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

Genji monogatari, ch. 15 「蓬生」, §§1‑3–1‑4 — into modern English

Contamination: high. Genji monogatari is among the most translated works in any language; complete English versions by Suematsu, Waley, Seidensticker, Tyler and Washburn exist, and further modern Japanese versions by Tanizaki, Enchi, Setouchi and others. Renderings of this chapter plausibly sit in the lead's training data, and the lead cannot establish that the English below is independent of remembered ones. No published rendering of this passage, in any language, was consulted before this translation and its log were frozen — the R04 source-only rule was followed, and the passage was chosen partly because the parallel modern-Japanese rendering hosted alongside the source text had not been read for these two sections (only for §§1‑1–1‑2, which are not translated here). That protects against priming; it does not protect against memory. Treat this as a practice artifact and as process evidence, not as an independent test of translating ability.

The translation

[1‑3 The decay of the Hitachi Prince's residence]

There was no one who called on her, not even over some small matter. Only her elder brother, the meditation master, looked in when he came up to the capital, and he came rarely; and he was so old-fashioned a man as scarcely exists any more, and even among the people one calls monks he was helpless in the world, a holy man wholly detached from it, so that it never so much as occurred to him that the deep grass and the mugwort might be cut back.

And so the thin grass covered the garden until its floor could not be seen, and the mugwort ran up in a race with the eaves. The creepers had sealed the east and west gates shut, which was at least something to rely on; but the wall around the grounds was crumbling away, and horses and cattle had trodden it into a road, and when spring and summer came, the sheer effrontery of the herd-boys who turned their animals loose there was a thing to be seen.

In the eighth month of a year when the autumn gales blew hard, the covered galleries went down flat, and of the lesser buildings, which had been flimsy board-roofed things, only the frames were left standing. Not so much as a servant stayed on. The smoke of the kitchen fires died out, and there was much then that was pitiful past speaking of.

Even those single-minded creatures called thieves went past the house as a thing not worth their trouble and never came near — put off, it may be, by the bleakness of imagining it; so that, wilderness and thicket though the place had become, inside the main hall alone the appointments stood as they had always stood, unchanged, with nobody to polish or sweep them. The dust gathered. But nothing was ever out of its place, and in that impeccable house she passed her days and her nights.

[1‑4 How she passed the time]

It is by such idle pastimes as trifling old poems and tales that one gets through empty hours and reconciles oneself to a dwelling of this kind — and in those matters, too, she was slow. It is not that one must be a devotee. Ordinarily, when nothing is pressing, a young woman will take comfort from a tree or a blade of grass, and from letters going back and forth with someone of her own mind. But she kept to the rule by which her father had brought her up so carefully, thinking the world a thing to be held at a distance, and she never grew easy even with the few people she might properly have written to. What she did was to open the old cabinet and take out Karamori, The Old Woman of Hakoya and The Tale of Princess Kaguya in their illustrated versions, and turn them over in her hands from time to time.

With old poems, too, it is the choosing that gives them something to look at — a graceful selection, the topic set down, the poet named and recognised. Hers were on impeccable Kamiya paper and Michinoku paper, gone soft and furred with age, and the verses copied out on them were the ones everyone has seen: a dispiriting business. Still, on the occasions when she had to have something to gaze at, she would spread them open.

Sutra-reading, devotions, the things people of the present day go in for — these embarrassed her acutely. There was nobody at all to see her, and even so she would not send for prayer beads. Such was her impeccability.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026‑07‑25, before any evaluation of this translation was designed (charter §3, A4). Decisions and alternatives; not quality claims. The one sentence below that shades into evaluation is marked. The page's front matter carries internal-judgment-only: true for the whole file.

1. The passage, and why this one

Chosen for density rather than fame. §1‑3 is description (a ruined estate); §1‑4 is a character portrait carried almost entirely by narratorial irony. Two very different textures, consecutive in the source, ~950 characters together. It is not one of the anthologised passages of Genji, which was deliberate: less-quoted text is less likely to be memorised verbatim, and the parallel modern Japanese rendering hosted next to the source had not been read for these sections.

