Repository path: workshop/translations/hoshi/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

「星」 — R06 (lead, source-only, single pass), v1

Source. 国木田独歩 (Kunikida Doppo), 「星」, written 明治二十九年十一月 (November 1896), first published in 『国民之友』. Public domain: Doppo 1871–1908. Copy-text: Aozora Bunko card 42207, file 000038/42207_34797.html, fetched 2026-08-13 with tools/fetch_aozora.py (Shift_JIS decoded as cp932 per CLAUDE.md), ruby and Aozora annotation markers stripped, nothing else altered; 底本 「武蔵野」岩波文庫、岩波書店. The cleaned text is ../source.txt. 12 paragraphs, 2,157 non-whitespace characters (2,016 CJK), read whole in Japanese.

The register is the material fact about this source. It is 擬古文 — Meiji literary Japanese in a deliberately archaised, quasi-classical register (住みけり, ありて, なればにや, 見えたり, 若くものあらじ), with classical verb morphology throughout and free tense alternation between a narrative past and a stative present. Nothing in modern English corresponds to it, and the two arms of this pair differ chiefly in what they do about that.

Regime. R06 v1.0 — lead agent, source only, single pass, no return pass, log written as the draft is written. No published rendering of this work into any language was read before this draft and its log were frozen. Reference use was limited to dictionaries of classical Japanese.

Cost. $0 (charter §3, A4 — lead translation is never ledgered).

Contamination: none, and the basis is a reachability check rather than a same-text measurement — which is stated here because a declaration with no number is what note (bcd) forbids, and this is the honest form of the number that does not exist. Checked at selection, before any translating (the standing rule, CLAUDE.md): no English rendering of 「星」 is reachable, and neither is any English Doppo prose. Project Gutenberg returns zero works for Kunikida Doppo (gutendex search, 0 results). English Wikisource carries exactly one Doppo item — a single poem, The Island in the Offing, translated by Glenn Hughes and Yozan Iwasaki in Fifteen Poets of Modern Japan (1928) — transcluded from a page scan and running to well under two hundred words. So no same-text comparator exists and no cross-text comparator large enough to bound anything exists either: the Romanian precedent (RS-20260813b) could at least measure against 8,748 words of the same author's period English, and here that quantity is not available. What is declared is therefore reachability, not the absence of any English rendering anywhere — a translation may exist in a printed anthology this project cannot open.

One deliberate exception to "source only", logged because it is a decision and not an oversight. The source names and quotes a Western poem: 西詩「わが心高原にあり」 is Burns's My Heart's in the Highlands, and 『いざさらば雪を戴く高峰』 is Doppo's Japanese of its second line. Recovering Burns's English is recovering the original of a quotation, not consulting a translation of this source, and the regime's bar is on published renderings of the source. The decision, its cost and the alternative are in the log at [3].

The Star

In the country not far from the capital there lived a young poet. His house stood at the foot of a low hill, and the garden was too wide for the house; a clear stream ran out from the trees on the hill and cut across it. The trees had grown as they had seeded themselves. In spring plum and cherry blossomed in confusion; in summer the green shade thickened until the water of the brook ran dark; in autumn the brocade of the turning leaves was magnificent. When autumn had aged a little and the first stripping wind began to sound, the loneliness of the place was past all measure; and when winter came in, the leaves fell away until there was nothing to see but the face of the garden itself — and in the middle of it only the pines and the cedars made a show of their green. Morning and evening, the poet lived on the pleasure of this garden.

At the beginning of winter one year, the master of this garden and one old manservant took brooms morning after morning and swept the fallen leaves together, and heaped them in seven places along the bank of the stream, and there the heaps stood for twenty days and more. The frost began to lie white, and it looked as though it would not be long before the brook froze over. So, at dusk on a Sunday, the poet came home from outside and walked about the garden a while, this way and that, singing in a clear voice — a happy love song, no doubt. In this poet's body young blood went warmly round, and the cold of a winter night was nothing to him; everything was joyful and at the same time sad, sad and at the same time joyful; he made his own poems, sang them himself, wept at them himself, and was happy.

That evening the sky was clear and high and the light of the stars was unusually sharp — perhaps that was the reason he went on strolling along the edge of the stream for a good while after night had come in. At last he called the old servant and had him carry fire across to one of the heaps of fallen leaves, and went indoors himself. And so, though the household sank into deep sleep and the night wore on, this one fire burned well; the flame was reflected in the water of the brook, the smoke rose dead straight, and where the cedars stood in a clump a single stroke of blue smoke hung heavy as mist.

