimachi or Azabu, do have a swing put up in the garden, one Western room will be quite enough. I didn't want a house of any kind at the time. A Western house and a Japanese house were both no use to me whatever, so I told Kiyo every time that I wanted nothing of the sort. Then she'd praise me again and say I wanted little and had a clean heart. Whatever I say, Kiyo praises me.

¶13

In the New Year of the sixth year after my mother died, my father died too, of a stroke. In April of that year I finish at a private middle school. In June my brother finished at his commercial school. My brother had the offer of a place at some company's branch in Kyushu and had to go. I still had to study, in Tokyo. My brother came out with it that he'd sell the house, clear up the property and leave for his post. Do as you please, I answered. I had no mind to live off him in any case. Even if he looked after me we'd quarrel, and he was bound to come out with something sooner or later. It's only because you take protection you can do without that you have to bow your head to a brother like that. I made up my mind I could keep myself delivering milk. My brother then called in a dealer and sold off the family junk, handed down for generations, for a song. The house and grounds went to a rich man through somebody's good offices. This seems to have brought in a good deal, but I know nothing about it. A month before, I had moved into lodgings in Ogawamachi in Kanda until I could see my way ahead. Kiyo was very sorry the house she had been in for ten years and more was passing into other hands, but it wasn't hers and there was nothing to be done. If you were a little older, sir, you could have come into this place, she kept telling me. If I could come into it by being a little older, I could come into it now. The old woman knows nothing, and believes that if I only grow older I shall be given my brother's house.

¶15

Two days before he left for Kyushu my brother came to my lodgings, put down six hundred yen and said I could use it as I liked — start a business with it, or study on it — but that after that he'd have nothing more to do with me. It was a decent way of going about it, for him. Six hundred yen or no six hundred yen, I'd have got by, I thought; but the plain way he went about it was unlike him and I liked it, so I thanked him and took it. He then put down another fifty yen and asked me to pass it to Kiyo while I was at it, and I took that on without a word against it. Two days later we parted at Shimbashi station, and I haven't seen him once since.

¶16

I lay in bed and thought about how to use the six hundred yen. Business is a bother and I shouldn't be good at it, and six hundred yen isn't enough to do any business worth the name with. Even if it were, the way I was I couldn't stand up in front of people and give myself airs about my education, so in the end I'd only lose by it. Never mind capital; I'd use it to study on. Divide six hundred by three and spend two hundred a year, and I could study for three years. Work hard for three years and something will come of it. Then I thought about which school to go to, but I've never liked any kind of learning from birth. Languages and literature in particular I want nothing to do with. As for the new poetry, I can't make out one line in twenty. Since I disliked them all, it made no odds what I did, I thought; and then I happened to pass the school of physics, and there was a notice up asking for students, so I thought it must be meant, got a copy of the regulations and went through the entrance procedure on the spot. Looking back on it now, this too was a blunder that came of the rashness I got from my parents.

¶17

For three years I studied about as much as anyone else, but I wasn't much good, so it was always handier to count my place in the class from the bottom. Still, it's a strange thing, but when the three years were up I finished after all. Even I thought it was odd, but I had no grounds for complaint, so I finished quietly.

¶18

Eight days after I finished, the head of the school sent for me. Thinking it must be something or other, I went along, and it turned out to be a proposal: a middle school somewhere in Shikoku wanted a teacher of mathematics. The pay was forty yen a month — how about going? For all my three years of study, the truth is I had no wish to be a teacher and no thought of going to the country either. Still, I had no prospect of doing anything but teach, so when the proposal was put to me I answered on the spot that I'd go. This too was the doing of the rashness I got from my parents.

¶19

Having taken it on, I had to go and take up the post. For those three years I'd shut myself up in one small room and not once been scolded. I got through without a quarrel too. It was a comparatively easy time of my life. But now the small room had to go as well. Since I was born, the only time I'd set foot outside Tokyo was on a school outing to Kamakura with my classmates. This wasn't Kamakura. I had to go a very long way. On the map it's on the coast and looks as small as the point of a needle. It won't be much of a place whatever it is. What sort of town it is and what sort of people live there I don't know. Not knowing doesn't trouble me. It's nothing to worry about. I'm simply going. Though it is a bit of a bother.

1,961 English words against 3,482 non-space Japanese characters.

Translator's log

Frozen with the translation, before the study limb of ARM-register-reach existed. Coverage codes per R22 §Procedure: P predicted by the rule set · D deviation with reason · INT decided by interpretation · L a loss the rule set caused. Every evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only by the page's front matter.

W5's required record — the locatable option refused, site by site

This is the rule set's own evidence and the reason the regime exists. Each row is a place where the Japanese sits below its own neutral written level and English's readiest way down was locatable under W5's operational test (would a reader in another English-speaking country register this as belonging somewhere else, or as marking the speaker's class?).

Twenty-one sites; at nineteen of them the readiest English was locatable and was refused. That is the count W5 exists to produce, and it is the fact the study limb has to price: the constraint bites almost everywhere, so the question of what it costs is not decidable from the log. internal-judgment-only.

