I need help translating as I'm confused with word usage

Question

I need some help with a bit of the Japanese-English translation I'm currently working on. Here is the full Japanese sentence:

返事をした女の子がこちらに近づき、僕の手にナイフを握{にぎ}らせる。

The following is the bit of what I need help with translating in the context of the above sentence:

ナイフを握{にぎ}らせる。

The second section directly translates to:

僕の手 - "my hand"

に - particle that represent direction of movement

ナイフ - "knife"

を - particle that means the knife is being affected by following verb event

握{にぎ}らせる - to let (someone) take hold of your hand/ grasp/ seize - verb.

Which all together translates to the following when strung together in a sentence:

my hand is taken hold of by (someone) knife is grasped in my hand.

I'm having trouble conveying the action while using only the words/meanings that are provided in the original which I have managed to translate as:

The girl’s response was to approach me, take hold of my hand knife appears in my grasped hand.

From what I know of the context, the knife is being placed? given? to the POV character by the girl before it is grasped, which is not shown in the given Japanese or translation. As pointed out in mindful's comment, the translation for

[僕の手にナイフを握{にぎ}らせる]

is more or less "made me grip the knife in my hand".
However, my understanding of the translated context would be that the translation would be the equivalent of “the girl grasps my hand, knife appears in my grasped hand".

Is it possible for me to translate this to

"The girl’s response is to approach me, take hold of my hand and places in my hand a knife."

while using only the words/meanings that are provided in the original Japanese?

Answer 1

First of all, as Kurasukun said, I think that understanding the grammar here is what will really make the difference. Most of the constructs used here are relatively straightforward as long as you know what they are, so I'll try and provide reading for each relevant construct.

返事をした女の子

This is "the girl who responded". In this case, 「返事をした」 is a subordinate clause describing 「女の子」. Tae Kim has a pretty good explanation of how subordinate clauses are used to modify nouns here. The particularly relevant section is Using relative verb clauses as adjectives.

がこちらに近づき

I think your understanding of this part is fine; it's talking about the girl coming closer to the speaker, with 「こちらに」 meaning "in the speaker's direction" and 「近づき」 meaning "to come closer".

僕の手にナイフを握{にぎ}らせる

So this is the tricky part. Tae Kim has an explanation of causative verb usage here which I think is worth reading (specifically the section Causative Verbs). Knowing what you are looking at will help you parse it.

That said, the way that I would think about this is that the actual action is 「僕の手にナイフを握る」, meaning "grip the knife in my hand". Then, because the verb 握る is conjugated into the causative 握らせる, it becomes "lets/makes (me) grip the knife in my hand".

As for a translation of the whole sentence, keeping it fairly literal I would say something like:

The girl who responded comes closer, and makes me grip the knife in my hand.

Answer 2

返事をした女の子がこちらに近づき、僕の手にナイフを握らせる。

This means "The girl who responded approached me, and put a knife in my hand." ^[1]

握る is the verb used for clasping, gripping things with a hand. It is the natural verb to use for a knife.

Given the context posted here, it's clear that the narrator just woke up, and nowhere in the story is a knife mentioned before, so the knife is not his nor in his hand nor within his reach.

^{[1] Nitpickers: I have "approached" and "put" in the past tense here because fiction flows better that way in English to me.}