#67 永井荷風『夢の女』
陰気に曇った冬の朝である。もしも、表の格子戸に人の呼ぶ声がしなかったなら、お浪は例のように九時近くまで寐ているのであったろう。
Vocabulary:
永井荷風 ながいかふう Nagai Kafu (author, 1879-1959)
陰気に いんきに gloomily
曇る くもる to become cloudy
冬 ふゆ winter
朝 あさ morning
もしも…なら if (indicates hypothesis)
表 おもて the front
格子戸 こうしど lattice door
呼ぶ よぶ to call, to call out to
声 こえ voice
お浪 おなみ o-Nami (proper name of protagonist)
例 いつも always, usual (unofficial reading of 例)
寐る ねる to sleep (be careful: 寐 ≠ 寝)
Translation:
It was a gloomy, cloudy winter morning. If someone hadn’t called out from the lattice door out front, o-Nami would have probably slept until about nine o’clock as she always does.
Amazon.jp link for the book I used:
Thank you fot the post!
It's cool, isn't it? It's just two sentences, but you can feel that relaxed atmosphere, as if you youself were in bed ^^ (If it were a modern book, I'd suppose everything after that beginning would be a part of the heroine's dream, like in Alice in Wonderland.)
Here comes a predictable question though, how these two ねる differ. One of my dictionaries says 寐る is just an old version of 寝る, and the other one simply says they are the same =_=?
Thanks Bunsuke for such good short paragraphs. They really help me to learn. One question, I mistranslate the sentence as “called out to the lattice door” rather than “called out from the lattice door”. Is there something here that marks the sentence as passive?