Repository path: workshop/translations/genji-yomogiu/R28-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

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

What this is

R27 asked whether anything could be recovered and found that nearly everything could, at a price it wrote down site by site. That leaves the practitioner's question open, because a ladder with only its two ends on it cannot show whether there is anything in between. This is the middle rung: the same hand, the same span, the same session, asked to carry the footing only where carrying it does not make the sentence say something the Japanese does not say, and to stop at a declared budget.

Twelve of the fifty‑two sites are carried. Forty are declined and every one of them is declined in writing, which is the part of this regime that is not optional.

Contamination: high

Identical to the other two members of the ladder and declared in full on T-genji-yomogiu-R06-v2: 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; Suematsu's and Waley's complete English of the chapter is cached in this repository and was not opened for §3‑4, before or after.

And one contamination this text has that neither of the others had: it was written by a hand that had just read both of them. That is not a defect to be excluded — it is the regime. R28 is defined as a manipulation of its own baseline, and the identity of the non‑site prose is enforced mechanically. Nothing measured depends on this text's independence from anything.

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 presented to her and left behind she had not deigned to look 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 offered them to her smelling sweetly of it there was nothing else to be done. She was pleased to change 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 deigning to send and 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 was pleased to push the hanging a little aside as he said it. She was as shy as ever, and did not offer him an 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 offer him a word, 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 be pleased to 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, but was pleased to say 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 was pleased to say 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 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 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 decisions were made; frozen with the text and committed before the evaluation that prices it was designed. The codes are self‑report (R28 §"What it does not license"), and the front matter carries internal-judgment-only for the whole page.

The rule, written down before the site list was re-read

1. LEX — an elevating transitive English verb (present, offer) — carried wherever English has one, because it asserts nothing beyond direction.
2. AUX — a deferential auxiliary (be pleased to, deign to) — carried only where the source's predicate is something its subject did on purpose. This is R27's volitionality observation used as a working rule; using it is not testing it.
3. RANK — a rank‑noun (her ladyship, his lordship) — carried nowhere, and the reason is a regime decision, not a site decision. See below.
4. LOW — a speaker‑lowering periphrasis (presume to, beg leave to) — carried nowhere: every candidate asserts overstepping or timidity, which きこゆ does not.
5. No device that requires a clause to be added.
6. Budget: ≤ +5% words, ≤ 20 marked tokens. Realised: +3.5%, 12 tokens.

The one decision taken across the whole text rather than at a site

RANK is refused everywhere, and this is the largest single choice in the rendering. R27 found it free at five sites — His lordship came in costs nothing at all against He came in — so a site‑by‑site rule with a budget would spend its cheapest tokens here first. It is refused because a rank‑noun is not localisable to a site. Used once it is an accident of wording; used at every site where it is free it appears eleven times, and a narrator who calls the man his lordship eleven times has changed register for the whole text, not marked eleven relations. The site‑level price and the text‑level price point in opposite directions, and only the text‑level one is real.

RS-20260814b supports the refusal from the other side and did not cause it: across five hands and 5,361 words the whole rank‑noun set occurs once. Whatever published translators of this chapter are doing, they are not doing this.

Carried — twelve sites

Declined — forty sites, by reason

(a) The device would assert choice the source does not assert — 23 sites. 1 (waiting is not chosen), 3, 6, 12 (おはす is bare existence), 24 (has been pleased to pass hidden away in these weeds says she chose the ruin), 27, 30, 33, 38 (らる is spontaneous), 40 (enduring years is not a favour granted), 41, 44, 45 (growing older), 46, 49, 50 (was pleased to be sorry for her turns a pang into a favour), 51, and the H2 sites 14, 16, 17, 31, 39, 42 where the only English is LOW and every LOW word asserts overstepping.

(b) The only device is RANK — 10 sites. 2, 5, 8, 11, 13, 25, 29, 34, 37, 47, 52. Refused by the text‑level decision above. Site 13 is the one this cost most: His lordship came in is a whole line, free, and marks the most conspicuous act in the passage.

(c) A clause would have to be added — 5 sites. 20 (きこえたまはず raises her as subject and him as object in one word; English needs two devices pointing opposite ways), 21, 23, 36, 43.

(d) No device of the right kind exists at all — 1 site. 26, 分け入りはべりつる. R27 found only an explicit comment on the speech act (— I say it with all deference —), which is a different category of thing. This is the H3 stratum that RS-20260814b measures at 0.000 over 19 sites in two published hands, and the one place where the census's silence and both attempts' silence agree.

(e) Budget — 1 site. 35 and 36 fall in one sentence; 36 was dropped so the sentence would not carry two.

What this attempt found that R27 could not

The price of selective carriage is not length. It is repetition.* The rendering adds twenty-nine words — 3.5% — and nobody could call that a cost. What it does is put be pleased to into six sentences and deign into two, because English has essentially one neutral deferential auxiliary and one that is at home in a refusal, and no third.* R27 paid in bulk and could hide this: at seventy‑eight tokens the repetition is the texture. At twelve tokens each one is visible, and six of them are the same three words.

That is a different shape of cost from anything framework/v0.2 §10 currently records, and it is not something a site‑by‑site price list can show, because at every individual site be pleased to is the right answer.

A second thing, and it is a claim about the source rather than about English. Sorting fifty‑two sites by did the subject do this on purpose is not a Japanese distinction. たまふ does not care, and neither does きこゆ. The rule that makes English carriage safe is a rule about English lexical semantics imported into a Japanese text, and the twelve sites it selects are not a natural class in the source at all. A translator following it is not carrying the Japanese system selectively; it is carrying the intersection of the Japanese system with an unrelated English one, and the intersection has no principle behind it that a reader of the Japanese would recognise.

(Both paragraphs are this translator's account of its own decisions. Whether any of it is audible to a reader is the question E-20260814h-footing-price puts to three seats that did not write it.)