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

〈風波〉 "The Storm" — Lu Xun, 1920, whole, R06 (lead single pass)

• Source: 魯迅 Lu Xun, 〈風波〉, first published New Youth 8.1, 1 September 1920; text of record the 1948 《魯迅全集》 vol. 1 pp. 353–364 as transcribed at zh.wikisource.org, retrieved 2026-08-11. 60 paragraphs, 4,307 characters. Stored whole at ../source-zh.txt — public domain (Lu Xun d. 1936; PD in China at life + 50 and in the United States).
• Regime: R06 v1.0 — lead, source only, single pass, no return pass.
• Translator: the lead agent, as a labeled subject (charter §3, A4). Cost $0, never ledgered.
• Date: 2026-08-11 (S157).
• Lineage: the translation limb of E-20260811b-realia-channel (ARM-realia-channel step 1). The story was chosen because its realia are its substance — a queue, a steelyard, a catty, a yamen, a Dragon Throne, forty-eight cash — so the retain-or-domesticate decision is live in almost every paragraph, which is what the study limb needs a translator's frozen record of.
• Contamination: suspected, and it is measured — ../contamination.md. Against the one reachable published rendering (Yang Hsien-yi & Gladys Yang, fetched mechanically before the lead read the Chinese, never read), the lead shares 53 seven-grams, 15 twelve-grams and a longest common run of 26 tokens — the project's longest run ever against a published human translation. The fifteen twelve-grams are fifteen windows of that one run, a chiastic slogan; with name-bearing n-grams excluded the counts fall to 5 seven-grams and 0 twelve-grams, at the ordinary independent-pair baseline. Run length alone is a poor proxy and both figures are reported (CLAUDE.md §Contamination). The remaining shared runs are almost all realia terms with conventional English equivalents — queue, Long Hairs, Taoist priest, Five Tiger Generals, speckled bamboo pipe.
• Priming: none. Translated from the Chinese alone. No English rendering of this story was opened or read by the lead at any point; the comparator was fetched to a scratch directory by curl, never displayed, and never stored in the repository.
• Third language: Chinese is the project's fourth work in Chinese (after 〈孔乙己〉, 〈促織〉, 〈狂人日記〉 materials) and the first Lu Xun story translated whole here.

The translation

On the beaten-earth yard beside the river the sun was drawing in its yellow light little by little. The leaves of the tallow trees at the edge of the yard, parched dry, had only now got their breath back, and a few mottle-legged mosquitoes hummed and danced beneath them. In the chimneys of the farmhouses that faced the river the cooking-smoke was thinning; the women and children were throwing water over the earth outside their own doors and setting out the small tables and the low stools. Everybody knew: it was supper-time already.

The old men and the men sat on the low stools waving big plantain-leaf fans and gossiping; the children ran as though they were flying, or squatted under the tallow trees gambling with pebbles. The women brought out steamed dried greens, black as pitch, and rice as yellow as pine-pollen, smoking hot. A gentleman's wine-boat came down the river, and the great writer aboard it, seeing all this, was seized with poetry and said, "Not a thought, not a care — this is the true joy of the farmer's life!"

But the great writer's words were somewhat at odds with the facts, and this was because he had not heard what Old Mrs Nine-Catties was saying. At that moment Old Mrs Nine-Catties was in a towering rage, beating the leg of her stool with a broken plantain-leaf fan and saying:

"I have lived to seventy-nine, I have lived long enough, and I have no wish to look on at this family going to ruin — better to be dead. We are about to eat, and here she is at the fried beans, eating a whole household into poverty!"

Her great-granddaughter Six-Catties came running up from the other side with a fistful of beans, and seeing how things stood made straight for the river, hid behind a tallow tree, put out her little head with its two horn-tufts and shouted, "The old thing that won't die!"

Old Mrs Nine-Catties was of great age, but her ears were not yet very deaf; still, she did not hear the child, and went on saying to herself, "Truly, each generation is worse than the last!"