The night wore later and later, and sky and earth drew gradually nearer to one another. One by one the stars came down to the treetops; one by one the dewdrops on the treetops made to return to the sky. Every sound in creation was still and had no voice; only the smoke of the poet's garden went up higher and higher.

In heaven there were a young man-star and a young woman-star. Far apart as they were held from one another, on the road of love ten million leagues count as one; and these two had fallen at some time into a deep dream of love, and came down to earth to take the pleasant hours of night after night — now on a rock-spur of a high peak, now on the waves of the great sea, now at the edge of a narrow valley stream — talking their endless intimate talk until daylight, and then, startled by the sky of first dawn, going home to heaven.

The woman-star was quick to catch sight of the smoke rising from the poet's garden, and said that tonight was cold beyond anything — there was frost even on the River of Heaven — so let them go down to that garden where the smoke was standing, stir up the bonfire and talk there; and the man-star smiled, and holding one another they followed the smoke down into the garden without a sound. The jewel on the woman-star's forehead threw out a crimson light; the man-star's gave off a light of pale blue. The maiden of heaven, drunk on the scent of love, leaned weakly on the man-star's shoulder. And so the two of them talked their endless hearts out until one mountain of leaves had burned away, and when first light was near went home far into the western sky. The next night too the poet had one of the heaped piles of leaves lit, and the man-star and the woman-star came down again out of the sky and talked as they had the night before. And so it went on until Saturday night: night after night the smoke rose from the poet's garden, and when the night wore late a pale blue light and a crimson light came down side by side into it — and the poet knew nothing whatever about it.

Of the seven mountains of fallen leaves, six had been burned, and Saturday night left only one. When the smoke from this one climbed thin and slender into the sky, the maiden-star, wrapped in a pale rose-coloured haze, came down first and quietly into the garden. Since the bonfires of the poet's garden ended tonight, the two talked on, unwilling to have done; and then, on their way home, saying that they could not go without a word of thanks to the master of the garden, they went together into the poet's room, and stood a while lost in the sight of the sleeping face of the poet — a face out of another world, noble, young, sunk in sleep without sin. Scattered about near his pillow were collections of poems from many countries. One of them lay open as it had been left, at a Western poem called "My Heart's in the Highlands", and in it the line

"Farewell to the mountains high cover'd with snow"

had a red line drawn under it. The maiden-star saw this, and at once a dew of tears rose in her eyes, and she said, how noble the heart of this young man is; and then she put her mouth to the poet's ear and whispered something, and when the whispering was done the lovers looked round at one another and smiled, and kissed the poet's gentle cheek by turns, and went out saying, sleep in peace, sleep in peace.

When day broke, on the Sunday morning, the poet lay in the bed he had woken in and called back the dream of the night before. In the dream a maiden of heaven wearing a crimson star on her forehead had appeared and beckoned to him without a word, and led by her he climbed the hill; and the maiden drew close and whispered: do you wish for love, she asked, or is it freedom you want? And he answered that since the blood of freedom is love and the wings of love are freedom, he did not wish to be without either of them. The maiden smiled and said that in that case there was something she would show him first, and pointed far off into the western sky and told him to fix his eyes and look — and with that she vanished, he could not tell where. The moment the poet called this dream back, he sprang up, and while the sky of first dawn was only beginning to whiten he went out of the house alone and climbed the hill. Looking out at the western sky he saw two small stars hanging low towards the earth and giving off a thin light; and after a while the eastern sky was dyed with gold, and the light of those stars went out of itself, and the shadows of the range of mountains that had come up above the horizon were like the dark of painted eyebrows, and the colour of the snow the peaks wore was fainter than the dream; and the poet's heart melted into a state of rapture, and his eyes overflowed with tears. These are tears that only a man in the prime of life can know, and he who swallows these tears longs for the freedom it is useless to want upon this earth. And of all the things that draw such tears from a man in his prime, there can be nothing to equal the faint snow on a high peak towering beyond the sky, when it has thrown the dream-road of love into a likeness.

The poet raised his voice and sang "My Heart's in the Highlands", and when he came to the line "Farewell to the mountains high cover'd with snow" his voice went higher still, and his eyes looked far away towards the range of mountains as though in longing, as though in anger; the black hair hanging at his shoulders swayed in the wind, and when the climbing morning sun set his whole body shining, his figure standing there with the blue sky held above him looked for all the world like the incarnation of freedom.

(Written November, the twenty-ninth year of Meiji.)

Translator's log

Frozen with the draft, before any evaluation of this translation was designed (charter §8, continue-prompt.md §5.4). Decisions and alternatives; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only, which the front matter asserts for the page as a whole. Written as the draft was written, in order.