2. What was hard, in order of how much time it took

(a) うるはし three times, doing structural work. The word appears at three points: 「紛るることなきうるはしき御住まひ」 (the house), 「うるはしき紙屋紙」 (the paper), 「かやうにうるはしくぞものしたまひける」 (the woman). In the source this is one word making one point three times — the residence, her stationery and her person are all the same quality, and the last occurrence closes the section on it. Heian うるはし means formal, correct, well-ordered, dignified; it is the antonym-in-practice of なつかし/をかし, which are the warm, appealing, alive qualities. So the thread says: everything about her is in impeccable order and none of it is alive.

Live options: (i) translate each occurrence for its local sense — "well-kept house", "fine Kamiya paper", "so correct was she" — which reads best locally and destroys the thread; (ii) find one English word that survives all three positions; (iii) keep the thread at two nodes and let the third go.

Chose (ii), with "impeccable": "that impeccable house", "impeccable Kamiya paper", "Such was her impeccability." It carries formal correctness, it carries the faint chill, and it takes the ironic weight at the close. The cost is paid at the paper: "impeccable Kamiya paper" is a slightly strained collocation in English, where "fine" or "formal" would be the natural word. That strain is the price of the thread, and it was paid knowingly. Alternatives tried and dropped: "correct" (works at the person, fails at the house), "seemly" (works at house and person, dead at the paper), "proper" (too weak at the close), "in good order" (cannot be an adjective at all three sites).

(b) The honorific layer, which simply goes. The source is continuously marked: たまふ on every verb belonging to her (思して, 馴れたまはず, したまふ, ものしたまひける), きこゆ humbling those below her (見訪らひきこゆる), 御 on her body, her cabinet, her dwelling (御身, 御厨子, 御住まひ, 御門). Every one of these carries social position, and English has no counterpart category. None of it is rendered. There was never a live option to render it: English can mark deference lexically at a few points, but the source marks it automatically and everywhere, and no English device applies at every occurrence.

What I did instead, without having planned it, was let the register of the narration stay a half-step formal throughout — "over some small matter", "one gets through empty hours", "she might properly have written to", "Such was her impeccability" — rather than write the plainest available modern English. That is a lexical-diction repayment for a grammatical loss, and it is intermittent by construction: it lands where a phrasing happened to be available. The single sharpest instance: 「見訪らひきこゆる人はなき御身なり」 marks her rank twice (きこゆ for the callers, 御身 for her) in the very sentence that says nobody visits. My "There was no one who called on her, not even over some small matter" keeps the content and loses both marks, so the sentence's irony — a person of this standing, and no callers — has to be inferred from context rather than read off the grammar.

(c) Three tales in one sentence, handled three different ways. 「『唐守』、『藐姑射の刀自』、『かくや姫の物語』の絵に描きたる」. I rendered them Karamori (transliterated, opaque), The Old Woman of Hakoya (half translated, half transliterated — 刀自 rendered, 藐姑射 kept), The Tale of Princess Kaguya (translated, and recognisable to an English reader as The Bamboo Cutter). Three handlings of one class, inside one sentence.

I noticed this while doing it and considered regularising — all three transliterated, or all three Englished — and did not, because each choice was locally right for a different reason: the first two are lost tales whose titles mean nothing to anyone, so an English rendering would manufacture a false transparency; the third is a text an English reader may actually know, so transliterating it as Kakuyahime no monogatari would hide something the source does not hide. The point of the sentence is that her taste is archaic, which requires at least one title the reader can place. Note for the study limb: 藐姑射 is itself a Chinese allusion (the mountain of immortals in Zhuangzi), so "Hakoya" is opaque in the source too, for a different reason — the source's own reader met a foreign word there.

