18 April 2018

Genjitsushugi Yuusha no Oukokusaikenki. Arc 4 Chapter 5D

Translator Corner
Minasan oideyasu. This is Yukkuri demasu!

Today is a day of many release.
Also, I want to try a new thing!

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DISCLAIMER: There is no guarantee that my translation is 100% correct. Please correct me if I was wrong.

Author:
Dozeumaru(どぜう丸)
Translator:
Yukkuri Oniisan
Editor:
SMS

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Enlightenment Arc
Chapter 5 As a Person D

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don't sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽☾☽


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73 comments:

  1. Man the author is leveling up his writing, what a beautiful description of the call of the sea :')

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  2. Well, this was less extreme than I expected. I would have expected Mary to have been a bot. lol.

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    Replies
    1. The only difference is that she's of flesh rather than not.

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    2. “Doesn’t that mean [Holy Maidens] are like real dolls?” [Aisha]

      I’m dying.

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    3. The degree of chaffing is massively different between a person and a bot. Big difference. It involves the potential of you walking bow legged the next day. lol

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  3. This is so sweet AHHHHHHHHHHH
    Thx you yukkuri-san and sms-san fir this chapter ^^

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  4. wow that's some awesome code and writing!

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  5. Someone draw or write that doujin!!!

    Issei Sensei where are you when I need you??? (Highschool D&D ref)

    Author-sama is the devil! the Devil!!

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    Replies
    1. Don't worry, when this become anime there will be plentiful of this Doujins.

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  6. This is one of my favorite chapters of Souma. Thank you so much for translating this, you've done it justice Yukkuri Oniisan.

    It's indeed a lofty ideal to sacrifice yourself for others and live up to the station and expectations of others. But when it comes at the price of throwing away any critical thinking, shirking personal responsibility and pushing away your loved ones... Eh, Maria and Souma had it right here.

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    Replies
    1. I would pick the third option. I would live up to that expectation I have too but I will make that expectation. I will define my own ideal. Made it known and walk it like the world biggest troll. I am not a king or a monster. I simply a Superman fanboy doing what he think is right, when he feel is right, where he think is right.

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  7. Finally! The MC laid his hand on the princess XD Looking forward to the Holy Kingdom got throughly destroyed

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  8. FINALLY!! The ship had sail to sea!! 😤

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    Replies
    1. Even with the fleet, though I am not quite certain (so this may or may not be a spoiler), I hear the shipyard hasn't closed down yet.

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    2. No problem. Its just more ship for the king fleet. Im guessing the empress and maybe some other country leader would join the fleet.

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  9. Thanks for the chapter, I guess next is Aisha's turn? XD

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    Replies
    1. Then he has sex with everyone else where they first met too.

      In the audience hall.

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    2. ...ouch...hehe

      Nice shot, direct hit. lol
      Didn't even see that coming.

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    3. Don't forget to also use the orb for broadcasting. Lol

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    4. Someone would be covered in rug. They would have Cleopatra rug incident reenactment.

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  10. Arrr hunt that seafaring whale.

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  11. are there no LN illustration?? why??!!

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  12. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  13. Thx for the chapter o.O
    Such a good place to end a chapter... BUT I REALLY WANT TO READ THE REST!!! (is there a chapter 5.5 where i can read this maybe?~~)

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    Replies
    1. for scientific propose of course...

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    2. Author said no R-18, Go write a doujin about it yourself lel

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  14. Thanks 4 the translation!

    That's one way for you and your partner to feel human.

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  15. This was exactly how saber(fate) rule her kingdom, to be a king she stop being a human. She was loved as a king not as a person.

    Good thing for souma to realize this sooner.

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  16. Thank for the chapter ^^

    Kyaaaaaaaaaaaa!!! finally!!! O(≧▽≦)O

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  17. What is this, really ?!
    There's no continuation at all from previous chap ?!

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    Replies
    1. Very smart Yukkuri! Its to trick those copying your work. Good job!

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  18. It’s about bloody time. I can’t stand protagonists that won’t consummate. Or manga that remove that part from adapting the LN.

    I can understand why the manga adaptation of Maken no Daydreamer did though. Something about saying “Reminds me of that one time with my mom” is probably not the most romantic thing to say in the afterglow.

    Mitigated by his mom was a succubus and not blood related, but still.

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  19. Yaaaassss!!! I've been training my imagination for situation like this, lol
    thanks as always ey

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  20. One of the few protagonist that ask a girl to sleep with him

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  21. Pic: this is just like one of my Harem VN endings!
    End: Someone better write that Doujin or can't wait for the next chapter!

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  22. Wait...they're aren't officially married yet? But who cares, this is part of what we're been waiting for!

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  23. "The author says:
    No… There is no 18+ scene.
    Go and draw or write the doujin yourself."

    *ahem*, Well Yukkuri-Oniisan, since you able to create such great writing about the calling of the sea, why not, you know, write the "Arc 4 Chapter 5D.5" for next chapter's captcha? *shy* *shy*

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  24. booooo KJ the author and translator :D:D:D thnks for the chpter

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  25. will the Holy Kingdom become the Devil Kingdom, that is worst that the Demon Kingdom Territory...?
    would be better if the dragon kingdom joins the frey into cleansing that 'kingdom',,,

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  26. well...the floors gonna shake!

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  27. commencing SMOOTH JAZZ~ for the background

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  28. Well this chapter was a rollercoaster. I went from:
    "WTF, what novel am I reading, is this somehow another April Fool's joke?"
    to:
    "Oh, here's the chapter, whew"
    to:
    "Well, that escalated super quickly from the last chapter. Souma my man, you've finally grown up. I'm so proud of you."

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  29. Ug, can't use reader view with your protection feature.

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    Replies
    1. Sorry bout that.
      But you don't really need a reader view yo read my site.
      I don't use ads, and the only jscript I had in my site is the reader location tracker on the side.
      Though my font choice and color leave things to be desired though...

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  30. Thanks for the chap~ ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

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  31. official office overtime, she'll get a raise soon

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  32. ......Then there is Warhammer 40k Sisters of Battle.

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  33. There is also about the future when he is no longer king, he ain't immortal. He should introduce the concept of "separation of church and state" and have the people love much like a certain nation love their second ammendment that even it seems have deadly drawback tney still want it as they believe without it is much worst.

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  34. Yeah good chapter but I wish there was some sex scenes. Oh well. By the way what exactly was the point of that essay?

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  35. " The author says:
    No…
    There is no 18+ scene.
    Go and draw or write the doujin yourself "
    Or go using our imagination for free xD

    Thank's for the chapter

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  36. Большое спасибо!

    "Next chapter: The morning after + Souma and Hakuya's evil scheme that even made Mary's expressionless face showed an expression."

    What kind of perversions will this be? :D))

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  37. Kyaa kya kya! Finally Souma graduated from being hetare :D

    So mean though...
    Souma used (puppy eyes) & (direct question) ...i can't?
    IT IS SUPER EFECTIVE!
    Licia is defeated...

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  38. Well there went my totally inhuman conspiracy of human doll puppets, sigh.
    But the ship has sailed.
    Now when are we going to see fleet maneuvers?
    Though I find it disturbing that Excell-sama got him drunk and only took advantage of his babbling to get all his fantasies written down. Despicable!
    Lol
    Thanks for the chapter

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  39. Took him more than a year to make love to his wives huh, still wp bro

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  40. Is there anyone who read full story of the sailor thing?
    Damn I got tricked

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