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

Genji monogatari, ch. 15 「蓬生」, §§2‑3–2‑4 — into modern English

Contamination: high

Genji monogatari is among the most translated works in any language. Complete or partial English versions by Suematsu, Waley, Seidensticker, Tyler and Washburn exist, as do modern Japanese versions by Yosano, Tanizaki, Enchi and Setouchi. 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.

Two priming events are declared by name, both of them real and both of them recorded before this text was written:

1. On 2026‑08‑14, during materials search and before this span was chosen, the lead read Suematsu Kenchō's rendering of §§3‑1–3‑3 of this same chapter (Project Gutenberg #19264) — a different and non‑overlapping stretch, but the same chapter, the same characters and the same translator whose text is one of the hands in E-20260814b. No published rendering of §§2‑3–2‑4 in any language was opened before this translation and its log were frozen.
2. Yosano Akiko's 1939 modern‑Japanese rendering of the whole chapter is stored in this repository (yomogiu-yosano-1939.txt) and was read for §§1‑1–1‑2 at S017. It was not read for §§2‑3–2‑4, before or during this work.

No tools/dependence_check.py measurement is reported here because the comparators are opened by the experiment that follows, and the standing rule (CLAUDE.md) wants the measurement taken as a selection gate before the design, which is not what this artifact is for: this rendering is excluded from the experiment's registered numbers by construction, so no primary depends on its independence. The overlap figures against Suematsu and Waley are computed and reported in RS-20260814b-honorific-hands §7 for the record, not as a gate.

She had never been on such intimate terms with her; but now, with a mind to talk her into setting out, she had a set of robes made up to present to her, rode over in a fine carriage, and came bowling up without warning, her face and her bearing proud and untroubled by any care. From the moment she had the gate opened, the shabbiness and desolation of the place were past all measure. Both leaves of the gate had sagged and fallen, so that the men had to lend a hand and made a great business of getting it open. And which of these, she wondered, picking her way in, would be the three paths that they say are trodden even at a dwelling as lonely as this?

She had the carriage drawn up at the one bay on the south front where the shutters were raised. The Princess felt the mortification of it keenly; but a shockingly sooty curtain-frame was pushed out, and Jijū came forth. Her looks had fallen off. She had wasted badly over the years, and yet she still had a neat, well-bred air about her — enough that one might, for all the disrespect of the thought, have exchanged her for her mistress.

"I have been thinking of setting out; but your circumstances are so painful to see that I could not bring myself to go off and leave you. I have come to fetch Jijū. You have hardened your heart against me and will not so much as come over for a moment yourself, so I thought you might at least let me have this one. But what a pitiable way this is to be living!"

— and at that she ought to have wept. Her mind, though, was on the journey before her, and she looked thoroughly pleased with herself.

"While my late brother the Prince was alive he thought me a disgrace to him and cast me off, so we began on distant terms; but all these years — what of that? You held yourself high and grand, and with His Excellency the Commander and the like coming and going in your fortunes, it seemed to me too presumptuous, and there was a great deal to hold me back from pressing my intimacy on you, and so I have let the time pass. But the world proving as uncertain as this, a person of no account is, after all, the more at her ease. It was a grief to me and a pain to see your circumstances, so far above my reach as they were. While I was near at hand, even in the times when I neglected you, I was a quiet resource you could count on; and now that I am going so far away, I find myself uneasy for you, and sorry."

So she talked on; but the Princess would give her no unguarded answer.

"It is very kind of you. But I am so unlike other people — what would be the good of it? I think I shall just moulder away here as I am."

That was the whole of it, and so:

"Yes, no doubt that is how you must feel. But to throw away a living body and go on in a place as grim as this — is there anybody else who does it? If His Excellency the Commander would take it in hand and do it up, it would turn overnight into a palace of jewels, no doubt, and there would be something to count on. Only just now, apart from the daughter of His Highness of Ceremonial, there is nobody, they say, that he divides his heart for. With that amorous disposition of his from of old, the places he used to visit without much thought he has all put out of his mind, they say. Still less will he come asking after a woman living as precariously as this in a bramble thicket, on the strength of her having trusted him with a clean heart. That will be very hard indeed."

