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

«こころ» 上・十三 — love is a sin — English, R06 v1

Source. 夏目漱石『こころ』(1914), 上「先生と私」, section 十三. Copy-text: Aozora Bunko card 000148, file 773_14560.html, 底本『こころ』集英社文庫（集英社）, 初出「朝日新聞」. Retrieved 2026-08-09, decoded as cp932 per CLAUDE.md. Cleaned plain text at workshop/canon/kokoro/source.txt (1,331 paragraphs, 160,234 non-whitespace characters), produced by tools/fetch_aozora.py; the section alone is at workshop/translations/kokoro/source-ja-13.txt and is committed with this artifact.

Span. Section 十三 whole — 26 paragraphs, 1,328 non-whitespace Japanese characters → 703 English words.

Regime. R06 v1.0 — lead single pass, source only, no return pass. Written straight through; where a choice was unresolved at the moment of writing, the option written is the one below and the alternative is recorded in the log.

Priming. None, and none was possible: no published English translation of «こころ» is freely reachable. Project Gutenberg holds only Botchan (Morri 1918) and Kusamakura for Sōseki; Wikisource holds none; the two standard English versions (McClellan 1958, McKinney 2010) are both in copyright and were not consulted. No rendering of this section into any language was read before this draft and its log were frozen.

Contamination: suspected, and — this is the point — UNMEASURED, because no comparator exists. Basis, three parts. (i) The project's own prior renderings: none. workshop/translations/ carries no kokoro directory and no lead rendering of any part of this novel — the note (bhb) repository check, run before the section was selected, returns zero. (ii) «こころ» is among the most translated works of modern Japanese prose and English versions plausibly sit in the lead's training data; the calibration run measured 93% work-recognition on Botchan's opening, and this novel is at least as famous. (iii) There is nothing to measure it against. tools/dependence_check_cjk.py needs a comparator and reference cells; with no reachable published English there is no subject pair to compute, so the figure that S139 could quote for «Дуэль» against Garnett — 23 twelve-grams, longest run 18 — has no analogue here. The declaration is therefore a statement of belief with a stated basis and not a measurement, exactly the placeholder CLAUDE.md warns can hide either end of the range. What follows for use: the lead writes no arm of the experiment this translation is paired with, no hand renders this section, and this artifact is cited descriptively and never as an independent rendering.

Cost. $0 (charter §3, A4). No API call.

The translation

We were in the middle of the crowd. Every face in it looked pleased with itself. Not until we had come out the other side, into a wooded place where neither blossom nor people could be seen, was there any chance to take up the same subject again.

"Is love a sin?" I asked, quite suddenly.

"It is a sin. Certainly it is." There was the same force in his voice as before.

"Why?"

"You will understand why in time. Not in time — you must understand it already. Has your heart not been in motion with love this long while past?"

I made a sort of inspection of my own breast. But it was emptier than I had expected. There was nothing in it that answered to what he said.

"There is not one object in my breast that I could point to. I do not believe I am keeping anything from you, Sensei."

"It is because you have no object that you are in motion. You come to want to move, thinking that if you had one you would be able to settle."

"I am not in such motion as all that."

"Was it not because you were unsatisfied that you moved to where I am?"

"That may be so. But it is not the same thing as love."

"It is a step on the stair that goes up to love. As a stage in the order of things that ends in your embracing the other sex, you first moved toward me, who am of your own."

"To me the two seem entirely different in kind."

"No, they are the same. I am a man, and being a man I am someone who can never give you satisfaction. And beyond that, there are particular circumstances which make me less able to give it to you still. I am truly sorry for you. It cannot be helped that you should move away from me and go elsewhere. I would rather hope for it. But — "

A strange sadness came over me.

"If it is your opinion, Sensei, that I shall go away from you, there is nothing I can do about it; but no such feeling has yet arisen in me."

Sensei lent no ear to what I said.

"But you'd better take care. Love is a sin, remember. There's no satisfaction to be had where I am, but there's no danger either — see here, my boy, do you know what it feels like to be tied up in long black hair?"

In imagination I knew. As a fact I did not. Either way, what Sensei meant by sin stayed hazy and out of my reach; and on top of that I had begun to feel a little put out.

