Repository path: workshop/translations/kiseru/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-kiseru-R04-v1 — 芥川龍之介「煙管」 sections 一 and 二

Source: workshop/canon/kiseru/source.txt — Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 「煙管」 (1916), sections 一 and 二 entire, 1,732 non-space characters, 32 body paragraphs. Provenance and the one gaiji emendation: workshop/canon/kiseru/manifest.md.

Regime: R04 v1.0 — lead, source only, draft then self-revise in session. The draft is frozen separately as T-kiseru-R06-v1 at commit 6168fc2, before this revision was begun (R04 §2a).

Pair: JA→EN. The project's second Akutagawa and the first from the volume A-shaw-spider-thread was built on.

Why this passage exists: it supplies the second site list for E-20260730-grain-clause. The 34-site census was frozen at commit 4f0134d — before a word of this translation was written — and the two rule variants under test were frozen before that, at 9830845. This translation was made without consulting any of the three rules, so unlike T-patsyuk-R04-v1 it is not complying with C15 by construction; but the translator had read C15 and RS-20260729d earlier in the same session, so it is not blind to them either, and every number that touches the translator's own handlings is descriptive only.

Contamination

Suspected, and measured. The measurement is a finding and not a formality.

Comparator: Glenn W. Shaw, "The Pipe", in Tales Grotesque and Curious (Hokuseido, 1930), Project Gutenberg #78105 — the same volume and translator that A-shaw-spider-thread rests on. The comparator was never opened by the translator: it was extracted from the volume mechanically into a scratch file and read only by tools/dependence_check.py.

The last row is the revision's own size: the longest span the two versions share is 56 tokens, and it sits in section 二 — the revision worked hard on section 一 and lightly on the dialogue, which is what the log's aggregate says.

The 13-token run, verbatim, and it is section 二:

then one day when five or six of them had their round heads

against 「するとある日、彼等の五六人が、円い頭をならべて」. The section-一 7-gram is "the attention of the whole palace was".

What follows from this, and what does not.

• It does not disqualify the unit. The primary statistic of E-20260730-grain-clause is reader-versus-reader agreement on a census of source-side sites; the readers never see this translation, and the lead's own handlings enter only as a declared-descriptive column.
• It is not evidence that the run was remembered. Nor is it evidence that it was forced. ARM-forced-defence exists because this project cannot currently tell those apart, and RS-20260728b-forced-run-ru showed on Russian that a shared run can be partly forced — three independent models reproduced the head of a 21-token run and none reproduced its distinctive tail. By eye the head here (then one day, when five or six of them) is close to compelled by 「するとある日、彼等の五六人が」 and had their round heads is a choice; that is an impression and is recorded as one, not as a measurement. It is a ready-made sixth case for that arm, in a seventh language pair, with a free comparator.
• The n12_nonames column reads 0 and is uninformative. tools/dependence_check.py's name_tokens() bans every word appearing capitalised anywhere in either text, which on prose beginning sentences with Then, One, When removes most of the run's vocabulary. This is the defect S049 reported and did not fix; it is reported again here rather than treated as a zero.
• Nothing was edited to reduce the overlap, and one edit reduced it anyway. The 13-token sentence is unchanged between the R06 draft and this revision, deliberately: revising a passage because a measurement pointed at it would destroy the only thing the measurement is good for. The section-一 7-gram did change, on a fidelity ground stated at D14 below — 殿中 is within the palace, not the whole palace — and the side effect is declared there.

一

Maeda Narinaga, lord of Kanazawa Castle in the district of Ishikawa in the province of Kaga, never once went up to the main keep of Edo Castle, during his terms of residence in the city, without carrying his favourite pipe. It was a pipe of the most studied refinement, from the hand of Sumiyoshiya Shichibei, the famous pipe-maker of the day: a ground of solid gold with the sword-and-plum-blossom crest scattered over it.

Under the shogunate's ordering of these things the House of Maeda had, ever since the fifth lord, Tsunanori, Governor of Kaga, been stationed in the Great Corridor, and its place in the order of precedence had, generation after generation, been next after the three houses of Owari, Kii and Mito. As for wealth, there was scarcely a lord in the land, great or small, who could stand shoulder to shoulder with it. That Narinaga, as the head of such a house, should carry a pipe of solid gold was therefore, if anything, no more than carrying an ornament proper to his station.