She spoke so as to drive it home; and the Princess, feeling the truth of it, was so sad that she wept and wept. But she was not to be moved, and after a whole day of arguing it this way and that,

"Then let me have Jijū at least."

The day was closing and she was in a hurry. And Jijū, flustered, in tears, said low, and to her mistress:

"Then, for today only. She presses me so; I shall go no further than seeing her off. And what she says is reasonable. That you should be distressed about it is natural as well; so to stand in the middle and watch it is painful to me."

That even this one was about to abandon her she felt as resentment and as grief; but there was no way for her to say her nay, and she wept the harder — crying was the whole of her resistance.

For a keepsake to send with her, the clothes she had worn were too worn and too salt-stained; she had nothing left to show for the years they had been together. So she gathered up the hair that had fallen from her own head, which had been made into a switch — over nine feet of it, and very beautiful — put it in a pretty box, and gave it to her, with a jar of an old robe-incense, still very fragrant.

I trusted the strand of this jewelled vine would never part; beyond all thought, it is severed and gone.

"Your late mother left word about it too, so, useless as I am, I had thought you would see me to the end. That you should leave me is reasonable enough; but to whom, I wonder, are you handing me on? I cannot help resenting it."

And she wept bitterly. Jijū too could get nothing out.

"My mother's dying words — I need not so much as speak of them. Through all these years I have lived out a wretchedness hardly to be borne; and now to be lured off on a road I never looked for, and to go wandering so far away —"

Though the jewelled vine be cut it shall not end: on the road I go I will swear it by the god of the wayside offerings. Only for my life I cannot answer.

And as she was saying it —

"Where are you? It has grown dark,"

came the muttering; and with her heart quite gone out of her she was drawn away, and could do nothing but look back.

That the one person who through all those years had grieved and yet never gone should now be parted from her left her utterly forlorn. And even the old women, whom nobody in the world would have any use for —

"Well, it stands to reason. How could she be expected to stay? We shall hardly hold out to the end ourselves,"

— and, calling to mind what connections each of them had, they were of a mind not to stay; and she heard them, and it was a wretched thing to hear.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026‑08‑14, before E-20260814b-honorific-hands was designed and before any published English of this span was opened. Decisions and alternatives; not quality claims. Every evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only, which the front matter also declares for the page.

D1 — the governing decision: English cannot mark the deference system, and I did not try to

Classical Japanese grades every clause of this passage. The aunt speaks up to the Princess with respectful auxiliaries (渡らせたまはね, 許させたまへ — both double‑marked) and down about herself with humble ones; Jijū speaks up to the Princess and up about the aunt in the same sentence; the narrator grades the Princess continuously (思したれど, のたまへば, 泣きたまふ, 思すに, 聞きおはす) and grades nobody else that way. English has no morphology for any of this. The available substitutes are all lexical and all costly: titles (madam, my lady), periphrasis (was pleased to), or added stage direction (deferentially).

I chose to add none of them where the Japanese marking is purely grammatical, and to let the rank show only where the Japanese also says something lexically. The reasons: (i) was pleased to and deigned to put a nineteenth‑century English costume on an eleventh‑century Japanese one, and the flavour is wrong in a specific way — it is arch, and this passage is not; (ii) the deference is constant, so marking it at every site would produce an English in which every third verb is periphrastic, which is not what the Japanese reads like; (iii) marking it selectively would mean inventing an emphasis the source does not have. The cost is stated plainly: a reader of the English below cannot tell that the aunt is speaking to a social superior, except from what she says. That is a loss and I have not concealed it.

Where I did let rank surface, it is lexical in the Japanese too:

D2 — the two humble たまふ forms, which I lost knowingly

Twice the aunt uses the shimo‑nidan 給ふ, the humble auxiliary a speaker attaches to her own perception: かたじけなく思ひたまへられしかばなむ and うしろめたくあはれになむおぼえたまふ. Jijū uses it once, 中に見たまふる. This is one of the finest gradations the language has — it marks the speaker's own verb as humble without touching the addressee — and I rendered all three with a plain first‑person verb (it seemed to me, I find myself, to stand in the middle and watch). Nothing in my English distinguishes these from the unmarked case. The alternative I weighed and rejected was I have felt it, if I may say so — which adds a hedging clause the Japanese does not have and would fire on three sites out of thirty paragraphs, producing a mannerism.