"Sensei, please say more plainly what you mean by sin, and let me hear it. Otherwise, let us break the subject off here — until I can see plainly for myself what the sin is."

"I've done a bad thing. I thought I was telling you the truth. What I was really doing was goading you. I've done a bad thing."

Sensei and I walked at a quiet pace from behind the museum in the direction of Uguisudani. Through a gap in the fence, a stand of bamboo grass in one part of a wide garden looked deep and secluded.

"Do you know why I go every month to the grave of the friend who lies buried in the cemetery at Zōshigaya?"

The question was altogether sudden. And Sensei knew perfectly well that it was one I could not answer. For a while I made no reply. Then, as though the thought had only now struck him, he said:

"There, I have said another bad thing. I think it wrong to make you impatient, and so I try to explain, and the explanation only ends by making you impatient again. There is no help for it. Let us leave this subject here. At all events love is a sin — do you take my meaning? And a sacred thing as well."

Sensei's talk had grown steadily less intelligible to me. But he did not speak of love again after that.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written; frozen with the draft, before any evaluation of it was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Paragraph numbers ¶n index the 26 paragraphs of source-ja-13.txt.

The shape of the problem, recorded first. Sensei's speech in this section moves on two independent axes, and they do not move together:

Tracked across the section, Sensei's utterances run: ¶5 あなた+polite · ¶8 polite · ¶10 あなた+polite · ¶12 polite · ¶14 あなた+polite · ¶18 plain + 君 (vocative), closing on a polite interrogative · ¶21 wholly plain, あなた · ¶23 君+polite · ¶25 あなた+polite, closing on the archaic よござんすか. The narrator's own speech (¶7, ¶9, ¶11, ¶13, ¶16, ¶20) never leaves です・ます and never stops calling him 先生. So the trajectory belongs to one speaker only, and it is a break and a recovery rather than a one-way switch — which is what made this section the locus and not §十四.

