I have an Anki card that I am struggling with a bit.
まさか, ヤトさんに間違い電話してしまうなんて
The card has this translated as a past tense action, basically “I mistakenly called Yato San”, and so does every other place where I plug in this sentence, but I am not picking up on what is making it past tense.
On one hand, I can sort of see how past tense could be sort of inherent to ~てしまう – you can’t really unintentionally do something in the present or future tense. But on the other hand, isn’t that what ~てしまった is for?
1 comment
You’re correct that there is no past tense in the original sentence. If I were translating it, I probably would not have used past tense either.
But there are still ways the past tense is implied that make it not a bad translation. For example, in the following two English sentences:
“To think of me mistakenly going and calling Y…”
“To think I would go and accidentally call Y…”
Even though neither of those is a past tense conjugation directly, they can be implied commentaries on something that already happened. So it’s not a huge stretch.
You could also say “To think I went and accidentally called…” and make the past tense more explicit, of course. But the first two aren’t “wrong” either.