There was a somewhat peculiar custom in this village: when a woman gave birth, the family generally liked to weigh the child on the steelyard and use the number of catties as its milk-name. Ever since she had celebrated her fiftieth birthday Old Mrs Nine-Catties had gradually turned into a woman with a grievance: she was for ever saying that when she was young the weather had not been as hot as this, nor the beans as hard as these — in short, there was something wrong with the present age. And besides, Six-Catties was three catties short of her great-grandmother and one catty short of her father Seven-Catties, which was an irrefutable proof of the thing. So she said again, with force, "Truly, each generation is worse than the last!"

Her son's wife, Seven-Catties' wife, was just coming to the table with the rice-basket in her arms; she slammed the basket down on the table and said indignantly, "There you go again, mother. When Six-Catties was born, wasn't she six catties five taels? And your family's steelyard is a private steelyard, it weighs heavy, eighteen taels to the catty; on a proper sixteen our Six-Catties would have come out over seven. I daresay great-grandfather and father-in-law weren't a full nine catties and eight catties either — the steelyard they used was perhaps fourteen taels…"

"Each generation worse than the last!"

Seven-Catties' wife had not yet answered when she suddenly saw Seven-Catties come round the mouth of the lane; she changed direction and bawled at him, "Where have you been dying, you corpse, to come back only now! Never mind that people are waiting on you to start supper!"

Though Seven-Catties lived in the country, he had long had some notion of rising in the world. From his grandfather down to himself, three generations had not gripped a hoe-handle; he too, in the regular way, hired himself out to punt the ferry-boat, once a day, from Lu Town into the city in the morning and back to Lu Town at evening, and so he knew a good deal about the affairs of the day: how in such-and-such a place the Thunder God had struck a centipede-spirit dead, or how in such-and-such a place a maiden had given birth to a yaksha. Among the villagers he was undeniably a man of some standing. But in summer no lamp was lit at supper, and there the household still kept to the farmer's custom, so that coming home too late was a thing to be scolded for.

Seven-Catties came slowly along with his head down, holding in one hand a speckled-bamboo pipe over six feet long, with an ivory mouthpiece and a white-copper bowl, and sat down on a low stool. Six-Catties took the chance to slip out, sat down beside him and called him father. Seven-Catties did not answer.

"Each generation is worse than the last!" said Old Mrs Nine-Catties.

Seven-Catties slowly raised his head and said with a sigh, "The Emperor has taken his seat on the Dragon Throne."

Seven-Catties' wife stood blank for a moment, and then all at once saw the light. "Why, that's good," she said. "Won't there be another amnesty by imperial grace?"

Seven-Catties sighed again and said, "I have no queue."

"Does the Emperor want queues?"

"The Emperor wants queues."

"How do you know?" asked Seven-Catties' wife, growing anxious, and quickly.

"Everybody at the Xianheng tavern says he does."

At this Seven-Catties' wife felt by instinct that things looked bad, because the Xianheng tavern was a place where the news was well informed. Her eye fell on Seven-Catties' bare scalp and she could not help flying into a rage: she blamed him, she hated him, she reproached him; and then all at once she gave up hope, filled a bowl of rice and shoved it in front of him. "Get your rice down you and be quick about it! Will pulling a face like a mourner make a queue grow?"

The sun had drawn in the last of its light; the water was giving the cool back darkly. Over the yard came a clatter of bowls and chopsticks, and the sweat stood out again on everybody's back. When Seven-Catties' wife had finished her third bowl she happened to raise her head, and her heart began to thump so that she could not stop it. Through the tallow leaves she had seen Seventh Master Zhao, short and fat, coming over the single-plank bridge — and wearing his long gown of sapphire-blue cotton.