• D1 — 先生 is kept as Sensei, untranslated, throughout. Alternatives live at the moment of writing: "sir" (wrong — he holds no office and the narrator is not his student), "Professor" (flatly false, and the novel says so), and deletion. Kept because the word is the addressee's only name in the entire novel and the narrator's first sentence is about the act of choosing it. The cost is a loan-word in an otherwise unforeign English, and the gain is that the one address term the Japanese keeps constant stays constant here too.
• D2 — the register trajectory is put on contraction, sentence length and directive force, because those are the exponents English has. Sensei's polite stretches are written with no contractions at all ("I do not believe", "It cannot be helped", "There is not one object"); ¶18 and ¶21, the two breaks, are the only places in his speech where contractions appear ("you'd better", "There's no", "I've done"). This is a deliberate, uniform rule applied across the section and it is the single largest decision in the draft. Rejected alternatives: marking the breaks by diction (Anglo-Saxon against Latinate), which would have made the outburst sound coarse rather than unguarded; and marking them by archaism in the polite stretches, which would have aged the whole speech.
• D3 — ¶18's 「――君、」 is rendered as a vocative, "see here, my boy". This is the crux of the section and the crux of the whole problem: 君 is a pronoun in Japanese and its use here is a reach toward intimacy, and English cannot make a pronoun do that. The options that were live: (a) nothing at all, letting the dash carry it — rejected, because the dash then marks a hesitation and not a turn; (b) "look here" alone — a turn without the closing of distance; (c) "my boy" alone — the closing of distance without the turn; (d) both, which is what was written. Two words are added that are not in the Japanese, and they convert a pronoun into a vocative, which is a change of device and not a translation of the form. Recorded here as the same manoeuvre as T-duel-R06-v1's D3 (a "sir" added where Russian switched pronoun) and in the opposite direction: there a word was added to make a speaker colder, here to make him warmer.
• D4 — ¶23's 君 is not rendered at all, and cannot be. 「君は私がなぜ…知っていますか」 is a subject pronoun in a question; English deletes it into "Do you know why…". So of the two 君 in this section, one became a vocative and one vanished, and nothing in the English marks the second one. This is the clearest single instance in the section of a marking the target language has no place to put.
• D5 — ¶21 is the plainest sentence-set in the draft and was written shortest. 「悪い事をした」 frames the utterance twice, and both times it is rendered identically ("I've done a bad thing") to keep the frame Sōseki built. Alternative considered and rejected: varying the second one ("It was wrong of me") for English ear-comfort. The repetition is the form.
• D6 — ¶25's 「よござんすか」 → "do you take my meaning?" An old downtown-polite variant of よろしいですか. It is the one place in the section where Sensei's politeness is marked rather than neutral, and the recovery of the polite frame is what it is doing. Options: "you understand?" (too bare, and it reads as impatience), "is that clear?" (schoolmasterly), "d'you follow?" (contracted, which D2's rule reserves for the breaks). "Do you take my meaning?" is faintly antique and uncontracted, which is what was wanted; it is longer than the Japanese.
• D7 — 動く / 動いて来た is kept as motion throughout (¶5, ¶8, ¶9, ¶10, ¶12). Sōseki uses one verb five times in eight paragraphs and builds the argument on it: the heart is in motion, the narrator moved toward Sensei, he will move away. English wants "restless" for some of these and "came to me" for others. Both were rejected in favour of holding the single word, at the cost of "I am not in such motion as all that" (¶9), which is stiffer than 「今それほど動いちゃいません」 — itself a contracted colloquial polite form, whose contraction D2's rule could not use because the speaker there is the narrator, not Sensei.
• D8 — ¶12 「恋に上る楷段」 → "a step on the stair that goes up to love". 楷段 for 階段. "Rung of a ladder" was live and is the more natural English idiom; "stair" was kept because the metaphor is architectural and the sentence continues into 順序, an order of things.
• D9 — ¶12 「異性」/「同性」 → "the other sex" / "of your own". The literal pair is "opposite sex"/"same sex", and "same sex" in present-day English carries a meaning Sōseki's sentence does not. Rewriting the second term as a relative ("me, who am of your own") avoids the anachronism and keeps the pairing; the price is a slightly archaic relative clause.
• D10 — ¶14 「しかし……」 → "But — ". The Japanese trails off in ellipsis; the English uses a dash, because the ellipsis in ¶14 and the dash in ¶18 do different work in Japanese (a fade and a turn) and English punctuation distributes them the other way round. Alternative: keep both as ellipses, which would have made ¶18's turn invisible.
• D11 — ¶1 「群集はいずれも嬉しそうな顔をしていた」 → "Every face in it looked pleased with itself." 嬉しそう is "looked happy"; "pleased with itself" imports a shade of the narrator's distaste that the Japanese leaves to 冷評 two paragraphs earlier (in §十二, outside this span). Recorded as an addition of attitude, and the plainer "looked happy" was the alternative.
• D12 — ¶22 「幽邃」 → "deep and secluded". A two-character compound with no English single word; two adjectives were used. 「熊笹」 → "bamboo grass" (not "kumazasa", not "dwarf bamboo"). 「鶯渓」 is transliterated Uguisudani rather than glossed as "Nightingale Valley", on the same principle as Zōshigaya in ¶23 — place names stay place names, and the two are two lines apart.
• D13 — 焦慮せる (¶25) is rendered "make you impatient", and the same verb in ¶21 is rendered "goading". The word is 焦らせる in both places and consistency was available. It was given up because ¶21 is Sensei's self-accusation in plain forms, where "goading" carries the violence he is accusing himself of, and ¶25 is the polite recovery, where "make you impatient" does not. This is the one place where D2's contraction rule was reinforced lexically, and it is a deviation from the hold-one-word principle D7 states.
• D14 — what was not attempted. No attempt was made to mark the あなた stretches as such. English has no unmarked-formal second person, and inserting "sir" into Sensei's mouth (the T-duel-R06-v1 solution, in the opposite direction) would have made him the narrator's inferior. The あなた/君 alternation is therefore carried in this draft at exactly one of its four sites (¶18, by D3), and is absent at the other three. Sentence-internal plain forms inside polite stretches (¶14 「仕方がない」) were treated as ordinary Japanese subordination and not as register events.

Length. 1,328 Japanese characters → 703 English words. The draft is longer than the source at every one of Sensei's polite paragraphs and shorter at ¶21, which is the intended consequence of D2.