This English was drafted by keikaku, a translation engine running on Meta's models. Before a line was drafted, it wrote an analysis of the book, its people and its tone, and that analysis steered every stage: the draft, the two readings against the Japanese, and the editing. It is published here in full, with the voice the draft was written in.
If you'd read this story differently, start your own edition and steer it. Or go back to the translation.
The gap between Taki's cherished, unwritten inner work and the squalid, absorbing business that actually fills his days — and the way the narration keeps lending the second the epic language of the first.
Taki is a writer who has not really begun: he tells his wife the work is 'about half' done (paragraph 28) when in fact, once he took up his pen, he could write it 'in one burst' at any time — or so he believes; putting it into prose feels to him as clumsy and roundabout as making conversation. Everything grand in the story stays in his head, in quotation marks. Everything that actually happens is petty and physical: a pond dug for no good reason, carp that cannot be caught, a house about to be demolished and replaced by a warehouse, a telephone he suddenly decides to sell, carp suddenly worth four hundred yen, creditors at the door. The story's energy is the traffic between the two. His wife's casual remark that his finished seascape looks 'like a snowscape, in midsummer' (paragraph 58) detonates a paragraph of self-laceration in which all his realistic fiction and his whole foolish way of living become a botched 'snowscape', a blizzard rises, and he must flee across a white wilderness (paragraphs 61 to 62). By section III the same man is bellowing orders at two workmen in a muddy pond like a general, then like an impresario inviting spectators up to the best seats, then discovering that this is more fun than any pleasure he knows (paragraphs 165 to 179). In section IV the pumping-out of the pond, done by his assembled creditors, acquires 'the same underlying force as the chorus of Nancy Lee' (paragraph 210) — the sentimental whaling song he inherited from his father — while Taki himself is simply absent, gone to Tokyo 'to buy a lamp' (paragraph 212). If a translation resolves this into satire on a lazy writer, or into lyrical sympathy for a dreamer, it has chosen one pole and lost the story.
In the English: Keep the comic disproportion intact. Do not make Taki's inner language beautiful and the pond business merely coarse background, and do not make the narration wink at him from outside. The same English must be able to inflate a carp-hunt into a battle, a chorus, a theatrical tableau, and then let it collapse into mud, cicadas and an unpaid bill. His quoted-back phrases — “the difficult work I'm holding in my head!”, “in one burst!”, “Nancy Lee”, “the telephone!”, “the terrifying blizzard!”, “nothing but a snowscape to look at!” — should recur recognisably, because in paragraph 160 the narration throws his own slogans back at him as they all scatter 'like goose down' while he sits glaring at the pond.
A second reader, who read the Japanese without seeing the reading above, put the heart of the story differently. keikaku drafted with both in mind.
TAKI SEES THE WORLD IN REVERSE SEASON: HIS 'FINISHED' SUMMER SEASCAPE LOOKS — RIGHTLY — LIKE A SNOWSCAPE, BECAUSE HE LIVES IN AN UNWRITTEN, 'HELD-IN-THE-HEAD' FANTASY AND IS BLIND TO WHAT IS IN FRONT OF HIM.
THE WIFE'S CASUAL LINE IN paragraph 58 TRIGGERS NOT EMBARRASSMENT BUT A FULL MID-SUMMER BLIZZARD HALLUCINATION IN paragraphs 61 to 62 (OWL'S EYES IN DAYLIGHT, BURIED UNDER SIN-FUL SNOW 'AS LARGE AS PEONY PETALS'). THE SAME WORDS KEEP RECURRING — 架空 MADE OF AIR, 夢, 'IN ONE BREATH' (paragraph 28, paragraphs 74 to 75), THE SIX-DAY JOB HE MUST ONLY 'HOLD IN HIS HEAD' (paragraph 135, paragraph 160) — AND IN paragraph 160 THE NARRATOR LISTS THEM BACK VERBATIM TO SHOW THEM ALL SCATTERED 'LIKE GOOSE DOWN' THE MOMENT MONEY APPEARS. THAT MAKES THE TITLE AN INDICTMENT, NOT A MOOD.