[1] The governing decision, taken in the first sentence and never revisited: render the classical register as plain modern narrative English, and let the archaism go. 「住みけり」 is a classical perfect with a storyteller's 「けり」; 「ありて」, 「過ぐ」, 「みごとなり」 are classical finite forms. The options at the top of the piece were (a) an English archaism — there dwelt a poet young of years — (b) a King James / fairy-tale cadence without lexical archaism, or (c) plain modern English with the syntax normalised. Took (c). Reason: R06 is one pass with no return, and an archaising register is a decision that has to be sustained for two thousand characters without a revision pass to catch the places where it slips; a register that slips is worse than one that was never attempted. What is lost is not small and should be said plainly: Doppo's Japanese was already old-fashioned in 1896 and was meant to be heard as such. A reader of this English has no way to know that.

[2] Tense. The source alternates freely — 「反射し」/「うつり」 present-stative inside a past narrative, 「知ることなし」 present at the end of a past paragraph. In classical Japanese this is ordinary and unmarked; in English it reads as a deliberate shift. Normalised to past throughout except where the sentence is a generalisation (the closing 「若くものあらじ」 → there can be nothing to equal). Alternative not taken: keep the shifts, which would have made the English look like an experiment in tense that Doppo did not write.

[3] 『いざさらば雪を戴く高峰』 — restored to Burns. The source names the poem: 西詩「わが心高原 にあり」 is My Heart's in the Highlands, and the quoted line is Doppo's Japanese of Farewell to the mountains high cover'd with snow. Restoring Burns's English is recovering the original of a quotation, not consulting a rendering of this source, so it does not breach R06 §1. The cost is real and is the interesting half of the decision: Doppo's Japanese reader meets the line as a translation, in a translated register, and my English reader meets it as Burns. The whole point of the scene — a Japanese poet with the poetry of many countries scattered round his pillow, a red line under a Scottish line about snow — turns on the line being foreign to the person reading it, and in English it stops being foreign. The alternative, kept live and not taken here: calque Doppo's Japanese back (Now then, farewell, high peaks that wear the snow), which keeps the foreignness and loses the recognition. Also not taken: quote Burns and footnote the difference — R06 admits no apparatus.

[4] The star-lovers. 男星/女星 are not Hikoboshi and Orihime here — Doppo does not name them and the Tanabata legend has them meeting once a year, not nightly — so man-star and woman-star were kept as the source's own coinage rather than domesticated to the Herdsman and the Weaver. 天の河 → the River of Heaven (not the Milky Way), because the frost falling on it is a figure that only works if it is a river. 天津乙女 → the maiden of heaven.

[5] 凩 (kogarashi). The wind that strips the trees; there is no English word. The first stripping wind — a compromise: it carries the function (it takes the leaves off) and loses the seasonal precision (a named wind of late autumn). Withering wind, winter wind, north wind all considered; the first is inert, the second is wrong by a season, the third is a different wind.

[6] 万籟寂として声なく. 万籟 is every sound nature makes. Every sound in creation was still and had no voice keeps the double predicate the Japanese has (寂として + 声なく) rather than collapsing it to all was silent. This is one of the few places the draft kept a redundancy that plain English would drop.

[7] 水色 → pale blue, not water-colour. The compound means light blue; the literal reading is a false friend in English, where water-coloured names a medium. Registered here because the other arm of this pair takes the other option under a rule, and the two together are a clean instance of the same word going two ways.

[8] 浮世のほかなる尊き顔の色. A face out of another world — 浮世 is the floating world, the world of transience and pleasure; out of the floating world is available and was not taken because in English it reads as ukiyo-e rather than as Buddhist transience.

[9] 黛のごとく. 黛 is the dark pigment used for painting eyebrows, and by extension the blue-dark of distant mountains. Rendered like the dark of painted eyebrows rather than dark blue — the figure is worth more than the colour, and the sentence has the colour of the snow immediately after it.

[10] この涙のむ者. 涙を飲む is to swallow one's tears, to endure without weeping. He who swallows these tears keeps the idiom; he who has known these tears would have been smoother and would have thrown away the physical verb the sentence needs.

[11] What was left unresolved and written as it stood, per R06 §2. 「恋路は千万里も一里とて」 — on the road of love ten million leagues count as one — the Japanese is a proverb-shaped aside introduced by 「とて」, and the English has no way to mark it as quoted wisdom rather than the narrator's own arithmetic. Written as it stands; the alternative (as they say, on the road of love…) supplies a frame the source does not have.