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

〈孔乙己〉 — six segments, R06 (lead single pass)

• Source: Lu Xun 魯迅, 〈孔乙己〉 (1919), 1938 《魯迅全集》 text — ../provenance.md, ../source-zh-segments.txt. 1,201 characters, six segments.
• Regime: R06 v1.0 (lead, source-only, single pass, no return pass).
• Translator: the lead agent, as a labeled subject. Cost $0; never ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Date: 2026-08-07 (S129).
• Lineage: the neutral middle of the three-arm ladder R08 ← R06 → R07 built for E-20260807e-sense-tradeoff. The three arms share translator, session, source, reading and revision depth; the rule set is the only variable.
• Contamination: none, and it is measured — see ../contamination.md. Against the one reachable published rendering the lead shares 6 seven-grams, 0 twelve-grams, longest run 11 tokens, where two independent hands on the same materials share 4 / 0 / 10. The design does not depend on this: every arm comes from the same hand in the same session, so any remembered English is common-mode and can only shrink a contrast between arms, never manufacture one.
• Priming: none. Translated from the Chinese alone. No English rendering of this story was fetched, opened or read until after all three renderings and all three logs were committed.

S1

The wine-shops of Lu Town are laid out unlike those anywhere else: each has, giving on the street, a big counter bent like a carpenter's square, with hot water kept ready inside it so that wine can be warmed at any moment. The working men, knocking off towards midday or towards dusk, will often spend four copper cash on a bowl of wine — this was twenty-odd years ago; now it has gone up to ten a bowl — and stand leaning against the outside of the counter and drink it hot, and rest. For one cash more they can have a dish of salt-boiled bamboo shoots, or aniseed beans, to send the wine down; for a dozen or so they could have a meat dish, but these customers are mostly of the short-coat sort and few of them run to it. Only the men in long gowns go strolling through into the room beside the shop-front, and call for wine and call for dishes, and sit drinking slowly.

S2

Kong Yiji was the only man who drank standing up and wore a long gown. He was very tall and large; his face was a greenish white, and among its wrinkles there were often scars; he had a great unkempt grizzled beard. What he had on was a long gown, true enough, but it was filthy and torn and looked as though it had gone ten years and more without mending and without washing. When he spoke to anyone it was always a mouthful of zhi hu zhe ye, so that one half understood him and half did not. Because his surname was Kong, people took the half-intelligible line from the red-tracing copybook — Shang da ren Kong yi ji — and out of it made him a nickname, and called him Kong Yiji.

S3

The moment Kong Yiji came into the shop everyone drinking there would look at him and laugh, and one or another would call out: "Kong Yiji, you've a fresh scar on your face!" He would not answer, but would say towards the counter, "Warm two bowls of wine, and a dish of aniseed beans," and lay out nine big coppers in a row. Then they would shout on purpose, at the tops of their voices, "You must have been stealing again!" Kong Yiji would open his eyes wide and say, "How can you blacken a man's good name out of thin air —" "Good name? The day before yesterday I saw you with my own eyes stealing books from the Ho family, and strung up and beaten for it." At that Kong Yiji's face would flush crimson, the veins on his forehead standing out one by one, and he would argue: "To purloin a book cannot be counted stealing … Purloining! … The affairs of a man of letters — can they be counted stealing?" And there would come a run of hard words after it, something about a gentleman is steadfast in poverty, something about zhe hu, until the whole company was roaring; and the shop, inside and out, was full of a cheerful air.

S4

When Kong Yiji had drunk half a bowl the flush would go slowly out of his face, and one of the bystanders would ask again, "Kong Yiji, can you really read?" Kong Yiji would look at whoever had asked, with the air of a man who does not deign to argue. Then they would go on: "How is it you never managed to scrape up so much as half a xiucai degree?" At that Kong Yiji would look at once dejected and uneasy, a layer of grey would settle over his face, and his mouth would say something; but this time it was all zhi hu zhe ye and nothing to be understood at all. At which the whole company would roar with laughter too: the shop, inside and out, was full of a cheerful air.