In the English: KEEP THE SNOW LITERAL, SUDDEN AND UNEXPLAINED, AND KEEP A RIGID CONCORDANCE FOR THE REPEATED PHRASES — 'in one breath/at one go,' 'hold it in my head,' 'Nancy Lee,' 'telephone,' 'terrible blizzard,' 'snowscape' — SO THE CATALOGUE IN paragraph 160 LANDS AS SELF-QUOTATION. DO NOT SMOOTH THE SUMMER/SNOW INVERSION INTO A SIMILE FOR HIS STATE OF MIND.
THE COMEDY AND THE VERDICT ARE IN THE COLLISION OF REGISTERS: LYRICAL, MOCK-HEROIC NARRATION OF A MUDDY POND-SIEGE AGAINST THE WORKMEN'S VULGAR DIALECT — AND TAKI, WHO CLAIMED NO FEELING FOR ANYTHING (paragraph 18), BECOMES A SHOUTING, TABLE-THUMPING 'GRAND BOURGEOIS' (paragraph 160) THE INSTANT THE DESPISED CARP ARE WORTH ¥400.
A AND B SPEAK IN HEAVILY ELIDED, ROUGH VERNACULAR (paragraphs 40 to 47, WITH THE NARRATOR EVEN GLOSSING 手前え AS 'FIRST PERSON'), AND THEIR BODIES — DRAGON AND UNFINISHED HANNYA TATTOOS (paragraph 48) — ARE GIVEN THE EPIC DESCRIPTION TAKI'S OWN WORK NEVER GETS. THE POND BATTLE (paragraphs 154 to 193) IS NARRATED AS WARFARE, THEN UNDER-CUT BY 'A WATER-FIGHT ON A HOT DAY.' TAKI FIRST EAVESDROPS, THEN IMITATES A'S CADENCE, ORDERS THE CARP BEATEN TO DEATH (paragraph 173), AND BY paragraph 210 HIS CREDITORS ARE PUMPING THE POND TO THE RHYTHM OF NANCY LEE'S CHORUS WHILE HE IS ABSENT IN TOKYO BUYING A LAMP.
In the English: KEEP THREE REGISTERS SHARPLY APART IN PLAIN, SPEAKABLE ENGLISH: HIS EVASIVE MUMBLE AND FALSE GRANDIOSES, THE WIFE'S BRISK DOMESTIC LOGIC, AND THE WORKMEN'S COARSE, COMPRESSED ROUGH-SPEECH (WITHOUT EYE-DIALECT CARICATURE). ABOVE ALL KEEP TAKI'S SLIDE INTO IMITATION OF A (paragraphs 165 to 176) BRUTAL AND COMIC — IT MUST SOUND LIKE A DIFFERENT MAN FROM THE 'SNOWSCAPE' REVERIE, NOT A POLISHED NARRATOR SUMMARISING.
The crux comes first. Taki lives by a phrase: 'in one burst!' (一気呵勢, paragraph 74). It is his motto, his excuse and his sedative — having thought it, he can become 'easily optimistic', make himself a little more leisure, and sink back into the 'dream'. The story is built as a series of occasions on which that leisure gets filled by something else, each time more completely. First a walk to escape the oppressiveness of thinking about fiction (paragraph 2); then his wife's arrival and the long, circling conversation about the carp, the doomed house, the trip they will supposedly take, the house they will supposedly rent in Tokyo (paragraphs 3 to 48); then the detonation of the 'snowscape' remark; then drink, the telephone inspiration, the carp valuation, the brothel; then the hunt itself, which swallows an entire day and remakes him as 'a haughty bourgeois waiting for his prey' (paragraph 160); finally the creditors pumping the pond dry in heroic unison while he is not there. Nothing in his life is ever quite refused — the trip is always about to happen, his mother may join them whenever she likes, the work is always half done — and the English must keep that soft, agreeable evasiveness in the dialogue. Taki's characteristic move is the answer that sounds like agreement and commits him to nothing ('Go if you like', paragraph 30, at once corrected, too late, to 'I want to go'), and the narration itself notices the habit (paragraph 33). If his lines are made decisive, or his wife's made merely nagging, the marriage — two people who have long practice at not quite meeting — disappears.