Narinaga, however, took an extreme satisfaction in owning it. Let it be said at once that his satisfaction had nothing whatever to do with any fondness for the pipe itself, in any sense of the word. What he took pleasure in was the reason why his own power — the power to put such a pipe to his lips as a matter of daily habit — stood above that of the other lords. He was gratified, in other words, and there is no harm in putting it exactly so, that the million koku of Kaga had turned into a pipe of solid gold which he could carry with him anywhere.

Such being the case, Narinaga hardly ever let the pipe out of his hand for the whole time he was at the castle. When he was talking to someone, of course; but even when he was by himself he would take it out of his breast, hold it lordly-fashion between his lips, and sit at his leisure sending up the high-scented smoke of Nagasaki leaf or something of the kind.

This gratified feeling of his was not, perhaps, of so puffed-up a kind as to make him flaunt either the pipe or the million koku the pipe stood for. But whether he flaunted it or not, the attention of the palace was plainly concentrated on that pipe, or so it appeared; and to be conscious of its being so concentrated gave Narinaga a considerable pleasure. In fact, after a lord seated beside him had said that the pipe was so very fine that he should like to be allowed to look at it for a moment, he even had the feeling that the smoke of the tobacco he was used to stung his tongue more pleasantly than usual.

二

Among those whose eyes were startled by the solid gold pipe Narinaga carried, the ones who most liked to make a topic of it were the class of the so-called shaven-heads. At every opportunity they put their noses together and fought out, with this "Kaga pipe" for material, the volubility they prided themselves on.

"Well, it is a great lord's article and no mistake."

"Same sort of article or not, a thing like that will fetch its weight melted down, it will."

"Put it in pawn and how many ryō would they lend on it, I wonder."

"It is not as if it belonged to you. Who would ever put such a thing in pawn?"

That, roughly, was the tone of it.

Then one day, when five or six of them had their round heads in a row and were taking a pipeful and gossiping about the pipe as usual, Kōchiyama Sōshun, of the tea-room service, happened to come along — the man who was in later years to play the principal rôle among the Six Poetic Immortals of the Tempō era.

"Hmph. The pipe again."

Kōchiyama took in the company of shaven-heads with a contemptuous side-glance and affected indifference.

"The chasing, the metal — it is a splendid thing either way. For the likes of us, who have not even a silver pipe, it is poison to the eyes so much as to look at —"

Ryōtetsu, the shaven-head who had been holding forth in this vein and warming to it, happened to look and saw that Sōshun had at some point drawn Ryōtetsu's own pipe-case over to himself, was filling a pipe from the tobacco in it, and was at his ease blowing the smoke out in rings.

"Here, here — that is not your tobacco-pouch."

"No matter."

Sōshun, without so much as turning to look at Ryōtetsu, filled the pipe again. And when he had smoked it out, he gave one half-forced yawn, flung the pouch down where it had been, and said:

"Faugh, what bad tobacco. A fancier of pipes, they call him — the words are enough to make a man stare."

Ryōtetsu hurriedly put the pouch away.

"Ah well, with a pipe of solid gold, even this would be smokable enough, I daresay."

"The pipe again," Kōchiyama repeated. "If solid gold is such a blessing, why don't you set off and ask to be given the pipe?"

"Ask to be given the pipe?"

"Just so."

Even Ryōtetsu, it seemed, was taken aback at the man's complete want of regard for anybody.

"Look here, however greedy you may think me — if it were only silver, now, that would be quite another matter. At all events it is solid gold. That pipe is."

"Obviously. It is precisely because it is solid gold that one gets it given. Where is the man who presents himself to be given some brass rubbish?"

"All the same, that would be a little presumptuous."

Ryōtetsu gave his cleanly shaven head a slap and made a gesture as of being abashed.

"If you won't have it, I will have it. Mind now — don't go envying me afterwards."

So saying, Kōchiyama tapped out his pipe, gave a shake of his shoulders, and sneered.

Translator's log

Frozen before any evaluation of this translation was designed (R04 §3, charter rule 8). Decisions and alternatives; no quality claims. Written during translation and during the revision, and not touched afterwards. Where a sentence here is evaluative it carries internal-judgment-only inline.

The passage is unusual for this project in that its realia are almost all institutional — offices, ranks, stations, obligations — rather than objects, food or clothing. Three quarters of the census is the machinery of a legally graded society, and the recurring problem below is that English has words for most of the pieces and none for the grading.

