Exercise in Translation – Miyazawa’s 注文の多い料理店

Obligatory Picture to tie-into the post.

Book: 注文の多い料理店 – The Restraunt of Many Orders ( It’s in the Japanese common domain, so this shouldn’t breaking any copyright laws)

Author: 宮沢 賢治 (Kenji Miyazawa )

Source: Aozora.gr.jp (and here’s where I learned how to put this document on my Kindle)

First Sentence:

二人の若い紳士が、すっかりイギリスの兵隊のかたちをして、ぴかぴかする鉄砲をかついで、白熊のような犬を二疋つれて、だいぶ山奥の、木の葉のかsかsしたとこを、こんなことを云いながら、あるいておりました。

Phrasal Breakdown (with Kanji reading):

二人の若い紳士が (ふたりわか.しんし): Two young gentlemen

すっかりイギリスの兵隊のかたちをして (へいたい): Completely English soldier form do

ぴかぴかする鉄砲をかついで (てっぽう): Shining gun shouldered

白熊のような犬を二疋つれて (しろくま/いぬ/にひき): Polar bear like dogs two led

だいぶ山奥の (やまおく): Great mountain recess’s

木の葉のかさかさしたとこを(): Tree leaves rustled when

こんなことを云いながら、あるいておりました。(いい): These things say while, walk descended

How is I think it would be said in English:

Two young gentlemen – the very visage of English soldiers: shinning guns shouldered, and leading two polar-bear like dogs – when the leaves on the trees were rustling, spoke these things as they  descended the great mountain recess.

How would you translate it differently? I haven’t looked at the (numerous) translations available online, but let me know if you can find a way to keep “great mountain recess” where it belongs in the middle of the passage. Are there any kanji you think I’ve read wrong? The book provides fuirgana for most of the kanji, so I’m pretty confident of my word choice here. You can see that I’m avoiding any notations on grammar. Sorry, I’m quite chicken and see no reason to so publicly expose myself. You’re happy to muse on the subject though.  Since I’m forced to find it interesting I may even venture a guess if prompted to.

Define “Study”

If you’ve been reading this blog’s back posts, or if, say, you actually know me in the physical world, I’ve probably mentioned the fact that I study Japanese. Or rather, that I don’t study Japanese as much as I’d like.

Japanese was my foreign language in college, and I spent six months in Japan (which I took basically zero advantage of), but my Japanese skills are still at the “beginner/intermediate” stage. That is, they were. Then I realized that my brother actually had manged to smarmy up to convince my sister to send him her DS. In my mind DS = Japanese Immersion Study Method. I immediately started spending shocking amounts of time researching DS games (immersive? not so much). I also finally downloaded Anki, and picked up the manga I had bought during Christmas, ditching the sticky notes and translation and just reading it straight up. I was already watching anime (Natsume Yujinchou at the time, but now season four is over. Sob).

Anki lasted until my game arrived and then I no longer had twenty minutes to spare for flashcards. It was good while it lasted though, because even now I’m recognizing kanji from the Heising deck I downloaded. Now every time Natsume visits a swamp in my manga I do a little happy dance – I get to recognize both swamp (沼) and seduction (召), which are two words I don’t often think of together. The downside is that the Heising deck doesn’t come with any readings, and some of the key words it picks for the kanji are, as you’ve probably already realized, real head scratchers (decameron for 旬 is my favorite), but it has exposed me to a lot of kanji and that in itself is enough. I also downloaded a Japanese  grammar deck, which threw me off completely at first, as I tried to answer it in polite, classroom Japanese. As useful as these decks were (and will be when I start them up again), both of these decks annoyed me like nothing else. I hate losing, and it appears memory is not a game I’m ever going to win an award for. It took me five days to finally get the kanji for “page” right, and then I failed it again the very next time Anki showed it (i.e. the very next day). Looking at my flashcards started leaving a bitter taste in my mouth, like cheap, burnt joe thrown back in the cold of a winter’s dawn as you trudge outside to shovel your car out of a two foot snow drift, knowing every other person in the house is sleeping at the moment, and will still be sleeping in an hours time because they stayed up all night partying while you were trying to get some shut-eye so you could function at your job.

Man, I hate to lose.

Luckily, you can’t really lose at  a video game. Not a linear one like Dragon Quest IX, anyway. You either progress or you wander around lost, but you don’t lose. Every time I come to a boss fight I die, but that doesn’t seem to bother the game at all. People tell me important things in the game and I just nod and smile and select “はい” as if I know what they’re saying. When I get really stuck (i.e. whenever the game wants me to do something in order to progress) I just go online and use a walkthrough. I rather wish the ones I’m finding would tell me a little more of what I was doing, instead of just saying “go to the north house and talk to X,” but oh well. I’m actually learning quite a lot while playing this game. My katakana, which was always really bad, is now passable as a skill (though the names they use for villagers and towns in this game have too many vowels). On top of this, I’m actually learning vocabulary and kanji. For instance, I know three kanji for “village” now, and the word for “goblin” that is used for monster attacks. I can recognize stuff versus equipment, and know defense and spells. Magic and curse and shield. Experience, defeat, inn . . . . Maybe not useful or applicable in real life, but if I ever run into a Japanese gamer I’ll be able to carry on a passable conversation – vocab-wise at least.