Register is where a fluent draft will most reliably go wrong, because the text runs on at least four distinct musics and keeps cutting between them without warning. There is the narration in a literary Taishō-Shōwa written style, capable of a level, almost reportorial calm (the opening walk, the still noon tableau of paragraphs 180 to 181, where the two workmen freeze like figures in a play and a bubble bursts on the mud). There is Taki's interior weather: rhymed, 'poetic' reverie (韻文的な想ひ) that tips without a seam into self-parody — the snow passage of paragraphs 61 to 62 is the extreme case, moving from an owl's eyes in daylight to sinful snowflakes 'the size of peony petals' burying his body, all triggered by a wife's mild puzzlement and punctured at once by her 'What's the matter?' and his sheepish change of subject (paragraphs 63 to 66). There is the wife's speech: quick, Tokyo, feminine in the period's inflections, teasing and managerial at once, the only voice in the story that consistently says what things cost and what will actually happen. And there are A and B, the tattooed workmen, whose pond-side talk (paragraphs 40 to 47) is broad working-class vernacular — boastful, sweaty, obscene round the edges — set down with evident relish by the narrator, who even pauses to describe their tattoos (the completed dragon; the unfinished hannya mask, and Taki's unasked question about why it was abandoned, paragraph 48). The temptation is to level these into one pleasant literary voice, or to render the workmen in some borrowed English dialect that pins them to a place they never lived. Resist both. They should sound rougher, faster and funnier than everyone else without turning into music-hall turns; Taki should sound smoother and vaguer than everyone else without turning into a poet.
The comedy is deadpan and structural, and it lives in repetition. Catch the carp: the word つかまへる tolls through the story from the wife's first line (paragraph 5) through the workmen's laments to Taki's bellowing 'the net! the net! the net!' (paragraph 166), and the pond obligingly clouds every time anyone moves — a small, perfect mechanism of frustration that the English should let recur in the same plain words rather than varying into 'grab', 'land', 'net' by turns. Likewise 'in one burst', which migrates grotesquely from Taki's unwritten masterpiece (paragraph 74) to A and B's plan to pump the pond dry 'in one burst' (paragraph 206): the same slogan, finally attached to the only decisive act in the book, performed by his creditors. Nancy Lee travels the same road, from the father's deck-song, through Taki's solitary whistling and his wife's ostentatious ear-covering (paragraphs 104 to 106), to the straining chorus of the pump-handlers (paragraph 210) — the one moment of genuine collective vigour in the story, and it belongs to the men he owes money. Keep the song's title untranslated and unexplained in the text; its slight foreign quaintness in 1927 Japan is part of the point, and the wife's objection that an American sailors' song is old and vulgar should be allowed to stand against Taki's sentimentality without the narration adjudicating. The same deadpan applies to money, which a fluent version may be tempted to keep vague: ten yen produced from a wife's purse, four hundred yen for carp, month-end bills, the telephone as a saleable asset. The amounts are the story's ballast.
What the text leaves unsaid should stay unsaid. Subjects drop for sentences at a time; dialogue goes unattributed (notably the restaurant haggling, paragraphs 108 to 120, and the drunken walk home, paragraphs 121 to 146, where Taki's parenthesised realisations — the telephone! it's mine! I'll sell it! — interrupt the old caretaker's patter and should stay typographically and rhythmically separate, a drunk man's lightning inside a slow scene). The unfinished things are thematic, not accidental: the unfinished tattoo, the unfinished house extension meant perhaps for a Buddhist altar room (paragraph 76), the unwritten novel, the uncaught carp, the trip untaken. A translation that completes sentences, assigns speakers the Japanese leaves floating, or explains why B stopped the tattoo has committed Berman's clarification in exactly the place this text forbids it. Equally, do not prettify the imagery in the lyrical passages: 'sinful snow-shavings', an owl's eyes in the light, 'goose-down' scattering of his grand phrases — these are meant to be a little too much, and their excess, kept, is what makes the puncturing funny and then, briefly, sad.
