Repository path: workshop/translations/genji-yomogiu/R06-v2/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Genji monogatari, ch. 15 「蓬生」, §3‑4 — into modern English (baseline)

What this is the baseline for, stated before the text so the ordering is legible

framework/v0.2 §10 says that where a source grades the speaker against the addressee in a slot English fills compulsorily, the marking does not reach English, and adds a practitioner sentence: there is nothing to recover and no craft that recovers it. Every hand that sentence rests on — two published human translators, two 2026 language models, one earlier lead rendering — was translating without being asked to carry the grading. Nobody has tried.

This is the rendering by a hand that was not trying, on a span nobody has rendered here before. T-genji-yomogiu-R27-v1 is the same hand, the same span, the same session, trying. The difference between the two is the only thing either of them is for.

The 52 footing sites were extracted mechanically and committed at 032ee16 before this text was written, and their rows were not read. sites.py prints stratum totals and nothing else for exactly this reason. What was not controlled, and cannot be: the honorific morphology of classical Japanese is visible to anyone reading classical Japanese. This translator knew the forms were there in the way any reader of the language knows. It did not know which 52 spans a script had picked out, and it had no instruction about them.

Contamination: high

Genji monogatari is among the most translated works in any language, and renderings of this chapter plausibly sit in the lead's training data. Three priming events are declared:

1. Adjacency, and it is the closest of the three. On 2026‑08‑14 the lead read Suematsu Kenchō's English of §§3‑1–3‑3 of this chapter during materials search (declared on T-genji-yomogiu-R04-v2). §3‑4 is the immediately following section of the same continuous English. No rendering of §3‑4 in any language was opened before this text and its log were frozen, and the record says the read stopped at §3‑3; but the two are adjacent prose and a spill cannot be excluded from the record alone. It is declared here rather than assumed away.
2. Suematsu's and Waley's complete English of this chapter are cached on disk in this repository (workshop/experiments/E-20260814b-honorific-hands/run/sources/). Neither file was opened for §3‑4.
3. Yosano Akiko's 1939 modern‑Japanese rendering of the whole chapter is stored here and was read for §§1‑1–1‑2 at S017. It was not read for §3‑4.

No dependence_check.py figure is reported. Nothing measured depends on this text's independence: it is a baseline against a second text by the same hand in the same session, and its comparator is that text, not a published one.

The Princess had gone on waiting, all this while, in the settled belief that surely he would come, and now that the belief had been borne out she was glad; but to be seen in the state she was in was more than she could bring herself to face. The robes the Dazai Deputy's wife had left behind for her she had not so much as looked at, out of the ill feeling that clung to anything of that woman's; but her women had stored them in a scented Chinese chest, and when they brought them out smelling sweetly of it there was nothing else to be done. She changed into them, and drew that same soot‑blackened curtain‑stand across, and sat waiting.

He came in.

"All these years apart, and my heart at least has not altered — you have been in my thoughts the whole of that time. It was pique at your never once sending to rouse me that made me hold off so long, to see how it would end; but the trees standing at your gate are so plain a marker, cedars or no cedars, that I could not get past them. I own myself beaten."

He pushed the hanging a little aside as he said it. She was as shy as ever, and did not answer at once; but a man who had forced his way in through all that had not come lightly, and she took heart enough to say something, very faintly.

"The years you have passed hidden away in these weeds move me more than a little; and being of an unchanging disposition myself, I have come in through the wet grass without any way of knowing what was in your own mind. What do you make of that? My neglect of you these years you will pardon, no doubt, as one pardons the way of the world in general. If from this time on I fall short of what you wish, then let the sin of breaking one's word be mine to carry."

— and a good deal else of the same kind: things he did not much feel, said feelingly, or so it would appear.

Staying the night, in a place like that, and with the whole state of things beginning with the place itself more than he could bear to look at, was out of the question; so he said what the occasion called for, and made ready to go. The pines had not been planted by any hand, yet they had grown tall, and the stretch of years that meant was affecting; the dreamlike course of his own life came back to him and would not leave off.

The wisteria hanging in waves was hard to pass, yet it was the pine that marked the house.

"Count them up, and they must come to a great number. So much has changed in the capital, and all of it moving, one way and another. Some quiet time I shall tell you the whole of that world I came down in the world into, at the parting for the provinces. The springs and autumns you have got through here, hard to get through as they must have been — who else have you to complain of them to? I take that for granted, which is a strange thing, I suppose, to be doing."

Year after year, and no sign of what I waited for — and you pass my house on the flowers' errand and no more?

She stirred a little where she sat, and said it under her breath; and the scent from her sleeves, at least, made him wonder whether she had not grown into herself since the old days.