D3 — 聞こゆ and its compounds

聞こゆ appears four times in the span as the humble "say/do to a superior" (むつびきこえさせむ, かの聞こえたまふ, 忍びて聞こゆ, ものも聞こえやらず, さらにも聞こえさせず). English say is neutral. I rendered 忍びて聞こゆ as "said low, and to her mistress" — the one place in the whole span where I put a marker of rank into the narration that the Japanese carries only in the verb. I did it because the sentence is the hinge of the scene and because mistress is a relation‑word, not a courtesy‑word: it states the fact rather than performing the deference. This is the single deliberate exception to D1 and it should be counted as one.

D4 — 三つの径

いづれか、この寂しき宿にもかならず分けたる跡あなる三つの径と、たどる alludes to the three paths of Jiang Xu 蔣詡, kept clear in his overgrown garden for his two friends — by way of Tao Yuanming's Return. I kept "the three paths" unglossed, with that they say are trodden doing the work of signalling that a saying is being quoted. The alternatives were a footnote (the regime has no apparatus), a gloss in the line (the three paths of the recluse, which explains a joke the Japanese leaves as a joke), or dropping the allusion (which loses the aunt's one moment of learning — she is showing off).

D5 — the two 玉かづら poems

玉かづら is a pillow‑word for hair and, here, the actual object: a nine‑foot switch of the Princess's fallen hair. 筋 is a strand of hair and a line of connection; 絶ゆ is a strand breaking and a tie ending. I kept "strand" in the first poem and "the jewelled vine" in both, letting the English pun sit on strand and cut/severed and losing the hair sense of かづら itself. Rejected: tress (right sense, wrong register — it sounds Victorian‑poetic), and inserting hair explicitly (which turns the poem into its own footnote).

The second poem's 手向の神 I rendered "the god of the wayside offerings" rather than "the god of the road" — the offering is the point, since Jijū is swearing with one.

D6 — かひなき身, 数ならぬ身, 世に用ゐらるまじき老人

Three self‑deprecating formulae in three different mouths. I gave them three different Englishes — useless as I am, a person of no account, whom nobody in the world would have any use for — rather than one, because they are not the same formula in the Japanese either and because a repeated English tag would read as a refrain the source has not written.

D7 — what the revision changed against the R06 draft

Seven changes, all local:

1. Ordinarily she was on no such intimate terms with her → She had never been on such intimate terms with her — the draft's ordinarily mistranslates 例は as a frequency adverb where it is a contrast with the present occasion.
2. though it is an unbecoming thing to say → for all the disrespect of the thought — かたじけ なくとも is deference to the Princess, not squeamishness about the remark.
3. His Highness of the Ministry of Rites' daughter → the daughter of His Highness of Ceremonial — the draft's genitive stack was unreadable, and 式部卿 is Ceremonial.
4. That was all she said, and so: → That was the whole of it, and so: — the draft's she said collided with the next paragraph's she said, which belongs to a different speaker.
5. The Jijū speech in the draft was introduced after it and attributed with a bare she said quietly; revised so the attribution (said low, and to her mistress) precedes the speech, which is what と、忍びて聞こゆ requires the reader to be able to reconstruct. See D3.
6. weeping was the only strength she had → crying was the whole of her resistance — 音をのみたけきことにて is force, not fortitude.
7. which she had had made into a switch → which had been made into a switch — the draft's causative implies the Princess commissioned it; the Japanese 鬘にしたまへる is respectful of her but says nothing about who did the work.

D8 — what I know I did not solve

The aunt is vulgar, and the Japanese says so structurally: she piles on the honorifics (渡らせたまはね, 許させたまへ, おはしまし通ふ) exactly while she is being cruel, and the narrator undercuts her in one flat sentence (されど、行く道に心をやりて、いと心地よげなり). In my English the cruelty survives and the over‑politeness does not, so the second half of the joke is gone: what reads in Japanese as a woman laying deference on with a trowel reads in English as a woman simply talking. internal-judgment-only. I do not have a fix for it that does not violate D1, and I record it here as the thing this rendering most plainly fails to carry.