A note on limits: the period surface (historical kana, Taishō diction) should not be answered with English archaism. Taki's world — buses, telephones, restaurants, harmonicas playing 'Ai Ai Ai' and 'Valencia', a Tokyo March — was modern to itself. The English should be modern enough to let the comedy move, with its formality carried in sentence shape rather than in thee-and-thou colouring. I cannot settle from the text alone how far Makino intends Taki as self-portrait, and the reading does not need it: the narration's evenness — it never once calls him lazy, dishonest or absurd outright — works whether the target is the author, a friend, or a type. That evenness is the final thing to protect. The last scene's heroic chorus and the absent hero are presented in the same level voice as everything else; the English should end as flatly as it began.
Called: 滝 (narrator); あなた (wife to Taki); あんた (old caretaker man to Taki; wife in reported scolding tone).
How they speak: vague, agreeable literary speech; hedges, corrects himself too late, imitates others when excited; interior reverie in high-flown 韻文的 register that tips into self-parody
Called: 細君 (narrator); 彼女 (narrator); 奥さん (restaurant proprietress (the restaurant proprietress) and old caretaker to Taki).
How they speak: quick period Tokyo feminine speech; teasing, practical, cost-aware; the only voice that says what things cost and what will happen; plays harmonica well
Called: お母さん (wife reporting her speech; Taki in reply).
How they speak: only reported indirectly; anxious, approving tone as quoted by the wife
Called: Ａ (narrator); 鳶職 (narrator).
How they speak: broad working-class vernacular, heavily elided, loud, comic-lamenting; imitated by Taki in paragraphs 165 to 176
Called: Ｂ (narrator); 鳶職 (narrator).
How they speak: same rough vernacular as A; dialogue often unattributed between the two by design
Called: 金魚屋 (narrator and A reporting to Taki); 商売人 (A and Taki).
How they speak: only reported as pricing: so much a fish, about 400 yen
Called: 留守居の老夫婦 / 留守居の年寄 / 年寄 / お爺さん (narrator and Taki).
How they speak: slow, placating old-servant speech; patter about the telephone and stone steps while Taki's drunk parenthetical thoughts interrupt
Called: 留守居の老夫婦 (narrator).
How they speak: none shown
Called: 中学生の弟 (narrator).
How they speak: none shown
Called: 滝の亡くなった親父 / 滝の親父 / 父親 (narrator).
How they speak: remembered as theatrical storyteller with gestures, using the song as 相の手
Called: 水夫 (narrator reporting father's tale).
How they speak: remembered chorus/work-song, not direct speech
Called: 其処の女房 (narrator); 奥さん (the restaurant proprietress to the wife).
How they speak: confiding whisper: まかれちゃいけませんよ
Called: 見物人 / 見物に来た (金魚屋) (narrator).
How they speak: none shown
Called: ぴん子 (Taki bragging to A and B); 綺麗なお酌 (Taki).
How they speak: only reported by Taki; no direct speech
Called: 債権者 / 自動車屋の集金人、料理屋の掛け取り、女郎屋の馬、レストランの亭主、酒屋の番頭、待合のお帳場 etc. (narrator).
How they speak: no idle talk, only breath and heave-ho cries; likened to the Nancy Lee chorus
In the English: Keep one fixed English — 'in one burst!' — wherever the slogan appears, from unwritten masterpiece to pumping the pond. The migration is the joke and the verdict.
In the English: Keep one plain verb — 'catch' — throughout; do not vary into grab/land/net. Let it toll from wife to workmen to Taki's bellowing.
In the English: Keep 'snowscape' as a hard noun everywhere, never softened to snowy scene/wintry view. Keep title Snowscape.
In the English: Do not translate; keep 'Nancy Lee' romanised and unexplained in text. Gloss only in margin if needed.
In the English: Keep 'telephone' literal and abrupt wherever it erupts; keep exclamatory repetition in drunk scene.
In the English: Keep 'hold (it) in my head' fixed; keep 'the difficult work' fixed. They must read as self-quotation when listed back in paragraph 160.
In the English: Keep cloud/mud vocabulary stable — cloudy, muddy, muddy water — not varied into turbid/murky by turns.