宮澤賢治「雨にも負けず」より。

長い文にも負けず。^^U
「負けぬ」や「丈夫」のあいだに「。」をつけたけど。

The original text has no punctuation at all, you know. :-) I've placed the punctuation marks according to this rendition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaQHufacSOI
一番好きなバージョンですから。＾＾
Anyway, it would be nice if some native speaker would give us his/her opinion on this topic.

Well, I meant in Spanish it is necessary.
Punctuation in Japanese is still out of mi capabilities. ^^U

First I'll quote the original, with the modernized forms of kanji.

雨ニモマケズ
風ニモマケズ
雪ニモ夏ノ暑サニモマケヌ
丈夫ナカラダヲモチ
慾ハナク
決シテ瞋ラズ
イツモシヅカニワラッテヰル

You shouldn't skip the line "慾ハナク", and you shouldn't change "瞋" to "怒" since they're two different kanji.
You could modernize the kana-zukai, which means changing the last line of the quote to "イツモシズカニワラッテイル".
I wouldn't feel like allowing further changes. I don't think you can call it a quote if you change katakana to hiragana or kanji, or you add punctuations.

I'm not sure what we should do in Tatoeba. My preference is:
雨ニモマケズ／風ニモマケズ／雪ニモ夏ノ暑サニモマケヌ／丈夫ナカラダヲモチ／慾ハナク／決シテ瞋ラズ／イツモシヅカニワラッテヰル
I know some people don't like this kind of thing, but I don't really understand why this is worse than distortion of the original.


Concerning your question: even if we write it using modern punctuations, we wouldn't put a period after "マケヌ". "ぬ" is a form that modifies a noun. Which noun? I guess two interpretations are possible: either "カラダ" or "モノ" at the very last of the poem. Anyway, the poem is composed of one long sentence.

説明して、ありがとう。今正しく分かったと思う。スペイン語の翻訳を直した。

2tommy_san
Thanks for you suggestions and corrections, Tommy. I've missed the line accidentally, thanks for pointing this out.
To tell the truth, if you have no objections, I'd like to keep this hiragana/kanji version here since it could be more convenient to read and understand it by Japanese language learners. At the same time, I think it would be great to also have this verse in it's original form (maybe even with obsolete katakana) with "／" as line delimiter just like you showed in your post above.

Question: is the 'ヰ' pronounced /wi/ or /i/? And I can't find 瞋る in the dictionary (in my quick search). Is it pronounced the same as 怒る?

Fixing translation.
I agree, the original can be too hard to understand.

It seems that 瞋る is pronounced as いかる here. JMDict has an entry for it: http://jplangtools.com/?qt=diq&...9E%8B%E3%82%8B
As for 'ヰ/ゐ', there is some info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi_%28kana%29

"ゐ" is pronounced /i/, and "瞋る" is pronounced "いかる".
We almost never use the kanji "瞋" now. I found out through some rough research that this kanji seems to have a Buddhist connotation. A Sanskrit term "Dvesha" is translated as "瞋" (しん) or "瞋恚" (しんい or しんに).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvesha_(Buddhism)
This kanji appears several times in the 法華経 (ほけきょう, the Lotus Sūtra), which Kenji studied earnestly.


I'm still reluctant to accept this hiragana version. I don't understand that it's hard for you to understand it. It's just that it takes you longer to read it, doesn't it? (That's also the case for most modern native speakers.)

To me it looks too stupid when it's written in hiragana. I feel some kind of spiritual strength that this text has would be totally lost in hiragana. Well, it's just a feeling. I'm afraid I can't explain why, and I can't tell you either why Kenji wrote it in katakana. But I do believe it's not a trivial difference.


If you're interested, here's how a modern Japanese would write it:
雨にも負けず
風にも負けず
雪にも夏の暑さにも負けぬ
丈夫な体を持ち
欲はなく
決して怒らず
いつも静かに笑っている

And here's the whole text in original writing, except that the old forms of kanji (旧字体) are changed into the new ones (新字体).
http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/0...630_23908.html


Finally, it might be important to know that, though we often take this text as a poem, this untitled text was posthumously found in his personal notebook. We don't know whether he wrote it as a "poem". Probably he never intended to publish it. He'd be bewildered to find it here in Tatoeba! ^^

Thanks for many interesting details, Tommy.
I think I understand you when you say that you "feel some kind of spiritual strength" reading the original katakana version of this poem (I think this masterpiece deserves to be called a poem). Even me, who is neither a native speaker nor even an intermediate learner, can feel the difference. That's why I think it worth having the original rendition of this verse here, too.
Yes, you're right, katakana doesn't completely prevent a learner from understanding the poem but, yes again, it makes the task much harder especially for beginners who use dictionaries constantly. I think, we can consider hiragana version as an "adapted variant". Having "modernized" kanji/hiragana version will also allow to find this sentence via search engine every time one wants to get an example of, say, "負ける", "体" or "笑う" usage.
However that may be, I'm not going to insist on keeping this version in Tatoeba, it's not my native part of the corpus, after all. Just let's found a way to keep this great lines here in acceptable form.

