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誰もが平等に死んで、自分では誰一人救えなかった。 人間なんてそんなものだと諦めるしか、目の前の恐怖を抑えられなかった。
My TL:
Everyone died equally, I could not save anyone.
I could do nothing other than giving up thinking "Human beings are like that."
I could not suppress the fear in front of me.
How does しか work in this sentence?
I think I understand the general meaning of the sentence but I am lost grammatically.
I would say this sentence is a bit awkward. This sentence is a lot easier to understand if it's written like this:
人間なんてそんなものだと諦めることでしか、目の前の恐怖を抑えられなかった。
It was only by giving up, thinking "That's how human beings are", that I could suppress the fear in front of me.
Compare with these simpler sentences:
しか is a postpositional particle and it is always used with ない which means "negative". And it means "just have to" , "have no choice but", and "have nothing but" etc.
For example. 彼は英語しか話せない(He can only speak English.), この図書館には日本語の本しかない(This library has nothing but books written in Japanese.)
I think 人間なんてそんなものだと諦めるしか、目の前の恐怖を抑えられなかった means that I could do nothing other than giving up by thinking "Human beings are like that." in order to suppress the fear in front of me.
This is an interesting question, since when I read the sentence leading up to "しか", I expected a "なかった" or "できなかった" to follow. So I think the form "[verb]しか" here implies that a negation should follow.
The object of the verb "抑えられなかった", however, of course is "目の前の恐怖", and "諦めるしか抑えられなかった" does not really make sense. So I would have to bet that this is a stylistic way of saying:
諦めるしか、目の前の恐怖を抑える方法がなかった
I must admit, I was a bit confused about the meaning until @choco's formulation in comments