Best of all, there are the odd sentences where I understand everything they say without having to look any of it up. And every now and then, when I do look up a word or two, it’s like being able to see fae, that distant country that is really all around us, only on a different plane.* Whether I come across these gems in my manga or my game, they make me want to keep going, to try harder, to fall, and fall, and fall as proof that I’m moving. My life is a never ending distraction, so my Japanese might be pushed aside a little here and there, but I’m never going to be able to push it out entirely. Not when I haven’t restored peace to the villages yet.

_____________________ Foot Notes _______________________________

* If you prefer sci-fi over fantasy you can read fae as something Out of Phase or, perhaps, in the forth dimension – though I’m not sure if even Japanese is that mind-bending.

Single Post Layout

Finally got around to changing the format for the single post layout. This means you should be able to resize your window without wonky things happneing to the pictures. I’ve also managed to get rid of the ridiculous amount of padding kindly included in the posts. Not quite sure how I did that. I think what finally made it give in to my shameless groveling scientific experimentation was this:

.singular .entry-header, .singular .entry-content, .singular footer.entry-meta, .singular #comments-title {
margin-bottom: 0;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
margin-top: 0;
width: 100%;

I’m using WordPress’ basic Twenty Eleven theme –  mostly because I figured there would be more help guides out there for it. When I want to change something in Twenty Eleven (i.e. all the time), I do it by making modifications to my Child Theme, which I’ve named Decollate – yet another word I don’t get to use as often as it deserves.

Anyway, the padding thing has been bugging me for ages, so I’m really happy it’s fixed (for now at least. I might decide I want things a little less fixed later, but at this time getting anything nailed down feels very satisfying). As a reward for my hours of poking randomly at code, I changed the colors on the comment box.

It’s the simple things in life.

Pulling the rug and the reading

Sometime last month I finished “reading” my five volumes of Natsume Youjinchyou (one of my favorite anime). I discovered something about manga writers while “reading” Natsume Yujinchyou: they genuinely want their readers to comprehend them. At least, I think that’s why Midorikawa-san keeps changing the reading of these kanji.* For a while I just assumed my dictionary was defunct. For instance, one of the very first words I looked up in the first volume gave me this kanji compound:

二組 (online dictionaries assume a reading of “にくみ,” or nikumi)

And used this as furigana:

そつち (sotsuti)

I wasn’t using anything but my paper-and-ink dictionary at the time, so I was completely lost. Looking the furigana up later in Denshi Jisho I get nothing. Nada. Zip. So, maybe it’s the name of the school? More likely it’s slang for something, as ”そつ” is the beginning of quite a few school related concepts, like graduation. The kanji themselves appear to mean either double (as in adjoining rooms) or class two. This makes sense with the story as Natsume is in class two, and since I’m no where near OCD enough to dig deeper when there are so many other things out there to partially translate, I’m leaving it at that.

Like I said, it took me a while to catch on, and sometimes I know I still miss it. Luckily the furigana often look a little different when they are being stretched out by characters they don’t belong to. I’m also starting to a be a little better at remembering which kanji I’ve seen before (still might not remember its reading, meaning, or where I first saw it, but the little feeling of recognition that I do get is nice). Since I’ve notice this I’ve realized the author does this all the time, it’s not just once or twice for a special word. Sometimes she even does this for katakana, which is really bizarre. I’ve come love it because it raises my chances of knowing what the sentence is about. It’s a small thing, but it always brings a smile to my face, especially when I find that I understand both words.

* You may already know that Japanese has multiple alphabets. In short, Kanji are the little picture characters. Japan’s other alphabets – hiragana and katakana – are phonetic, but Kanji aren’t and require memorization. Lots of it. It is often said that to read a newspaper in Japanese one needs to know about 2,000 kanji. Furigana are the small, phonetic characters written over kanji to let people know how they are being read, since kanji have multiple readings (both for meaning and pronunciation). Furigana are used when you’re not sure if your target audience will be able to read the kanji you’re using, which basically restricts it to either media meant for kids or for particularly archaic or technical kanji. Both Natsume Youjinchou (manga) and DQ IX (DS game) use furigana for all their kanji.

The Weary Wave

Hello everyone! Just wanted to pop in and say “hi,” and all that. My plots and plans for this blog are bubbling and boilng away on the back burner of my mind at the moment. Instead of sketching blog banners I’ve been drawing page after sticky note after memo pad of rooms, and all this because (drum roll please) I’ve been condo hunting.

Yes, if you bet that we wouldn’t be able to stand each other for more than two years, you win. Come collect your prize money.

Anyway, I know there are a lot of little, but extremely annoying, problems with my current blog layout (no pictures on the front page, post pages too narrow, etc.) and these will be fixed – in August. Hopefully.

Thanks for reading,

––– Sixer