The translation of sabishii is a little lonely, a little sad

We’re looking at the famous sentence comparing a girl’s lips to leeches in Kawabata’s Snow Country:

細く高い鼻が少し寂しいけれども、その下に小さくつぼんだ唇はまことに美しい蛭の輪のように伸び縮みが滑らかで

and Seidensticker’s translation:

The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches…

And have concluded in our previous article that it would work better as

Her long, narrow nose

Now we learn that her nose was 寂しい (sabishii). This word seems to have thrown Seidensticker for a loop. One of its most common meanings is lonely (or lonesome), but it can also mean sad (not unhappy, but in the sense of lacking something). Seidensticker thus rolls out yet another of his translation strategies, the include all possibilities strategy, where if you’re not sure if something means A or B, just put both A and B in the translation—maybe one of them will be right! Just make it lonely and sad! But then to make sure the “a little” applied to both lonely and sad, he needed to repeat the “little“ again before the sad. “A little lonely, a little sad”! That necessitated a comma between “a little lonely” and “a little sad”, breaking the rhythm of the sentence and destroying the flow of the original. Pity the people, including the illustrious members of the Nobel Prize Committee, who read “a little lonely, a little sad” and were blown away by Kawabata's exquisite prosody. Actually, this English has virtually nothing to do with anything Kawabata wrote.

What does sabishii mean?

So what does sabishii really mean in this context? Can we express it in a single word or phrase in English?

The problem is that, like so many Japanese words, sabishii has a broad range of related meanings. Yes, it can mean “lonely” or “lonesome”, as in missing your friends. A connected meaning is a place populated by few or no other people (hissori, or deserted) or objects or decorations (desolate, forlorn). But it can also refer more generally to cases in which some element that should be there or used to be there is missing or lacking, or something is incomplete, or imperfect, or unsatisfying, or leaving something to be desired.

Hey, aspiring students of Japanese! Sabishii is a great word to learn and use. It gives you an instant Japanese sensibility. You can use it for almost anything. Kid bring home a so-so report card? Then his 成績が寂しい (his grades were less than thrilling). Wife picked out a couch that leaves you cold? Tell her you think it’s sabishii. You can say 懐が寂しい (futokoro ga sabishii, meaning nothing in your wallet, or 口が寂しい (kuchi ga sabishii), meaning your nothing in your tummy (mouth). If you don’t use sabishii, your Japanese will be sabishii!

In this case, it seems reasonably clear that the intent is to convey that Komako’s nose is missing some desired element of shape, probably breadth, or petiteness, or both. It couldn’t possibly be “lonely”—what would that even mean, that the nose doesn’t have any friends? The point is that it’s unsatisfyingly narrow. It leaves something to be desired. So why not just say that?

Her long, narrow nose left a bit to be desired

Seidensticker’s translation of sabishii as “lonely and sad” is just…sabishii.

Behind the word sabishii

Let us examine the word sabishii more closely. It’s natural to assume that it derived from sabi. We know sabi in at least two contexts: one is “rust”, in which case it is written 錆, and the other wabi-sabi. It’s intriguing that in both cases the underlying meaning is some kind of defect—tarnish or rust or patina on a metal object, or imperfection in the case of wabi-sabi. The verb form sabiru can also refer to the degradation of something, like a skill.

This reinforces our understanding of the meaning of sabishii as indicating some kind of defect or imperfection. And by the way, yes, sabishii is linguistically related to rust! Both sabi as in rust and sabishii are believed to have come from the ancient word さぶ (荒ぶ), meaning to become unrefined or grow rough.

The word samishii, often written as 淋しい, is a phonetic evolution of sabishii, and has a stronger sense of lonely or deserted. This m-to-b transformation is a common one.

Oh no. We’ve spent an entire post working on a mere five additional characters. Undaunted, we will forge ahead in the next post to buds of lips and leeches.