Repository path: workshop/translations/botchan/R24-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-botchan-R24-v1 — the same twelve paragraphs of Botchan chapter 1, with the located idiom permitted

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 — byte-identical to the span T-botchan-R22-v1 was written from.

Regime. R24 v1.0 (source-first located low): R23's cell A — +I −S, located idiom permitted, standard spelling — written in one pass from the source, not as a minimal revision of a placeless draft. Cost $0 (charter §3, A4).

Why this artifact exists. T-botchan-R22-v1 is the −I half of a pair on exactly this span, and it was frozen at 915bf89 on 2026-08-10 before the question this file answers had been asked. The two differ on one switch and one procedure. RS-20260810c §6 could not tell whether the located idiom is unavailable in this material or merely unreachable by minimal revision; §W5+ below is a translator's-chair answer to the first half of that, and the panel arms of E-20260810z are the answer to the second.

What was NOT consulted, and what was

Not consulted while translating — the Morri 1918 published translation; T-botchan-R04-v1, R04-v2, R21-v1; and T-botchan-R22-v1 and its 21-row W5 table, which is R24's procedure rule 1 and matters more here than the published comparator does. The pair is only readable if the +I half is a translation rather than a revision.

Consulted before translating, and this is a declared contamination of the lead's limb. The lead read RS-20260810c §5 and §6 in this session, before writing, in order to constitute the arm. §5 quotes two rows of the R22 log verbatim — row L4 (この外いたずらは大分やった, where the R22 rendering was there was a good deal of other mischief besides and the refused located option was recorded as get up to) and row L5 (尻を持ち込まれた, R22 had it brought home to me, refused option got it in the neck). Those two sites are flagged PRIMED in the table below and are excluded from every uptake rate computed from this log. No other row of the R22 log was seen before this pass.

Contamination against the published comparator: measured after the freeze, tools/dependence_check.py, against Yasotarō Morri 1918 chapter 1 — reported in E-20260810z/materials/contamination.json. It gates nothing here: the lead wrote this knowing the arm's question, which disqualifies the artifact from every primary figure more strongly than any overlap measurement could, and it is rated by nobody in the run this session designs.

Self-overlap is expected and is not independence. Note (bhb): the lead matches itself across sessions at up to 37 contiguous tokens, above its record against any published human translation. T-botchan-R24-v1 is not an independent second opinion of T-botchan-R22-v1 and no figure here treats it as one.

The translation

[¶2]

A relative gave me a Western-made knife, and I was holding the pretty blade up to the sun, showing it off to my friends, when one of them said it shone all right but it didn't look like it would cut. Anything it won't cut? I'll cut whatever you like, I said, and gave him my word on it. So he put in his order: cut your own finger, then. What's a finger, I said, and cut slantwise into the back of my right thumb. Luckily the knife was small and the thumb bone was hard, so the thumb is on my hand to this day. But the scar will not go till I do.

[¶3]

Twenty paces east across the garden and you run out of garden; there is a bit of a vegetable patch rising away to the south, and a chestnut tree standing in the middle of it. That tree mattered more to me than my own life. When the nuts were ripening I would be out of the back door the moment I was up, pick up the ones that had come down, and eat them at school. The west side of the patch backed onto the garden of a pawnshop, the Yamashiroya, and the pawnbroker had a lad of thirteen or fourteen called Kantarō. Kantarō was a funk, of course. Funk though he was, he would come over the lattice fence to pinch the chestnuts. One evening I hid behind the wicket gate and collared him at last. Kantarō, with nowhere left to run, came at me for all he was worth. He had a couple of years on me. A funk, but strong with it. He set his broad flat head against my chest and shoved and shoved, and with that his head slipped and went up the sleeve of my lined kimono. It was in the way and I could not use my arm, so I swung the arm about anyhow, and Kantarō's head, inside the sleeve, went wobbling left and right. In the end he could not bear it and bit into my upper arm from inside the sleeve. That hurt, so I pinned him to the fence, hooked his leg from under him and dropped him over the other side. The Yamashiroya's ground is a good six feet below the vegetable patch. Kantarō brought half the lattice fence down with him, went head first into his own territory, and said guh. As he went, one sleeve of my kimono came clean off and my arm was suddenly free. That evening my mother went round to the Yamashiroya to apologise, and got the sleeve back while she was at it.

