The bud of her lips

We're looking at the famous sentence from Kawabata's Snow Country about lips and leeches. We've decided that the first part would better be:

Her long, narrow nose left a bit to be desired

The next portion of the Japanese is:

その下に小さくつぼんだ唇

which Seidensticker gives as

the bud of her lips

Wait, what happened to その下に (“below it”)? I guess Seidensticker felt that all Western readers would know that mouths were below noses and wouldn’t need this superfluous piece of information, or that, like provinces, this issue of facial geometry would be too difficult to explain to clueless English speakers, or maybe it just didn't fit in well.

And what happened to 小さく (little)? Well, if つぼんだ is interpreted as “budded/was budding”, as the translator did, then it’s weird—how can something bud in a small way? In the Seidensticker translation approach, if you run into a problem like this, the answer is always to just ignore the original and leave it out.

Here, つぼんだ, the past tense of つぼむ, does not mean bud or budded. Especially when written in hiragana, it means to get narrower or shut. (If you were going to write it in kanji, it would be 窄む.) Did Seidensticker know this meaning of つぼんだ? Here are some dictionary entries amplifying on the meaning of this word as follows:

細長いものの先などが、狭く小さくなる。また、開いていたものが閉じる。つぼまる。すぼむ。
The tip of something thin and long gets narrower or smaller. Or, the closing of something open.

ふくらんでいたり、開いていたりしたものが、縮んで小さくなる。しぼむ。
Something that has expanded or opened shrinks and grows smaller.

In English, it can be translated as closing, like a flower or an umbrella, shrinking like a balloon, narrowing, tapering, scrunching up, bringing together, or in the case of a mouth “pursing” or “puckering”. It is related to 壺 (tsubo). It is very close to subomu, which is another reading of 窄む.

So whatever was happening with Komako’s mouth had nothing to do with “buds”; her lips were pursed, like this:

Based on the above the correct translation here would be:

but below it her slightly pursed lips

Let's not pull any punches here. Seidensticker's translation was not a mere exercise of translatorial license, nor a considered adaptation to the exigencies of the target language. No, it was just wrong. You know, a mistranslation. Any system for addressing translation quality would give this single phrase three black marks and send it back for rework.

In summary

In summary, we would propose instead of

The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips…

the following:

Her long, narrow nose left a bit to be desired, but beneath it her slightly pursed lips…

Next: on to the leeches!