S5

Kong Yiji knew himself that he could not talk with them, and so had no one to speak to but the children. Once he said to me, "Have you had any schooling?" I gave a slight nod. He said, "Schooling — … then I shall put you to the test. The hui of hui-xiang beans: how is it written?" I thought: a man not a step from beggary, and is he fit to examine me? So I turned my face away and took no more notice. Kong Yiji waited a long while and then said, very earnestly, "You cannot write it, then? … I shall teach you. Remember it! These characters ought to be remembered. When you are a shopkeeper by and by you will want them for the accounts." I thought privately that I was a long way in rank yet from being a shopkeeper, and that our shopkeeper never entered aniseed beans in the accounts at all; and, half amused and half out of patience, I answered him lazily, "Who wants your teaching? Isn't it the hui of hui-lai, with the grass on top?" Kong Yiji looked hugely pleased, and tapping the counter with the long nails of two fingers, nodded and said, "Just so, just so! … The character hui has four ways of being written. Did you know that?" I was more out of patience than ever, and went off with my lips pushed out.

S6

Several times the children next door, hearing the laughter, came running up to be in it too and crowded round Kong Yiji. He would give them aniseed beans to eat, one apiece. The children would finish their beans and still not go away, all their eyes on the dish. Kong Yiji would take alarm, spread his five fingers over the dish to cover it, and stoop down and say, "There are not many left. I have not many left now." Then he would straighten up and look at the beans again and say, shaking his head, "Not many, not many! Are they many? They are not many." And with that the whole pack of children would scatter, laughing.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written, decision by decision, frozen with it (R06 §3, §4). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. The one place an evaluative word appears it is marked internal-judgment-only; nothing here is evidence that any decision was a good one.

The register this log uses, and why

Beside each logged decision this log carries a fork code, assigned at the moment of writing:

• FORK — at this site the translator was aware of two live renderings, one of which carried more of what the source has and the other of which produced English that moves more easily, and could not have both. The choice was between them.
• FREE — two or more live renderings, and the choice was not of that kind (rhythm, a synonym, a comma).

This is a decision record in exactly the sense R06 §3 requires; it is not a claim that either option was better. It is registered here because E-20260807e predicts from it, and it is frozen before the evaluation is designed so that the prediction is a prediction.

The fork register, frozen

Density is FORK per 100 source characters: S3 3.24, S2 3.97, S4 2.50, S1 2.40, S5 1.37, S6 2.11. The rank column is the frozen prediction and is ordered on the raw judgement made while translating, not recomputed from the density column — where the two disagree (S2 vs S3, S1 vs S4, S5 vs S6) the rank column governs, and the disagreement is left visible rather than tidied. Tallies parsed mechanically by analysis/parse_log.py (the binding condition in workshop/translations/README.md).

S1 — 5 FORK, 4 FREE

1. 曲尺形的大櫃臺 — FORK. A big counter bent like a carpenter's square keeps the Chinese figure (曲尺 is the L-shaped joiner's rule); a big L-shaped counter is what an English writer would put. Took the figure. Alternative recorded.
2. 短衣幫 — FORK. Literally the short-clothes gang: a class term, the men who work. The short-coat sort keeps the garment and loses the 幫; labourers loses the garment, which is the whole point, because the story's system is clothes. Kept the garment.
3. 長衫 — FORK, and it is the same decision as (2) seen from the other end. Long gowns against the gentry. Kept the garment; the class fact then has to be inferred by the reader, as it is in Chinese.
4. 茴香豆 — FORK. Aniseed beans (a calque, and unidiomatic in English — nobody eats these) against spiced beans / fennel beans. Kept the calque; it recurs four times and S5's whole examination scene is about the character 茴, so a domesticated name would break S5.
5. 文 / 大錢 — FORK. Cash is the received English word for the coin and is now dead; coppers is alive and is a different coin. Used copper cash first and coppers second, which is a compromise and is recorded as one.
6. 闊綽 — FREE. Run to it against afford it / be so free-handed.
7. 踱進 — FREE. Go strolling through against saunter in.
8. 要酒要菜 — FREE. Kept the doubled verb (call for wine and call for dishes) rather than order wine and food; a rhythm choice, not a fidelity one.
9. 這是二十多年前的事… — FREE. The narrator's aside is parenthetical in Chinese by dashes and stays parenthetical.