[¶4]

Besides that I got up to a good deal of mischief. Once I took Kane, the carpenter's lad, and Kaku from the fishmonger's, and we wrecked Mosaku's carrot field. Straw had been laid all over a patch where the carrot shoots had not all come up yet, so the three of us wrestled on it half the day without a break and the carrots were all trodden flat. There was the time I filled in the well in Furukawa's paddy and got it in the neck for it. The way it worked was that a thick length of bamboo had its joints knocked out and was buried deep, and the water welled up out of it and went over the rice round about. At the time I did not know how it worked, so I rammed stones and bits of stick down the well, and once I had seen that the water had stopped I went home and was having my dinner when Furukawa came storming in, red in the face. It was settled with a fine, I think.

[¶5]

My old man never made the least fuss of me. My mother favoured my brother and nobody else. This brother was sickly white, and liked playing at theatre and doing the women's parts. Every time he laid eyes on me my old man said this one will come to no good. He is rough, so rough, there is no telling where he will end up, my mother said. Sure enough, I have come to no good. You can see the state of me. It was no wonder they wondered where I would end up. All that can be said is that I am alive and have not done time.

[¶6]

Two or three days before my mother died of her illness I turned a somersault in the kitchen, caught my ribs on the corner of the stove and it hurt like anything. My mother was furious and said she did not want to see the face of anything like me, so I went and stayed at a relative's. Then word came that she had gone after all. I had not thought she would go so soon. If she was as ill as that, I thought on the way back, I might have behaved myself a bit better. Whereupon that brother of mine said I was an undutiful son, that Mother had died early because of me. It got my back up, so I clouted him across the side of the head and got a terrible telling-off.

[¶11]

After that Kiyo had it in her head that once I had a house of my own and was independent she would come and live with me. Please take me in, she asked, over and over. Somehow I felt as though I might come to have a house, so I answered yes, I'll take you in — the answer, and nothing more. But this woman had a powerful imagination, and she went on laying out plans on her own and as she pleased: which do you like best, Kōjimachi or Azabu, do have a swing put up in the garden, one Western room will be quite enough. At the time I did not want a house or anything else. Western building or Japanese building, I had no use for either, so I always told Kiyo I did not want anything of the sort. At which she praised me again: you want so little, she said, and your heart is clean. Whatever I say, Kiyo praises me.

[¶13]

In the New Year of the sixth year after my mother died my old man went too, of a stroke. That April I finish at a private middle school. In June my brother finished at the commercial school. My brother had got a start at some firm's Kyushu branch and had to go. I still had to study in Tokyo. My brother came out with it: he would sell the house, settle up the property and leave for his post. Do as you like, I answered. I had no intention of sponging off him in any case. Even supposing he did look after me, we would only fight, and he would be bound to start saying something. It is only if you take that half-hearted protection that you have to bow your head to a brother like this one. I made up my mind I could keep myself fed delivering milk. Then my brother brought in a second-hand dealer and sold the family junk, handed down from our forefathers, for a song. The house and grounds went, through somebody's good offices, to a man of money. That side of it seems to have fetched a fair sum, but I know nothing at all about the details. A month before, I had gone into lodgings in Ogawamachi in Kanda, until I could see which way I was going. Kiyo was very sorry to see the house she had been in for a dozen years and more pass into other hands, but it was not hers, so there was nothing to be done. If only you were a little older, sir, you could inherit this place — she kept on at me about it. If I could inherit by being a little older, I ought to be able to inherit now. The old girl knows nothing about it, so she believes that all you need is years and you get your brother's house.

[¶15]

Two days before he left for Kyushu my brother came to my lodgings, put down six hundred yen and said: use it as capital and go into business, or use it for school fees and study, spend it as you please — but after that I have nothing to do with you. Handsome of him, for him, I thought; I would hardly be stuck without six hundred yen — but the clean way he went about it was unlike him and I liked it, so I thanked him and took it. Then he put down fifty yen more and said hand this to Kiyo while I was about it, and I took it on without argument. Two days later we parted at Shimbashi station, and I have not set eyes on him once since.

[¶16]

I lay in bed thinking what to do with the six hundred yen. Going into business would be a nuisance and I would never make a go of it, and six hundred yen would hardly run to a business worth the name anyway. And even if it did, as things stand I could not stand up in front of people and brag about having had an education, so it would come to nothing but a loss. Never mind capital; I would use it for school fees and study. Split six hundred yen three ways and spend two hundred a year and I can study for three years. Three years of hard graft and something will come of it. Then I thought about which school to go into, but I have never taken to study of any kind. Languages and literature and that sort of thing I will have none of, thank you. As for the new-style poetry, out of twenty lines I cannot make out one. If I was going to dislike it whatever it was, I thought, it made no odds what I did; and as luck would have it I was going past the School of Physics and there was a notice out for students, so I thought it must be fate, got the prospectus and went straight through the entrance formalities. Looking back, this too was a blunder that came of the recklessness I got from my parents.