> Having "modernized" kanji/hiragana version will also allow to find this sentence via search engine every time one wants to get an example of, say, "負ける", "体" or "笑う" usage.

That does make some sense, but I don't find it convincing enough.
I haven't seen an easy-reading-Shakespeare-like thing in Tatoeba... have you?
What I expect to see here is real usages of languages, not those adapted for learners.

I really want to know what others (both native speakers and learners of Japanese) think, though.

> I haven't seen an easy-reading-Shakespeare-like thing in Tatoeba... have you?

This is completely different case, I think. The English Shakespeare spoke differs from the modern English dramatically, not to mention that he invented a lot of words by himself. The English grammar and orthography of that time were pretty different, too. That is, when we see an original quotation from some Shakespearian text, we rather see a literary monument, not an example of real usage of contemporary English. Another similar example - old translations of Biblical texts that we have a great many here.
Personally, I see no problem if somebody wants to "translate" or "modernize" such texts. Of course, the results can't be called "quotation" but apart from this I see no other drawbacks. Unfortunately, copy-pasting is much easier than adapting/re-translating.
Back to the Miyazawa's masterpiece. Is it so common in Japanese to write poetry and prose using katakana? I'm pretty sure that anyone who never saw the original text will write it down using kanji/hiragana when he hear it read by someone else. I mean, katakana and hiragana versions sound absolutely the same (correct me if I'm wrong) but hiragana version is much closer to the real language usage example, I believe. And katakana version is the original shape of this literary monument that undoubtedly worth being added to Tatoeba.
Now a little parenthetic remark about original renditions of old/ancient/archaic texts. The orthographic rules of the Russian language was changed considerably during the reform of 1917-1918. This means that all classical masterpieces of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy at alias looked pretty different at the moment they saw the light. And this, in its turn, means that all quotations of those authors we have in Tatoeba, formally, can't be considered as "originals", but it seems that no one have any problem with this fact. :-)

And what about having both versions linked?

You seem to fail to understand (or rather "feel") what 表記 is for us.
Our characters are not just symbols to write down a speech sound.

水村美苗 writes in her bestseller 『日本語が亡びるとき』 about "同じ音をした同じ言葉――それを異なった文字で表すところから生まれる、意味のちがい" (the differences in meanings that result from writing the same word of the same pronunciation using different characters). Then she quotes a famous poem of Hagiwara Sakutarō.

　ふらんすへ行きたしと思へども
　ふらんすはあまりに遠し
　せめては新しき背広をきて
　きままなる旅にいでてみん。

という例の萩原朔太郎の詩も、最初の二行を

　仏蘭西へ行きたしと思へども
　仏蘭西はあまりに遠し

に変えてしまうと、朔太郎の詩のなよなよと頼りなげな詩情が消えてしまう。

　フランスへ行きたしと思へども
　フランスはあまりに遠し

となると、あたりまえの心情をあたりまえに訴えているだけになってしまう。だが、右のような差は、日本語を知らない人にはわかりえない。

she writes (p. 307).

I don't think she succeeds here in explaining the differences, but I share her feeling that this poem stops to be poetic if "ふらんす" were written in kanji or katakana.


The same is true of Kenji's text. The version with hiragana and punctuations looks too prosaic and stupid and dull. I'm pretty sure that if Kenji were to write the same idea in 2013, he'd either used still katakana, or wrote using hiragana with much different wordings. Turning it simply into hiragana doesn't work.

I know my explanation is too poor to convince you. I'm ashamed of it. It's not that I can't clarify because I'm writing in English. I couldn't say in Japanese, either. I beg you to understand that it's a delicate matter.


The equivalent in Japanese of the different orthography in Western languages would be different forms (字体) of kanji and 仮名遣い.
Most pre-war Japanese texts are now published in 新字体 and 現代仮名遣い. Though I personally don't really like this tendency, it's still bearable. Here in Tatoeba, I modify a text to 新字体 and 現代仮名遣い to avoid confusion of learners---just as some German contributors are reluctantly using the new orthography.
Example: http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/2355738

And as I said, that's still bearable. Turning katakana into hiragana is unbearable.

So my suggestion is:
雨ニモマケズ／風ニモマケズ／雪ニモ夏ノ暑サニモマケヌ／丈夫ナカラダヲモチ／慾ハナク／決シテ瞋ラズ／イツモシズカニワラッテイル

OK, Tommy, believe me or not, but you has convinced me. :-)

> You seem to fail to understand (or rather "feel") what 表記 is for us.

You're right, this part of Japanese language and culture often slips away from foreigners and I'm afraid one has to be born Japanese and raised in Japan to grasp this.

> Our characters are not just symbols to write down a speech sound.

This was just the reason I asked for comments and wanted to enlist your support on keeping hiragana version.
Thanks for your explanations, Tommy. I'm following your suggestions.