Seventh Master Zhao was the proprietor of the Maoyuan tavern in the next village, and the one distinguished figure and man of learning within thirty li; and because he was learned there hung about him something of the smell of a survivor of the old dynasty. He owned a dozen-odd volumes of the Three Kingdoms with Jin Shengtan's commentary, and would often sit reading it a character at a time; he could not only recite the names of the Five Tiger Generals, he even knew that Huang Zhong's style was Hansheng and Ma Chao's was Mengqi. After the Revolution he had coiled his queue up on the crown of his head like a Taoist priest, and he would often sigh and say that if Zhao Zilong were alive the empire would never have fallen into such disorder. Seven-Catties' wife had good eyes, and she had seen at once that today's Seventh Master Zhao was no longer a Taoist priest but had a smooth scalp and a glossy black crown; so she knew that the Emperor must indeed have taken his seat on the Dragon Throne, and that queues must indeed be required, and that Seven-Catties must indeed be in very great danger. For this cotton gown of Seventh Master Zhao's was not lightly or often worn: in three years he had put it on only twice — once when Pockmarked Ah-Si, who had fallen out with him, was ill, and once when Big Master Lu, who had once smashed up his tavern, died. This was the third time, and it must again mean rejoicing for him and calamity for his enemies.

Seven-Catties' wife remembered that two years ago Seven-Catties had got drunk and called Seventh Master Zhao a low-born whelp, and so she saw at once, by instinct, the danger Seven-Catties was in, and her heart began to thump.

As Seventh Master Zhao came along, everybody sitting at supper stood up and pointed with their chopsticks at their own rice-bowls, saying, "Seventh Master, take your rice here with us!" and he nodded all the way along and said, "Please, please" — but went straight on to the table of the Seven-Catties household. They hurried to greet him, and he too said with a smile, "Please, please," studying their supper closely as he said it.

"What fine-smelling dried greens — have you heard the wind?" said Seventh Master Zhao, standing behind Seven-Catties and opposite Seven-Catties' wife.

"The Emperor has taken his seat on the Dragon Throne," said Seven-Catties.

Seven-Catties' wife watched the Seventh Master's face and forced a smile. "The Emperor has taken his seat on the Dragon Throne — when will the amnesty by imperial grace come?"

"An amnesty by imperial grace? — An amnesty will come in its own good time." Here the Seventh Master's voice and face suddenly hardened. "But where is your Seven-Catties' queue — his queue? That is the serious matter. You know how it was in the time of the Long Hairs: keep your hair and lose your head, keep your head and lose your hair —"

Seven-Catties and his wife had never been to school and did not well understand the profundity of this classical saying, but they felt that if a man of learning like the Seventh Master said so, the thing must be very grave indeed and past all mending; it was as though sentence of death had been pronounced on them. There was a buzzing in their ears and they could not say another word.

"Each generation worse than the last —" Old Mrs Nine-Catties, nursing her grievance, took the chance to address Seventh Master Zhao. "The Long Hairs nowadays only cut off people's queues, so that they are neither monks nor Taoists. Were the Long Hairs of the old days like that? I have lived to seventy-nine, I have lived long enough. The Long Hairs of the old days — a whole bolt of red satin wound about the head, and hanging down, hanging down, all the way to the heels; and the princes had yellow satin, hanging down, yellow satin; red satin, yellow satin — I have lived long enough, seventy-nine years."

Seven-Catties' wife stood up and said, as if to herself, "What are we to do? A household of old and young like this, and all of them living off him…"

Seventh Master Zhao shook his head. "There's no help for it. What the penalty is for having no queue is written out in the books, clause by clause, plain as plain. It makes no difference what people he has at home."