[¶17]

For three years I studied about as much as anyone else, but I was no great shakes at it, so it was always quicker to count my place in class from the bottom. Funnily enough, when the three years were up I graduated after all. It struck me as odd myself, but there was nothing to complain about, so I went quietly and graduated.

[¶18]

Eight days after I graduated the principal sent for me, and thinking he must want something I went along: a middle school somewhere out Shikoku way needed a maths teacher. The pay was forty yen a month — how about going? That was the proposition. I had studied for three years, but to tell the truth I had no mind to be a teacher and no thought of going out to the country. Then again, I had nothing else lined up, so when the offer came I answered on the spot that I would go. This too was the recklessness I got from my parents coming home to roost.

[¶19]

Having taken it on, I had to go and take up the post. For those three years I shut myself up in a four-and-a-half-mat room and never once had a word said to me. I got through without a fight. As my life goes, it was a comparatively easy time. But now it came to it, the four-and-a-half-mat room had to go too. Since I was born the only time I had set foot outside Tokyo was an outing to Kamakura with my classmates. This time it is nothing like Kamakura. I have to go a terrible long way. On the map it is on the coast and looks as small as a pin point. It will be no great place. What sort of town it is, what sort of people live there, I do not know. Not knowing does me no harm. It does not worry me. I just go. Though it is a bit of a nuisance.

Translator's log

Coverage codes: P predicted by the rule set · D deviation with reason · INT decided by interpretation · L a loss the rule set caused.

W5+ — the per-site availability record

R24 procedure rule 3. One row per site at which the source has a proverb, a set phrase, a figure or a popular turn. code is one of:

• TAKEN — a located option was available and taken; item names it and where names the variety a reader would place it in;
• ANT — Available, Not Taken; item names the located option that was available and note says why the placeless wording was preferred;
• NONE — no located English option was found; note says what was searched for.

primed is Y at the two sites named in §What was NOT consulted. Rows with primed: Y are excluded from every rate computed over this table.

What the table says, counted by script

The counts are computed by workshop/experiments/E-20260810z-idiom-reach/code.py (log_table), which parses this section, and are asserted by verify.py. They are not typed here by hand — note (bey).

Rules that bound, in the order they bit

W6 — nothing is added — bit specifically on the located options, and it is the only rule that did. Three rows name it as the reason a located English phrase was refused — A13 (fair shoved supplies an intensifier), A47 (no side to it supplies an evaluation) and A63 (some godforsaken hole supplies contempt) — and a fourth, A21, refused shouting the odds on a neighbouring ground. A large part of English's located lexicon is emphatic, and a rule set that bars supply bars that part of it whatever the I switch says. INT.

W1 — nothing above the source's level — cut in the other direction, once (A36), and it was Kiyo's line. The narration never came near the ceiling.

−S cost exactly one site (A14), the noise Kantarō makes going over the fence. Everything else the +I switch wanted was dictionary-spelled, which is R23's line holding.

W3 — the numerical clause. English words against Japanese characters: counted by script in code.py, no return pass was needed.

The three decisions that took the longest

A07/A12, 弱虫 → a funk. The placeless options are a coward and a weakling, and both are a register above 弱虫, which is a child's word. The current colloquial equivalents are a wimp (1980s American), a chicken (American), a scaredy-cat* (childish, general). A funk* is British schoolboy slang contemporary with the book, and it is the only one of the four that is both a child's word and not anachronistic to 1906. It puts Kantarō in an English prep school, which is precisely the cost framework/v0.2 §7 is about. Under −I (R22) none of these was admissible and the site had to take the level-raising coward. INT.

A20, 尻を持ち込まれた → got it in the neck for it. The source idiom is "had the backside brought to me" — the complaint arrives at your door. Got it in the neck is the readiest English idiom for it and is British. This is a primed row: the lead had read the R22 log's refusal of this exact phrase before translating, and the row is excluded from the uptake count for that reason and no other. P.

A32, 横っ面を張って → clouted him across the side of the head. Clout is a dictionary word of northern English origin; slap and hit are placeless and lose the flatness of the hand; belted and walloped are located and stronger than 張る. The −S line is what makes this admissible — clout is spelled as the dictionary spells it, and had the readiest word been 'ammered it would have been barred. P.

One thing this pass noticed about the material, and it is a translation observation, not a claim

The sites where a located English option was not available cluster in a shape: they are the transcribed noise (A14), the Buddhist abstraction (A54), the neutral institutional verb (A03, A57), and the servant's decorous praise (A36). The sites where the located option was readiest are all the narrator's own body and temper — hitting, being hit, stealing, being caught, sulking, being told off. That is not a fact about Japanese; it is a fact about what English has kept its located vocabulary for. INT, internal-judgment-only.