S2 — 6 FORK, 2 FREE

1. 滿口之乎者也 — FORK, and the largest in the passage. Four classical particles, quoted as sounds. Live options: (a) romanise, a mouthful of zhi hu zhe ye — carries that the man's speech is quoted as noise, costs the reader all sense; (b) a mouthful of classical tags; (c) an English analogue — forsooths and whereases. Took (a). (b) and (c) are what R07 will have to do.
2. 描紅紙上的『上大人孔乙己』 — FORK. The line is from a child's calligraphy tracing sheet; the nickname is stolen from a copybook, which is why it is an insult. Options: romanise and leave it opaque; gloss it; or replace with an English copybook line. Romanised, with red-tracing copybook carrying the object.
3. 半懂不懂 — FORK, twice in four sentences. So that one half understood him and half did not keeps the Chinese's balanced negation; barely intelligible is the English. Kept the balance.
4. 靑白臉色 — FORK. 靑白 is one word and is a colour English does not have. A greenish white calques it; pallid / sallow domesticates it.
5. 他身材很高大 — FORK. Very tall and large is awkward; a big tall man is not. Took the awkward one because the sentence is a list of physical facts in Chinese and reads as one.
6. 一部亂蓬蓬的花白的鬍子 — FORK. 一部 is the classifier used for a beard, and 花白 is flowered-white = grizzled. A great unkempt grizzled beard drops the classifier, which is untranslatable, and keeps 亂蓬蓬 as a doublet.
7. 姓孔 — FREE. His surname was Kong.
8. Sentence order in the nickname sentence — FREE. Chinese puts 因爲他姓孔 first; English can too, and does here.

S3 — 8 FORK, 3 FREE

1. 竊書不能算偸 — FORK, and this is the sentence the story is famous for. 竊 is the classical verb, 偸 the vernacular one; they mean the same thing and Kong Yiji is defending himself with the difference in register. Live options: (a) two English verbs at different registers — purloin against steal; (b) keep both Chinese words; (c) drop the distinction and translate the sense — taking a book isn't theft. Took (a). What is lost in (a): 竊 is not archaic to a 1919 reader the way purloin is to an English one, it is learned, and English has no learned register that is not also either legal or comic.
2. 讀書人的事 — FORK. The affairs of a man of letters; alternatives a scholar's business, the concerns of the reading class. 讀書人 is the class term for those who studied for the examinations and it is exactly what Kong Yiji is claiming to be. Took the longest of the three because it keeps the claim explicit.
3. 君子固窮 — FORK. Analects XV.2, where Confucius answers Zilu: the gentleman is steadfast in poverty (or the gentleman can indeed endure want). Options: translate the tag and lose that it is a quotation; romanise and lose the sense; translate it in italics as a quotation, which is what was done — italics doing work Chinese does with the tag's mere form.
4. 者乎 — FORK. Two more particles, quoted as noise like (S2.1). Romanised for consistency.
5. 憑空汚人淸白 — FORK. 淸白 is clean-and-white = an unstained name. Blacken a man's good name out of thin air domesticates 汚 (to soil) into blacken, which is the English idiom, and keeps 憑空 as out of thin air. Half and half; recorded as a fork resolved in the middle.
6. 弔着打 — FORK. Strung up and beaten; the Chinese is two verbs with no connective and no subject. Supplied and.
7. 額上的靑筋條條綻出 — FORK. 條條 is a reduplicated classifier — strand by strand. One by one keeps the reduplication's function and loses its shape.
8. 店內外充滿了快活的空氣 — FORK, and it recurs verbatim in S4, which is the point of it. The shop, inside and out, was full of a cheerful air. 空氣 is air in both senses and English air carries the same pun; this is the one place in the passage where the calque and the idiom are the same string. Kept identical in both segments so the repetition survives.
9. 温兩碗酒 — FREE.
10. 排出九文大錢 — FREE. 排 is to lay out in a row; lay out … in a row keeps it.
11. 哄笑 — FREE. Roaring.