Section 一

• D1 — 加州石川郡金沢城の城主. The source stacks province → district → castle → holder. English cannot stack that way without reading as an address. Rendered as an appositive running outward (lord of Kanazawa Castle in the district of Ishikawa in the province of Kaga). Alternative considered and rejected: lord of Kanazawa Castle, Ishikawa, Kaga, which turns a status formula into a postal line.
• D2 — 参覲. No English word. The obligation is the alternate-year residence in the shogunal capital. Draft ran it together with 登城 as during his term of attendance, which conflated the residence with the daily going-up to the castle; the revision separates them (during his terms of residence in the city / went up to the main keep). The institution itself is not named, and a reader who does not know it will read the sentence as being about travel.
• D3 — 前田斉広. Read Narinaga. Retained, romanised, no gloss; the sentence's own apposition carries the rank.
• D4 — 金無垢地に、剣梅鉢の紋ぢらし. The draft lost 地 (solid gold throughout, and strewn over with). Revised to a ground of solid gold with the sword-and-plum-blossom crest scattered over it, which recovers the metalwork sense: 紋散らし is a pattern name. 剣梅鉢 is translated rather than retained — the crest is described in the source by its own components, so translating it costs nothing.
• D5 — 数寄を凝らした. of the most studied refinement. 数寄 is the tea-taste category; the word recurs at 御数寄屋坊主 in section 二, where the same morpheme names an office. The English loses the link entirely — refinement and tea-room share nothing — and there was no rendering available that kept both without a note. Declared as a loss.
• D6 — 大廊下詰. been stationed in the Great Corridor. A rank expressed as a place: the highest houses waited in the 大廊下 and the name of the corridor became the name of the rank. Kept literal, on the ground that the sentence's neighbours (ordering of these things, order of precedence) supply enough for stationed to read as rank rather than as furniture. Alternative rejected: held the first order of precedence, which states the sense and deletes the mechanism.
• D7 — 尾紀水三家. Expanded to the three houses of Owari, Kii and Mito, i.e. the abbreviation is undone. The source's compression (one character per province) is a scholarly shorthand a Japanese reader unpacks silently; keeping it (the Bi-Ki-Sui three houses) would be opaque and expanding it is a small domestication. Note the expansion also silently supplies that these are Tokugawa collaterals — it does not; a reader will not know why they rank above Kaga.
• D8 — 加賀守綱紀. the fifth lord, Tsunanori, Governor of Kaga. 加賀守 is a court title, not a job; Governor overstates its content. Alternative rejected: leaving it romanised, which would have made the clause unreadable in a sentence already carrying three institutions.
• D9 — 百万石. Retained romanised as the million koku, twice, with no gloss. This is the one place a conversion was live (the passage would take a million bushels of rice a year or a domain worth a million), and it was declined because the figure is being used as an emblem of size rather than as a quantity — 「加州百万石が金無垢の煙管になって」 makes the assessment become the pipe. A converted number cannot do that. The cost is that the sentence's force now depends on the reader knowing what a koku is.
• D10 — 肩を比べる. Draft set beside it; revised to stand shoulder to shoulder with it, which is the idiom's own image and is available in English.
• D11 — 身分相当の装飾品. an ornament proper to his station, with 寧ろ restored as if anything.
• D12 — 所以を悦んだ. The hardest sentence in section 一. The object of his pleasure is not his power but the reason why his power exceeds the others'. Draft flattened it to the ground of his own power … standing above; the revision restores the two-step (the reason why his own power … stood above that of the other lords). Clumsy in English, and deliberately so — smoothing it deletes the joke.
• D13 — 鷹揚に口に啣えながら. hold it lordly-fashion between his lips. 鷹揚 is a manner word with no single English adjective; grandly (draft) reads as comic, magnanimously is wrong, lordly-fashion at least keeps the register of rank the passage is about.
• D14 — 殿中の注意. Draft: the attention of the whole palace. Revised to the attention of the palace … or so it appeared, on two grounds: 殿中 means within the palace, and 観があった (there was the appearance of) is a hedge the draft dropped. Declared side effect: the draft's wording was also the section's one shared 7-gram with Shaw, so this fidelity edit removed it. The edit was made from the source and the overlap was noticed afterwards; it is recorded because the reverse order would be indistinguishable in the artifact and is exactly what a reader should suspect.
• D15 — 拝見させて頂きたい. should like to be allowed to look at it for a moment. Two stacked humbling auxiliaries reduce to one modal. English politeness has no way to be this deferential without sounding satirical; the loss is in the direction of levelling the rank difference the sentence exists to display.