(d) Realia, and one substitution refused. 数珠 → "prayer beads", not "rosary". "Rosary" is the idiomatic English word and would have read better; it is also a Christian object, and the project has a catalogued instance of exactly this move going wrong (Shaw's 「命のあるもの」 → "has a soul" in A-shaw-spider-thread). Refused on that ground. Other decisions in the class: 紙屋紙/陸奥紙 → "Kamiya paper"/"Michinoku paper" (copy plus a one-word calque, no gloss); 寝殿 → "the main hall" (calque, the architectural term dropped); 禅師の君 → "the meditation master" (calque, lower-cased, unglossed — "the Zenji" was the copy-opaque alternative and was rejected as unreadable, "the priest" as flattening a title into a job); 廊 → "the covered galleries"; 下衆 → "a servant" (the class term flattened); 御厨子 → "the old cabinet"; 野分 → "the autumn gales", losing the word's literal image (field-divider) and its calendrical specificity in exchange for period feel — "typhoon" is accurate and sounded like a weather report.

(e) めざまし, a word that means a social relation. 「放ち飼ふ総角の心さへぞ、めざましき」. めざまし is offence taken downward — it names something as intolerable given who is doing it and to whom. English has no word whose meaning includes the rank differential. "Effrontery" was chosen as the nearest; it carries presumption but not the ranks. 総角 — boys with their hair in loops — names the herd-boys by a class-marked hairstyle; "herd-boys" names them by their job. Both losses are the same shape as (b): social position encoded in the word itself, transcoded into something that merely describes.

(f) The plants, kept distinct on purpose. 浅茅 / 蓬 / 葎 are three named plants in an ascending sequence — grass hides the ground, mugwort reaches the eaves, creepers seal the gates. Ground, wall, gate. I kept three distinct English plants ("the thin grass", "the mugwort", "the creepers") to hold the progression, accepting that "the thin grass" is a weak rendering of 浅茅, which is a standing literary sign of desolation and not just a description of height.

3. Smaller choices, logged because they were choices

• 「西東の御門」 → "the east and west gates": order reversed for English idiom. A silent domestication, and the only one I made without hesitating.
• 「煙絶えて」 → "The smoke of the kitchen fires died out": four words of scaffold added inside the phrase. Bare "the smoke died out" is opaque in English; a footnote was not available. This is the scaffold handling from wiki/goodness-senses.md, applied to my own text.
• 「盗人などいふひたぶる心ある者」 → "those single-minded creatures called thieves". An earlier draft had "creatures we call thieves"; the "we" imports a first-person narrator the sentence does not have, and was removed on revision.
• Sentence architecture: the source's long paratactic periods were kept long in §1‑3 (the fourth paragraph is one sentence in both) but broken at one point — "The dust gathered. But nothing was ever out of its place" — where 「塵は積もれど」 turns on a concessive that English handles better as a full stop.
• かひなき/はかなき-type adjectives were mostly rendered as flat modern words ("trifling", "small", "idle"). No attempt was made to reproduce their frequency.
• No archaising. The whole text could have been pitched at Waley-era English, and the source is a thousand years old; but the source was contemporary prose for its readers, and archaic English would translate the manuscript's age rather than the book. Stated as a decision, not as a recommendation.

4. What I could not do

• The honorific system (2b). Not reduced — absent.
• をかし/あはれ register. 「あはれにいみじきこと多かり」 became "there was much then that was pitiful past speaking of", which is a paraphrase of an effect, not a rendering of two aesthetic terms.
• The poetic-allusion substrate. The critical text marks two allusions inside these sections' neighbourhood; nothing in my English signals that a phrase is quoting. A reader of the source who knows the Kokinshū hears a second voice; my reader does not.
• Grammatical subject-tracking. Classical Japanese identifies who is acting through honorific level rather than by naming them. English forced me to supply "she", "he", "her father" repeatedly. This is not loss so much as forced explicitation: my text states, at every clause, a fact the source leaves to the honorifics. It is the same category loss as (2b), seen from the other side — and it may be the more consequential half, because it makes the English more determinate than the Japanese rather than less.

5. One evaluative sentence, flagged

internal-judgment-only: the passage I am least confident about is 「今の世の人のすめる」, which I read as "the things people of the present day go in for"; the construction is compressed and I could not rule out a reading in which すめる is doing something other than standing for する.