The moon was going down. It came in through the open door on the west side — there was no gallery left standing to interrupt it, nothing left of the eaves either — and came in so brilliantly that he could see the room about him; and the furnishings, unaltered from the old days, looked better bred than the fern‑choked ruin outside had led him to expect. He thought of the man in the old tale who pulled his pagoda down, and found something affecting in a place that had simply grown old as it stood. Her air of unbroken shyness had a certain breeding in it for all that, and he liked her the better for it. He had meant, in his own fashion, never to forget her, and had been uneasy about her; and then for years one trouble after another had taken up his whole mind and left him too dazed to attend, and all that time she must have thought him cruel. He was sorry for her.

And the lady he was on his way to, at the Falling Flowers, was no place of bright modern gaiety either, so that the shift of his eyes from the one to the other was not a violent one, and a great many faults escaped notice.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written; frozen with it. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only, which the front matter also declares.

Regime discipline. Single pass, no return pass. Ordinary local backtracking inside a sentence happened, as R06's own limitations section says it must; no frozen sentence was gone back over.

The register decision, taken once at the top

E1. Modern English prose, unmarked for period, with the syntax allowed to run long where the Japanese runs long. The alternative — a consciously archaic English of the kind the chapter's two published hands wrote — was live and rejected, on the ground that this project has an open finding that archaic English is heard as patterned by readers who are shown nothing else (RS-20260814g), and I did not want the baseline carrying a register effect the second rendering would then be credited with.

The hard places

D1. さりともと待ち過ぐしたまへる心もしるく — "surely, even so" with no complement; the sentence turns on a belief whose object is unstated. had gone on waiting in the settled belief that surely he would come supplies the object. Alternative kept live: leaving it unsupplied (waiting, all this while, on a "surely, even so"), rejected as unreadable in English without a gloss.

D2. いと恥づかしき御ありさまにて対面せむ — the shame is in being seen, not in meeting. to be seen in the state she was in. This drops 対面 (a formal facing) into the passive, which loses the sense that a meeting is an event with a protocol.

D3. 大弐の北の方 — the aunt, by her husband's office. the Dazai Deputy's wife. Alternative: her aunt, which is clearer and less foreign; rejected because the text names people by office and this is the second time the office has appeared in the chapter.

D4. 心ゆかず思されしゆかりに — the resentment attaches to the donor, transferring to her gift. out of the ill feeling that clung to anything of that woman's, which makes the transfer explicit; the Japanese only implies it with ゆかり.

D5. 入りたまひて — a four‑word line in the original, standing alone. Kept as its own three‑word paragraph, He came in. The temptation was to fold it into the speech that follows.

D6. 杉ならぬ木立のしるさに — an allusion to the Miwa poem, in which cedars at the gate say this is the house. Rendered the trees standing at your gate are so plain a marker, cedars or no cedars: the allusion's mechanism is carried, the poem it points at is not. No note, no gloss.

D7. 負けきこえにける — Genji concedes the game he had been playing. I own myself beaten.

D8. 情け情けしう聞こえなしたまふことども、あむめり — the narrator's flick of scepticism, with あむめり ("there seem to have been") doing the work. things he did not much feel, said feelingly, or so it would appear. The em‑dash opening the paragraph carries the fact that the speech is being summarised rather than quoted.

D9. The two poems. Rendered as two‑line free verse, indented, without rhyme or syllable count. The 待つ／松 pun — the pine that is also the waiting — is lost in both. In Genji's poem I have the pine that marked the house; in hers, no sign of what I waited for is next to no pine at all. An English pine/pine‑for pun was live for about a minute and rejected as comic. This is the single largest loss in the passage and I have no repair for it.

D10. 鄙の別れに衰へし — an allusion to Yukihira's exile poem. Rendered inside Genji's sentence as that world I came down in the world into, at the parting for the provinces, which is clumsy and which I would fix on a return pass I am not allowed. The alternative was to cut 衰へし and say simply the years of my exile.

D11. 昔物語に塔こぼちたる人 — a tale I cannot identify with confidence; commentators differ. Rendered literally, the man in the old tale who pulled his pagoda down, on the principle that an unidentifiable allusion is still a sentence the character thinks, and the reader may take it as strange.

D12. かの花散里 — the Lady of the Falling Flowers, named in the chapter by her sobriquet. the lady he was on his way to, at the Falling Flowers translates the name and supplies the errand, which the Japanese has established earlier and this span assumes.

D13. 御目移し — "the shifting of the eyes" from one woman to the other, a compact noun English has no noun for. the shift of his eyes from the one to the other.

What I notice I did not do, recorded before I look at the site list

D14. I have used no deign, no vouchsafe, no my lord, no your ladyship, and I do not think I have used any word whose job is to mark one of these people as standing above another. Genji's speech and the Princess's are in the same English register. The narrator's 思す / 思し for both of them, and the 御 on her curtain, her robes, her state, are all gone into ordinary English possessives and articles. I record this before reading sites.tsv, so that the second rendering's difference set cannot be a story told afterwards.