Repository path: workshop/translations/genji-yomogiu/R33-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Genji monogatari, ch. 15 「蓬生」, §§2‑3–2‑4 — the footing-directional rendering

Contamination, measured before this design existed. RS-20260814b §7 measured the lead's R06 rendering of this exact span against both published hands and found it clean at the project's own thresholds — 0 shared 7-grams and a longest run of 6 tokens against Suematsu, 5 against Waley, where the two published hands share 3 with each other. R33 is that rendering plus marks, so its overlap with either published hand can only have moved through the marked material; the measurement is re-run on this artifact in §Contamination below and reported before anything was designed on it. The one dependence that is real is on the lead's own prior rendering, which is total by construction and is the regime (R33 §Procedure 1) — note (bhb) territory, declared rather than measured away.

Ordinarily she was on no such intimate terms with her; but with a mind to talk her into setting out, she had a set of robes made up fit to be presented to the Princess, rode 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 the men had to lend a hand and made a great business of getting it open. Which of these, she wondered, picking her way, are the three paths that they say must be trodden even in a lonely dwelling like 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, though it is an unbecoming thing to say, have exchanged her for her mistress.

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

— and here 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 and cast me off, so we began on distant terms; but all these years — what of that? Your ladyship held yourself high and grand, and with His Excellency the Commander and the like coming and going in your ladyship's fortunes, it seemed to me too presumptuous, and there was much to hold me back from pressing my intimacy upon your ladyship, 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 ease. It was a grief and a pain to me to look upon your ladyship's 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. 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, and I am much obliged to you for it. But I am so unlike other people — what would be the good of it? I think such a one as I am had best just moulder away here."

That was all she vouchsafed, and so:

"Yes, no doubt that is how your ladyship 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 His Highness of the Ministry of Rites' daughter, there is no one, they say, 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 her ladyship, 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, I am sure."

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

"Then let me have Jijū at least,"

she said, hurrying as the day drew to its close; and Jijū, flustered, in tears:

"Then, for today only. The lady presses me so; I shall go no further than seeing her off. What she says to your ladyship is reasonable too. And that your ladyship should be distressed about it is natural as well, so that to be caught between you is painful to me, if I may say so."

she said quietly to her ladyship.

That even this one was about to abandon her she felt as resentment and as grief, but there was no way for her ladyship to say her nay, and she wept the harder — weeping was the only strength she had.

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

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

"Your late mother was pleased to leave 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 her ladyship wept bitterly. Jijū, for her part, could find nothing to say to her.

"My mother's dying words — I need not so much as speak of them to your ladyship. 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 from your ladyship —"

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.

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 ladyship 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 on with the likes of us? 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 her ladyship heard them, and it was a wretched thing to hear.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-15, before any evaluation of this rendering was designed (charter §3, A4; continue-prompt.md §5.4). Decisions and alternatives. Any evaluative sentence here is internal-judgment-only, and the counts are self-report (R33 §What it does not license).

The gradings, read off the frozen sites

Every source paragraph, the grading its own marks establish, and what was done. Party keys: PR the Princess · AU the aunt · JJ Jijū · GJ Genji, "His Excellency the Commander" · PC the late Prince, the Princess's father · NU Jijū's late mother, the Princess's nurse · OW the old women · NA the narrator.

No paragraph's dominance score puts anybody but its own highest party on top. Twenty paragraphs graded, ten ungraded and left unmarked, one mark declined.

The one declined mark, and why

¶24, site 64 — 命こそ知りはべらね, Jijū's addressee-deference to the Princess in the line that closes her poem. The baseline folded that line into the poem's blockquote, and the skeleton constraint (R33 §Procedure 1) forbids moving it out. Every English device available inside the line either names the addressee — my lady, your ladyship — which is a vocative the source has not got, or changes the sense: I dare not answer turns 知りはべらね ("I do not know") into a refusal. The assertion constraint (R33 §Procedure 5) forbids both, so the mark was dropped and the paragraph left as the baseline had it.

The three reversals, which are the whole reason this regime exists

Twenty of this span's thirty paragraphs are graded by their own marks, and seventeen of the twenty put the Princess on top. The rule is trivial in those seventeen. The other three are the work:

¶7 — the Princess defers to her aunt. はべる is addressee-polite: it grades the person spoken to, and says nothing at all about who outranks whom. The Princess is a royal princess and her aunt married into the provincial-governor class; the source can have her defer without conceding an inch of rank, because its politeness attaches to the act of speaking. English has no such device. Every rank word available — your ladyship, madam, my lady — asserts a standing the source denies, and inverts the social facts the whole chapter turns on. What was used instead is the only English resource that behaves like はべる: a formula of obligation from speaker to hearer — I am much obliged to you for it — paired with a self-lowering — such a one as I am. Neither touches rank. Rejected: It is very good of your ladyship (asserts the aunt outranks a princess); I thank you humbly (humbly from a princess to a governor's wife is grotesque, and 謙譲 is not what site 25 is).

¶19 — the Princess elevates a dead nurse. のたまひ置き is subject-honorific on Jijū's mother. The predicate — leaving word before dying — is something its subject did on purpose, so framework/v0.2 §10.5.3's volitionality constraint licenses a deferential auxiliary here, and was pleased to leave word is the whole mark. Rejected: my lady your mother (asserts a rank the nurse had not got).

¶29 — the old women elevate Jijū. 立ち止まりたまはむ is subject-honorific on Jijū in the servants' mouths. Rejected: a woman of her quality, which asserts a quality where the source marks only a relation. What was used, stay on with the likes of us, carries the same relation from below, which is where the source's own speakers are standing.

What the rule made me do that a free hand would not have

• ¶3 and ¶5 are stacked with your ladyship — six occurrences between them — because the paragraphs' marks are stacked in the source (six sites and fourteen sites). The rule says mark where the source marks, and the source marks in bursts. This is the regime obeying itself into something a hand writing freely would have thinned.
• ¶8's vouchsafed is an elevating verb and not a title, which is where RS-20260814b §4 says the only device that actually carried in a published hand was found — one occurrence of deign in 5,361 words. It is the one place this rendering follows Waley's solution rather than a rank noun, and it was chosen for that reason.
• The Princess's rank nouns in ¶6 and ¶8 stand on either side of ¶7's reversal. The rule is per-paragraph and obeys itself in each; a reader taking in all three at once sees the Princess, then a deference with no rank word in it, then vouchsafed. This regime predicts on its own page that such a reader may not see the reversal at all (R33 §The one thing this regime knows it cannot do), and the design that follows was built to put exactly that stretch in front of judges who have not been told there is a reversal in it.

Contamination

tools/dependence_check.py, this rendering against both published hands of the same span, run before the study limb was designed.

The marks added nothing shared. R33's longest run against either published hand is the same 6 and 5 tokens RS-20260814b §7 measured for the baseline, so every mark placed this session is the lead's own wording and not a recollection of Suematsu's or Waley's. The reference pair still agrees less with itself (3 tokens) than the lead agrees with either member of it, which is the honest way round to state it.

Length

Baseline 1,176 words → 1,246, +70 words, +6.0%, against the declared +8% ceiling and against R27's +21.1% on the neighbouring span.