Japanese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Japanese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Struggling to grasp this sentence:
残像｛ざんぞう｝さえ霞む｛かすむ｝高速｛こうそく｝の打突｛だとつ｝。
Rapid strikes that [verb clause starts] ...
Applying structures from here and here hasn't made sense to me so far.
Thinking about it more: "Rapid strikes, such that even their afterimage becomes blurred"? Sounds horrible when I translate it like that.
Your translation shows your complete understanding of the phrase even if you do not like it yourself.
A difficulty this relative clause could present for the translator is the fact that 「霞む」 is an intransitive verb and that is not the action either performed by or against 「打突」, the main noun of the relative clause.
What I often do in such cases is that I rephrase it the way it does not change the meaning or nuance of the original.
「残像さえ霞む高速の打突」
I mentally rephrased this to:
「残像さえ霞むような高速の打突」,
「残像さえ霞むほど高速の打突」 or
「残像さえ霞むほどに高速な打突」
The phrase became somewhat easier to translate and I now have:
"a strike so rapid that even its afterimage gets blurred"
A noun phrase needs to stay as such till the end. I said that because many users here tend to call a phrase like this a "sentence".