S4 — 4 FORK, 2 FREE

1. 秀才 — FORK. The lowest examination degree. Options: romanise (xiucai); translate (licentiate, a bachelor's degree); paraphrase (even the first examination). Romanised, with the classifier degree supplied as the minimum gloss — which is already a compromise and is recorded as one.
2. 連半個…也撈不到 — FORK. Not so much as half a degree — the half is the joke, since a degree cannot be halved. Kept it. 撈 is to scoop up, i.e. to get by grubbing; scrape up keeps the manner.
3. 不屑置辯的神氣 — FORK. With the air of a man who does not deign to argue expands 神氣 into a clause; a look of disdain contracts it.
4. 嘴裏說些話 — FORK. His mouth would say something is not English; he would mumble something is. Took the un-English one: the Chinese detaches the mouth from the man, and the detachment is the sentence's whole content.
5. 臉上籠上了一層灰色 — FREE. A layer of grey would settle over his face.
6. 在這時候 / 在這些時候 — FREE.

S5 — 4 FORK, 5 FREE

1. 茴香豆的茴字 — FORK, and the segment stands or falls on it. Kong Yiji asks how to write a character. Options: romanise (the hui of hui-xiang beans), print the character 茴, or domesticate the whole exchange into English spelling. Romanised without the character, which costs the reader the ability to see what is being discussed and keeps the shape of the question.
2. 草頭底下一個來回的回字 — FORK. The hui of hui-lai, with the grass on top — 草頭 is the grass radical ⺿. Without the character this is nearly opaque in English; the alternative was a footnote, which the regime does not permit. Left opaque.
3. 回字有四樣寫法 — FORK. The character hui has four ways of being written. Alternatives: four ways of writing it, four different forms. Kept character explicit so the reader knows the subject is a graph and not a word.
4. 討飯一樣的人，也配考我麽 — FORK. 配 is to be fit/matched to. Is he fit to examine me? keeps the indignation and the register; what right has he to test me? is easier.
5. 略略點一點頭 — FREE. Gave a slight nod.
6. 很懇切的 — FREE. Very earnestly.
7. 又好笑，又不耐煩 — FREE. Half amused and half out of patience.
8. 嬾嬾的答他道 — FREE. Answered him lazily.
9. 努着嘴走遠 — FREE. Went off with my lips pushed out.

S6 — 3 FORK, 2 FREE

1. 多乎哉？不多也 — FORK, the passage's second Analects tag (IX.6, 君子多乎哉？不多也). Kong Yiji says not many, not many in the vernacular and then says the same thing again in classical Chinese, to children, about beans. Options: (a) render the classical half as a distinct English register — took this, in italics, Are they many? They are not many., whose stiff inverted question is the only marker English offers; (b) romanise; (c) drop the doubling. The entire effect is that a man quotes Confucius over a dish of beans, and English has no register that does what classical Chinese does here.
2. 着了慌 — FORK. Take alarm is dated; panic is not, and is too strong.
3. 一人一顆 — FORK. One apiece — the Chinese is two measure-phrases in apposition with no verb.
4. 趕熱鬧 — FREE. Came running up to be in it too.
5. 走散了 — FREE.

What was hardest, and it is one thing

internal-judgment-only: the whole passage runs on the fact that Chinese in 1919 had two languages inside it — 文言 and 白話 — and that Kong Yiji is the only character who speaks the dead one. Every FORK above is a local instance of the same absence: modern English has no second language inside it. What it has instead are three thin substitutes — italics, Latinate diction, and romanisation — and this rendering uses all three, at different sites, with no consistency, because none of them works twice.