When Seven-Catties' wife heard that it was written in the books she despaired utterly; and being at her wits' end she suddenly turned to hating Seven-Catties. She pointed her chopsticks at the tip of his nose and said, "This corpse has brought it on himself! When the rising came I said, didn't I, don't go punting, don't go up to the city. But he must go dying into the city, rolling into the city, and no sooner in the city than they cut his queue off. A queue that was black and glossy as silk, and now he has made himself neither monk nor Taoist. This jailbird has brought it on himself — and what about us that he has dragged into it? This jailbird of a walking corpse…"

When the villagers saw Seventh Master Zhao come into the village they finished their suppers in a hurry and gathered round the Seven-Catties family's table. Seven-Catties knew himself to be a man of some standing, and to be abused like this by his wife in front of everybody was not a handsome thing; so he had to raise his head, and he said slowly:

"It's easy for you to talk now. At the time you—"

"You jailbird of a walking corpse—"

Among the onlookers Mrs Eight-One was the kindest-hearted; she was standing beside Seven-Catties' wife with her two-year-old — born after his father's death — in her arms, watching the excitement, and now, feeling it was too bad, she hurried to smooth things over. "Let it be, Mrs Seven-Catties. People aren't immortals; who can know what's to come? Didn't you say yourself at the time that there was nothing so ugly about having no queue? And besides, His Honour at the yamen hasn't put out a proclamation yet…"

Seven-Catties' wife did not hear her out; both her ears were already scarlet. She turned her chopsticks round and pointed them at Mrs Eight-One's nose. "Oh! What talk is this! Mrs Eight-One, do you take me for a human being at all, that I would say such wild, muddled stuff? At that time I cried for three whole days, everybody saw it; even that little devil Six-Catties cried—" Six-Catties had just finished a big bowl of rice and now held out the empty bowl, clamouring for more. Seven-Catties' wife, in no good temper, drove the chopsticks straight down between the two tufts of her hair and roared, "Who asked you to put your oar in! You little husband-stealing widow!"

With a smack the empty bowl fell out of Six-Catties' hand to the ground, and as it fell it caught the corner of a brick, so that a great piece was broken out of it. Seven-Catties leapt up, picked up the broken bowl, fitted the piece back and looked it over, and roared in his turn, "Your mother's—!" and knocked Six-Catties down with one slap. Six-Catties lay there crying; Old Mrs Nine-Catties took her by the hand and led her away, saying over and over, "Each generation is worse than the last."

Mrs Eight-One grew angry too and said loudly, "Mrs Seven-Catties, you're beating with the rod of spite…"

Seventh Master Zhao had been looking on with a smile; but after Mrs Eight-One said "His Honour at the yamen hasn't put out a proclamation," he became somewhat annoyed. By now he had come round the end of the table, and he took her up: "'Beating with the rod of spite' — and what of that? The troops will be here directly. You should know that the man guarding the throne this time is Marshal Zhang, and Marshal Zhang is descended from Zhang Yide of Yan; with that eighteen-foot serpent spear of his he had a valour ten thousand men could not withstand — who can stand against him?" He clenched both fists at once as though he were gripping an invisible serpent spear, took several steps towards Mrs Eight-One and said, "Can you stand against him?"

Mrs Eight-One was trembling with rage, the child in her arms, when she suddenly saw Seventh Master Zhao, his face shining with sweat, glaring straight at her and bearing down on her; she was very frightened, dared not finish what she was saying, and turned and went. Seventh Master Zhao went after her, and the crowd, partly blaming Mrs Eight-One for meddling, made way for him; and several men who had had their queues cut and had grown them again hid quickly behind the others for fear he should see. But Seventh Master Zhao did not look closely into it: he passed through the crowd, turned suddenly in behind the tallow trees, said, "Can you stand against him!", stepped onto the single-plank bridge and went off in style.

The villagers stood there stupidly, reckoning it over in their minds, and all felt that they certainly could not stand against Zhang Yide, and so they settled it that Seven-Catties was as good as dead. Since Seven-Catties had broken the Emperor's law, they remembered how he used to hold his long pipe in his mouth and look so proud when he talked to people about the news from the city, and so they felt a certain satisfaction in his having broken it. It seemed as if they wanted to pass some remark, but they found they had no remark to pass. There was a buzzing, confused din; the mosquitoes butted against their bare backs and went off to hold their market under the tallow trees; and the villagers drifted slowly away home and shut their doors and slept. Seven-Catties' wife went home too, grumbling, taking in her things and her table and her low stools, and shut the door and slept.

