75169
I started translating a manga to get a better real world grasp of the
language. I also have the english version to help me cross check my
translations. But the following sentence is giving me a hard time and doesn't
match the english version at all (from what I can tell):

> 性懲りも無く頭を過ぎった

[![japanese sentence
"性懲りも無く頭を過ぎった"](https://i.stack.imgur.com/I8TRA.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/I8TRA.png)

Edit: ~~The same "box" from the english version (usually it matches
perfectly):

> I wondered if this person might want to be my friend. ~~

_I found this text at another location. (Web Novel vs Light Novel but 99%
matching) This could be the corresponding translation:`I often wished I could
find someone like that.`_

* * *

What I gathered so far with the help of Google translate and weblio.jp:

性懲り -> discipline

無く -> without

頭 -> head

過ぎる / 過ぎった -> pass / passed

Full Google translate is `I passed my head without discipline` which doesn't
make any sense here.

Context: Person A meets Person B but is afraid of people and wants to chase
her away at first. But what she really thinks is that she wants to make
friends and talk to people.

From the manga `ぼっち怪物と盲目少女`

What is the meaning of this sentence?
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-03-23T23:26:14.647
75167
2020-03-24T11:26:26.323
2020-03-23T23:56:13.610
18637
18637
question
translation meaning manga
Meaning of 性懲りも無く頭を過ぎった
First of all, please forget the "matching" translations you found. You're
somehow seeing something totally irrelevant.

性懲り on its own means something like "learning (by a bad experience)" or
"feeling like not repeating something any more". But this word is used almost
exclusively in the idiom 性懲りもなく ("without 性懲り"), which you should learn as a
set phrase.

性懲りもなく means something negative like "as if [one] had forgotten the lesson
(learned by a bad experience)", "like someone who does not learn by mistakes",
"doggedly", "yet again", etc.

頭を過ぎる【よぎる】 is another idiom meaning "to cross one's mind" or "to come to
mind".

Thus 性懲りも無く頭を過ぎった means "[Some idea] persistently crossed my mind" or "It came
to my mind yet again". The nuance is that he already learned it's a bad idea,
but somehow cannot get rid of it.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-03-24T01:51:11.583
75169
2020-03-24T02:50:52.493
2020-03-24T02:50:52.493
5010
5010
75167
answer
So this is [the original context](https://www.pixiv.net/artworks/60053309):

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6ws1m.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6ws1m.png)

I must say in the beginning that the sequence 性懲りも無く頭を過ぎった would be hard to
make sense if there were no specific context, though both 性懲りも無く and 頭を過ぎる are
common idioms (see @naruto's answer).

The main reason is that this expression is a [transferred
epithet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transferred_epithet) which is not
conventional. 性懲りも無く "despite one's failures" should obviously depict a
person, but what 頭を過ぎる "cross the mind" is an idea.

With rhetoric torn away, it seems to mean "even though I have experienced
numerous letdowns, it popped into my head (again)". The English translation
you saw looks like a part of a paraphrase rather than a faithful one.

As an aside,

> この時 性懲りも無く頭を過ぎった 「この人なら友達になってくれるかも」と

is the full continuation of sentence here. It is inverted and grammatically
unmatched, but somewhat obscured by fragmentation and interruption of other
balloons. A consistent sentence would be:

> この時、「この人なら友達になってくれるかも」という考えが性懲りも無く頭を過ぎった。
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-03-24T11:26:26.323
75179
2020-03-24T11:26:26.323
7810
75167
answer