Repository path: workshop/translations/genji-yomogiu/R27-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Genji monogatari, ch. 15 「蓬生」, §3‑4 — the same span, translated by a hand that was trying

What this is, in one paragraph, because the text below will otherwise be misread

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 that there is nothing to recover and no craft that recovers it. Every hand behind that sentence was translating without being asked to carry the grading. This is the same span, the same hand, the same session, asked. The English below is deliberately over‑marked and is worse than its own baseline; that is the regime, not a slip. What it produces is not a rendering anyone should copy but a price list: where a device existed, what it cost, and where none could be found.

Contamination: high

Identical to T-genji-yomogiu-R06-v2 and declared there in full: Genji is among the most translated works in any language; the read of Suematsu's §§3‑1–3‑3 on 2026‑08‑14 is adjacent to this span and a spill cannot be excluded from the record alone; Suematsu's and Waley's complete English is cached on disk in this repository and was not opened for §3‑4; Yosano's modern Japanese was not read for §3‑4. Nothing measured depends on this text's independence — its comparator is the baseline by the same hand, not a published one.

Her ladyship had been pleased to go on waiting, all this while, in the settled belief that surely he would come, and now that the belief was borne out she was glad; but to be seen in the condition her ladyship's state of life had come to was a thing her ladyship was pleased to shrink from. The robes that the Dazai Deputy's wife had presented and left there for her ladyship's wearing, her ladyship had not been pleased to look at, out of the ill feeling her ladyship had been pleased to entertain toward anything of that woman's; but her women had stored them in her ladyship's scented Chinese chest, and when they offered them up to her smelling sweetly of it there was nothing else to be done. Her ladyship was pleased to change into them, and to draw across that same soot‑blackened curtain‑stand of her ladyship's, and there her ladyship was pleased to remain.

His lordship came in.

"All these years apart, and my heart at least has not altered — I have presumed to keep your ladyship in my thoughts the whole of that time. It was pique at your ladyship's never once being pleased to send and rouse me that made me hold off so long, presuming to try 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 am beaten, and beg leave to own it."

He was pleased to push the hanging a little aside as he said it. She was as shy as ever, and did not deign to venture him an answer at once; but a man who had been pleased to force his way in through all that had not come lightly, and she took heart enough to be pleased to venture a word up to him, very faintly.

"The years your ladyship has been pleased to pass hidden away in these weeds move me more than a little; and being of an unchanging disposition myself, I have made my way in through the wet grass — I say it with all deference — without any way of knowing what was in your ladyship's own heart. What is your ladyship pleased to make of that? My neglect of you these years your ladyship will be pleased to pardon, no doubt, as one pardons the way of the world in general. Should I from this time on fall short of your ladyship's heart's wish, then let the sin of breaking one's word be mine to carry."

— and a good deal else of the same kind: things his lordship was not pleased to feel, which his lordship was pleased to represent feelingly and to offer up to her as feeling, or so it would appear.

For his lordship to be pleased to stay the night, in a place like that, with the whole state of her ladyship's household beginning with the place itself more than he could bear to look at, was out of the question; so his lordship was pleased to say what the occasion called for, and was pleased to make 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; his lordship was pleased to go on dwelling on the dreamlike course his lordship's own person had run.

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 beg leave to tell your ladyship the whole of that world I came down in the world into, at the parting for the provinces. The springs and autumns your ladyship will have been pleased to get through here, hard to get through as they must have been — to whom else is your ladyship to be pleased to complain of them? I take that for granted, which is a strange thing, I suppose, to be doing."

So his lordship was pleased to offer it up to her; and —

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

Her ladyship was pleased to stir a little where she sat, and said it under her breath; and the scent from her sleeves, at least, made his lordship wonder whether her ladyship had not been pleased to grow 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 her ladyship's furnishings, unaltered from the old days, looked better bred than the fern‑choked ruin outside had led him to expect. His lordship was pleased to call to mind 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 his lordship was pleased to like 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. His lordship was pleased to be sorry for her.

And the lady he was on his way to, at the Falling Flowers, being one who was not pleased to shine with any bright modern gaiety either, his lordship's shifting of his lordship's 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. The codes are self-report, as R27 §8 requires, and the front matter carries internal-judgment-only for the whole page. Nothing here is a quality claim about any hand, including this one.

The devices, named before the table

Four, and no others were found:

• RANK — a rank‑noun in the slot a pronoun or possessive would fill: her ladyship, his lordship, your ladyship. This is framework/v0.2 §10.3's device, and it is the only one that works on a noun, so it is the whole of the answer to H5 (御‑prefix).
• AUX — a deferential auxiliary on the verb: be pleased to, deign to. Structurally the closest match to たまふ — an auxiliary on a verb — and the one that does most of the work here. Vouchsafe, condescend and see fit were live and rejected as further from neutral.
• LOW — a speaker‑lowering periphrasis: presume to, venture to, beg leave to, offer up. This is what H2 (謙譲) takes, and it is a genuinely different device from AUX, which is what matters: the two directions of the Japanese system get two different English shapes.
• LEX — an elevating transitive verb where English has one: present for 差し上げる‑type たてまつる, offer up for the same. The only device on the list that costs nothing anywhere.