Seven-Catties carried the broken bowl home and sat on the threshold smoking; but he was so full of care that he forgot to draw, and the fire in the white-copper bowl of the six-foot speckled-bamboo pipe with the ivory mouthpiece slowly went black. He felt only that the situation was extremely dangerous, and he tried to think of some way, some plan, but it always came out very vague and would not join up: "The queue, the queue? The eighteen-foot serpent spear. Each generation worse than the last! The Emperor on the Dragon Throne. The broken bowl must go up to the city to be riveted. Who can stand against him? It's written in the books clause by clause. Your mother's—!"

Early the next morning Seven-Catties punted the ferry-boat from Lu Town into the city as usual, and came back to Lu Town at evening, carrying his six-foot speckled-bamboo pipe and a rice-bowl back to the village. At supper he told Old Mrs Nine-Catties that the bowl had been riveted in the city; because the break was a big one it had taken sixteen copper rivets at three cash each, forty-eight cash of small money in all.

Old Mrs Nine-Catties said very crossly, "Each generation is worse than the last, and I have lived long enough. Three cash for one rivet; were the rivets of the old days like that? The rivets of the old days were… I have lived seventy-nine years —"

After this, though Seven-Catties went into the city every day as usual, there was a certain gloom over the household; the villagers on the whole kept out of his way and no longer came to hear the news he brought back from the city. Seven-Catties' wife had no good word for him either, and often still called him "jailbird."

A dozen or more days later Seven-Catties came home from the city and found his wife in high spirits. "Did you hear anything in the city?" she asked him.

"I didn't hear anything."

"Has the Emperor taken his seat on the Dragon Throne or not?"

"They didn't say."

"Didn't anybody at the Xianheng tavern say either?"

"Nobody said."

"I think the Emperor can't be on the Dragon Throne after all. I went past Seventh Master Zhao's shop today and saw him sitting reading again, with his queue coiled on top of his head again, and no long gown on."

"…"

"You think he's not on the Throne?"

"I think he's not."

Nowadays Seven-Catties has long had proper respect and proper treatment again from his wife and from the villagers. When summer comes they still eat on the beaten-earth yard outside their own door, and everybody greets them with smiles. Old Mrs Nine-Catties held her eightieth-birthday celebrations long ago, and is aggrieved and healthy still. Six-Catties' two horn-tufts have turned into a single thick queue; and though her feet have lately been bound, she can still help Seven-Catties' wife with the work, going to and fro across the beaten-earth yard with the eighteen-copper-rivet rice-bowl in her arms, limping.

(October 1920.)

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written, frozen at the commit that creates this file, and frozen before E-20260811b-realia-channel's design existed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only, and the lead does not judge this translation (charter §5).

English words: 3,246. One pass, no return pass; where a choice was unresolved at the moment of writing, the option written stands and the alternative is recorded here.

A. The realia table — every place the source named a thing English does not have

This is the table this session exists to have. KEEP = the source-culture term or a calque of it survives into the English; MUTE = an English generic replaces it; SPLIT = part kept, part generalised. predicted-placing is the translator's prediction, made here and frozen, of whether a reader given this passage and asked where is this set would use this item. It is a prediction about reading, made by the person who wrote the sentence, and it is what the study limb tests.

Count: 40 sites. KEEP 28, SPLIT 7, MUTE 3, wholly cut 2 (見下 §C.4 — 「請請」's second occurrence is not a realia site and is not counted; the two cuts are 「伊」's archaism and 「顚撲不破」's idiom, both §C). Predicted-placing: 23 yes, 6 weakly, 11 no.