Section 二

• D16 — お坊主の階級. the class of the so-called shaven-heads. The word is the ordinary one for a Buddhist cleric and these men are lay household servants who shaved their heads; rendering it monks would be flatly wrong and priests worse. 所謂 restored in the revision — the source itself flags the word as a nickname, which does half the mediating work for free. This is the passage's clearest instance of the source supplying its own scaffold.
• D17 — よるとさわると / 鼻をつき合せて / 得意の饒舌を闘わせた. Draft compressed the last to matched their practised volubility; the revision keeps 得意 as the volubility they prided themselves on and 闘わせた as fought out, because the sentence is a small joke about competitive gossip and the verb is the joke.
• D18 — the four servants' lines (¶¶7–10). The register is period servant-clipped: 利きやす for 利ります, だて as a sentence-final, こちとら, 貴公. English has no register that maps. Chosen: a plain low-formal English with a tag repetition (, it will) and no attempt at a dialect. Alternatives rejected: Cockney-flavoured (imports a class geography that is not there), and modern flat colloquial (deletes the period). This is the standing problem wiki/goodness-senses.md files under voice, and nothing here solves it.
• D19 — つぶしが利く. will fetch its weight melted down. The idiom is about scrap value; English has melt value is trade jargon, so the phrase is unpacked.
• D20 — 両. Rendered ryō, retained. The draft had dropped the unit entirely (what would they lend on it), which is the kind of silent deletion the census exists to make visible: the unit is the whole point of the servant's question. A change of substance made in revision, not a polish.
• D21 — 貴公 / 手前 / 己. Three status-marked pronouns, all reduced to English you and I. 貴公 (It is not as if it belonged to you), 手前 and 己 in the last speech (If you won't have it, I will have it) — the contempt in Kōchiyama's 手前/己 pairing survives only as emphasis and word order. Declared loss; there is no English resource here at all.
• D22 — 御数寄屋坊主. of the tea-room service. Rejected: tea-room monk (wrong, see D16), Master of the Tea Room (inflates a menial post into an office of state). The post's low standing is what makes his effrontery funny, and service is the most that could be got.
• D23 — 天保六歌仙 and the rôle. the Six Poetic Immortals of the Tempō era. 歌仙 is unpacked because the nickname is ironic — these are criminals called poet-immortals — and the irony needs the words. The source's own 「rôle」, printed in Latin script in a 1916 Japanese text, is a texture the English cannot carry: in English the word is unremarkable. Kept as rôle with the circumflex, italicised, which preserves the graphic oddity and not the effect. Declared loss.
• D24 — 煙管入れ then 煙草入れ (¶¶16–17). The source is inconsistent: the narrator calls it a pipe-case and Ryōtetsu, two lines later, calls it a tobacco-pouch. The object is the single waist set that holds both. Both words are kept as they stand, inconsistency and all, rather than harmonised; harmonising would improve the English and delete a fact about the text.
• D25 — 生あくび. one half-forced yawn. Draft a bored yawn supplied the motive; 生 means the yawn is put on, not that he was bored.
• D26 — 聞いてあきれる. the words are enough to make a man stare. A fixed dismissive formula; the English is an approximation and reads a shade politer than the Japanese.
• D27 — 傍若無人. complete want of regard for anybody, unpacking the four-character compound. Rejected: outrageousness, which is a judgment where the source gives a description.
• D28 — 真鍮の駄六. some brass rubbish. 駄六 is period slang for a worthless article; there is no equally period English slang available, so the register drops to plain.
• D29 — 恐れ. a little presumptuous. The word is 恐れ多い shortened — presumption toward a superior specifically, which presumptuous carries only weakly.
• D30 — 拝領. ask to be given / gets it given / presents himself to be given. The single Japanese word covers the bestowal, the soliciting of it, and the ceremony; English needs a different construction in each of its three occurrences, so the class is handled non-uniformly — which is exactly the practice CL-20260726-forked-class-nonuniformity records in published translators and C15's standing constraint forbids. Noticed and recorded during translation; not corrected, because correcting it would have required a coinage.
• D31 — the last three exchanges. Kept short and unglossed. The passage ends on a threat whose whole content is that soliciting a gift from a great lord is a recognised, nameable manoeuvre; the English states the manoeuvre and cannot name it.

Draft → revision, in the aggregate

31 logged decisions. Of the revision's changes, three are substantive rather than stylistic — D2 (separating 参覲 from 登城), D14 (殿中's scope and the dropped hedge), D20 (restoring 両) — and one is a restored source feature (D17, 所謂 at D16). The rest are register and rhythm. internal-judgment-only: the revision reads to me as tighter and more period, and that judgment is worth nothing here — it is the drafter grading the reviser.

Sizes. 1,732 source characters → 1,015 English words in this revision (section 一 473, section 二 542); the R06 draft was 941. Longest span shared with the draft: 56 tokens.