What I notice while making that table, and cannot settle from here. The refused options divide into two kinds that W5's single rule treats alike. Clobber, narked, faff, no great shakes are lexical — a word from somewhere. Get up to, round, all round, reckon are grammatical or collocational — no unusual word in them at all, and they locate the sentence anyway. The second kind is the one that surprised me: I can avoid a British word by looking for another word, but I cannot avoid a British preposition without rebuilding the clause, and three times I rebuilt the clause and lost the movement (L4, L6, L19). internal-judgment-only.

Decisions by rule

1. P/W2 — source-culture particulars flattened. 袷 → jacket (L: the lined kimono is gone, and with it the fact that a sleeve is a sack); 四つ目垣 → the fence (L: the open-lattice construction is what lets Kantarō break half of it); へっつい → the stove; 孟宗 → bamboo (L: the species, and its thickness, which is the point of 太い); 女形 → the women's parts; 停車場 → station; 新体詩 → the new poetry; 物理学校 → the school of physics.
2. P/W2, and the largest L in the file — 四畳半 → one small room (¶19, twice). The four-and-a-half-mat room is the standard cheap lodging of the period and its size is a social fact; one small room keeps the smallness and loses the price. I took it because W2 is a rule about particulars and a mat count is the most particular thing in the paragraph. A translator not under W2 would keep the mats.
3. P/W1 — nothing above the source's level. The narration is 俺 in plain だ/である and I contracted throughout (didn't, I'd, won't). R22 W5 names contraction among the placeless means, and an uncontracted I do not know in ¶19 would sit above the Japanese, not level with it.
4. D/W3 — the numerical clause has no comparator on this span and is not applied. W3 requires the finished English to be no longer than the source in tokens; the source is Japanese and no token count of it is commensurable with an English one. T-botchan-R21-v1 satisfied W3 by counting against an R04 rendering of the same paragraphs, and no R04 rendering of these twelve exists. The English is 1,961 words; the discipline was applied by hand and the number is recorded so a later session with a second rendering can check it.
5. P/W6 — nothing added. Two places where the English wanted a word the Japanese does not have and did not get one: ¶5's 乱暴で乱暴で is he's rough, he's rough and not he's far too rough; ¶19's ただ行くばかりである is I'm simply going and not I'm just going anyway.
6. INT — the tense shifts are the source's and are kept. 「これは命より大事な栗だ」 (¶3), 「その年の四月におれは……卒業する」 (¶13), 「清は何と云っても賞めてくれる」 (¶11) and most of ¶19 are present in Japanese inside past narration. English convention would regularise them. I kept every one, because the voice is a man telling it now and the switches are where he leans in.
7. INT — Kiyo's honorifics inside narration. ¶11's 「お庭へぶらんこをおこしらえ遊ばせ」 and ¶13's 「ご相続が出来ますものを」 are the chapter's highest deferential forms and they fall inside these narration paragraphs as quoted speech. R22 is a register programme aimed downward and says nothing about the up-pole; I marked the deference with sir twice and no more. R04-v1 and R04-v2 handled the same forms under a different regime and the two renderings are not consistent with each other. That inconsistency is real and is declared, not repaired.
8. L — 「二の腕」 is the upper arm and I wrote my arm, because bit my upper arm through the sleeve is a sentence about anatomy and the Japanese is a sentence about a fight.
9. INT — 「ぐうと云った」 rendered as grunted. The Japanese is a sound, quoted; and went "ugh" keeps the quotation and adds a spelling I would then have to defend under W5.
10. D/W2 — place names kept: Kōjimachi, Azabu, Ogawamachi, Kanda, Shimbashi, Kamakura, Shikoku, Kyushu, Tokyo, and the shop name Yamashiroya. W2 flattens particulars, not names; E-20260808e's site criterion excludes proper names from being sites at all, and the same exclusion is the sensible reading of W2.

What I think this span shows, and cannot show alone

The chapter's low register is not carried by vocabulary. There is almost no slang in these 3,482 characters; what makes the narration low is that it is fast, flat, unsubordinated and rude about everyone including the narrator. English has that without going anywhere: short clauses, contraction, parataxis, and then, so, anyway. Where I had to refuse something (the table above) it was almost always a figure — a set phrase — and not a plain sentence. If that generalises, the framework's register question is smaller than it looks, because the placeless means cover the plain sentences and the locatable means are only needed for the figures.

I cannot test that here and I am not permitted to judge this file. It is written down so that it is on the record before the measurement, and so that if the measurement disagrees the disagreement is visible. internal-judgment-only.

Contamination

Measured after the freeze, against Yasotarō Morri (1918) chapter 1 — the only English rendering of this span the project holds in a public-domain, whole-text form. tools/dependence_check.py, raw output at workshop/experiments/E-20260810c-register-reach/materials/contamination.json:

The subject pair sits below the project's own already-measured reference pair against the same comparator on every column.

The declaration does not gate anything in this arm, because this artifact enters no primary, no gate and no pooled figure of the study limb: the lead wrote it knowing the question the arm asks, which is a stronger disqualification than any contamination measurement could be, and it is fixed here before the measurement was made.