B. The decision the whole translation turned on

Site 7 — the catty — decided the register of every name in the story, and it was made in the second paragraph, before I knew what it would cost. The children are named for their birth weights: 九斤 nine jin, 七斤 seven, 六斤 six. Three renderings were live:

1. Pounds. "Old Mrs Ninepounder." Reads as English, and the arithmetic of ¶7 — six catties five taels on a private eighteen-tael steelyard against a standard sixteen — becomes nonsense, because a pound has sixteen ounces and the joke is that this steelyard does not.
2. The bare Chinese. "Jiu-jin." Opaque; and the story states the custom in ¶7, so the reader is being told the naming rule in words that do not carry it.
3. The catty, which is the English name of the unit and has been since the seventeenth century, and which brings the tael with it and makes ¶8 arithmetic that works.

I took 3. The price is that four characters are called by a word most English readers will not know, in a story where the names are said aloud forty times. The gain is that the argument in ¶8 — the daughter-in-law's demolition of her mother-in-law's decline-of-the-world proof, on the grounds that the family steelyard weighs heavy — is translatable at all. With pounds it is not.

Site 11 — queue against pigtail — is the story's other hinge, and here I went the other way from site 7's logic. Pigtail is the domestic word, and it is what an English child's hair is in; the Manchu queue is a legal object in this story, a thing you are executed for not having, and pigtail makes it comic. I wrote queue throughout and did not vary it. What is lost: 辮子 is an everyday word in the Chinese and queue is not an everyday word in English, so the English is more technical than the original at every one of its fifteen occurrences.

C. The rest, briefly

1. The refrain. 「一代不如一代」 occurs seven times and I rendered it identically every time — each generation is worse than the last — including where the Chinese elides (¶8, ¶30). The alternative, varying it as English prose style prefers, would have destroyed the thing the refrain is: an old woman with one sentence. Where the source truncates it mid-phrase I truncated the English at the matching point.
2. 伊. Lu Xun uses the archaic/experimental feminine third person 伊 rather than 她 throughout. English has one she. The distinction is simply gone; there is no cheap way to mark it, and marking it expensively (archaic diction around her) would have located the prose in an English past that the Chinese does not have.
3. The curses. 「入娘的！」 → Your mother's—!, keeping the aposiopesis; 「賤胎」 → low-born whelp; 「偷漢的小寡婦」 → you little husband-stealing widow, said to a child, which is incoherent abuse in the source and left incoherent. 「死屍」/「活死屍」/「囚徒」 → corpse / walking corpse / jailbird, kept consistent because the wife recycles them.
4. 「恨棒打人」 — a bookish four-character tag that two illiterate characters and one half-literate one throw at each other. I wrote beating with the rod of spite and kept the quotation marks, so that it reads in English as what it is in Chinese: a phrase out of a book, in a mouth that got it second-hand.
5. 留髮不留頭，留頭不留髮 — keep your hair and lose your head, keep your head and lose your hair. The chiasmus survives; the four-beat symmetry does not.
6. The inconsistency at the end is the author's and I kept it. ¶45 says the bowl took sixteen copper rivets; ¶58 calls it the eighteen-copper-rivet bowl. I checked the source twice and wrote what is there. A reviser would have smoothed it; R06 forbids the return pass, and I would not have smoothed it anyway.
7. Three places I would look at again and cannot (R06): the water was giving the cool back darkly (¶21) is doing something the Chinese 「水面暗暗地回覆過涼氣來」 does more plainly; there hung about him something of the smell of a survivor of the old dynasty is a long way round for 「有些遺老的臭味」; and went off in style for 「揚長去了」 is flatter than the swagger in the Chinese.

D. What this log does not claim

Nothing here is a quality claim. The predicted-placing column is a prediction about readers, not about how well anything was rendered, and it was written before any evaluation of this translation was designed. internal-judgment-only.