The counts

52 sites. Carried 51, abandoned 1, nothing‑available 0. Of the 51 carried, 15 free (C-n) and 36 at a price (C-p).

The first thing to say about that table is that N is zero, and it is the number that bears on framework/v0.2 §10. At no site did the translator fail to find a candidate English device. The section's sentence — there is nothing to recover and no craft that recovers it — is not what this attempt found. What it found is that the recovery is nearly always available and nearly always costs something, and that the cost is what the five hands in RS-20260814b were declining to pay. That is a different claim, with a different instruction attached to it.

The one thing the per‑site coding cannot see, recorded before the table

The price is cumulative and the codes are local. Sites 7, 8 and 10 are each C-n — a defensible English sentence on its own. The opening paragraph, which holds all three and nine other sites besides, says ladyship ten times and pleased to six times in 159 words, and no reader would call it English. Every C-n in the table is a judgment made about one sentence at a time, and the sum of fifteen free carriages is not free. A design that priced the sites one by one would underestimate the cost, and the honest total is in the paragraph, not in the column.

The pattern the coding fell into, which was not predicted and is offered as description

Nothing was registered in advance, so this is a post‑hoc observation about one hand's 52 decisions and it is offered as a description to be tested, never as a finding:

Every English deference device found is volitional. たまふ is not.

Deign, be pleased to, vouchsafe, condescend, see fit — the whole AUX set — says that the elevated person chose to do the thing, and generously. たまふ attaches to anything a superior does, suffers, feels or simply is. So the two fit exactly where the source's predicate is something its subject did on purpose, and misfit everywhere else. Sorted that way, the H1 sites split cleanly:

Nine of twenty against zero of eleven, and the single abandoned site is non‑volitional. The misfit is not stylistic. His lordship was pleased to be sorry for her (site 50) turns an involuntary pang into a favour granted; your ladyship has been pleased to pass hidden away in these weeds (site 24) says she chose the ruin, and the whole pathos of the chapter is that she did not. At these sites carriage is available and it changes what the sentence says. That is a mechanism S1 has not been offered before, and unlike the four it has already lost, it predicts which sites rather than whether.

Site‑by‑site

Numbers are sites.tsv rows. ¶ is the source line. Where the English differs from T-genji-yomogiu-R06-v2, the baseline is quoted after ←.

What the pair costs, in the two numbers that can be counted mechanically

Recomputed by counts.py, which is the only thing on this page that is not a judgment.

Corrected 2026-08-14 (S187), and the correction is recorded rather than made silently. counts.py matched its device patterns against the file's raw text, in which four two-word devices straddle a line break (her\nladyship, your\nladyship, his\nlordship, her\nladyship). The RANK count was therefore 38, not 34, and the marked-token total 78, not 74 — one every 13.0 words, not 13.7. The script now collapses whitespace before counting. Nothing else on this page moves: the word counts, the +21.1%, the 52 sites and every per-site code are unaffected, and the correction makes the density higher, which is the direction that strengthens what the figure was cited for.

• 836 English words → 1,012, on the same 1,227 characters. +21.1%, and every added word is a deference marker or the grammar needed to hang one on.
• her ladyship / his lordship / your ladyship: 0 in the baseline, 38 here. pleased to / deign: 0 and 29. The LOW set (presume, venture, beg leave, offer up, present): 0 and 11. 78 marked English deference tokens in 1,012 words — one every 13.0 words — against 52 Japanese sites in 1,227 characters, one every 23.6 characters.
• The rate of marking is comparable. The visibility is not, and that is what this rendering exists to show. The Japanese marks are inflections on words that had to be there anyway; the English marks are 176 extra words. The same density is background in one language and foreground in the other, and a translator who carries all of it has not reproduced a feature of the source — it has added one.

What this does not show, and it needs saying plainly

• One hand, hypothesis‑aware, that wrote the specification it then executed. The codes are self‑report (R27 §8). A blind panel shown both renderings could price the difference independently; nothing here has been judged by anyone.
• C-n versus C-p is my own judgment about my own sentences, made one at a time, and the paragraph‑level note above says why the split flatters the free column.
• Nothing here is about quality. Tier D is NOT PASSED. Neither rendering is claimed to be better than the other, and the over‑marked one is expected to be much worse.
• The volitionality pattern is post hoc. It was noticed while coding, not registered before. It is a candidate for a design, not a result.
• R27 rewards effort and effort is unmeasured. A translator who tried harder at site 46 might carry it. The log prices this attempt.