I'm not understanding the meaning of ドリンクを持って行った correctly in the below excerpt.

To provide context it is a Christmas Eve party at a fancy hotel and ヒルダ had just finished her performance on the stage and returned back to where ロキ and her friends who congratulated her. The next 20 or so sentences after this are listening to other peoples impression of the performance, after which ヒルダ asks ロキ to dance with her.

Originally I thought that ドリンクを持って行った was the narrator ロキ giving her a drink, but this doesn't seem correct as I would have expected something like 持って行ってあげた if this was the case.

From my understanding the literal meaning of 持って行く is to "hold and go" which obviously implies that someone is holding this/these drink/s and 'going' somewhere but it is not clear to me from context.

edit: I guess it could just be referring to ヒルダ going else where after ロキ speaks to her, but I am unsure whether I am assuming the correct subject.








  • I don't understand the sentence either. But I guess that 持っていく in this case means holding [the drink] and going away from someone's (who?) point of view. Maybe, since this is a theater script, it means that the drink holder just gets out of the scene (i.e goes away from the audience)? Just thinking out loud. – jarmanso7 Oct 13 '19 at 15:44

持って行く can be translated either "to take away" (hold-and-go) or "to bring" (hold-before-going), but in this case the former makes no sense. Therefore "I brought a drink (to pass it to Hilda)" should be the correct interpretation. (-て)あげる is not necessary because this is described as a trivial action rather than a favor.

Note that he has to say ドリンクを持って来た instead if he and Hilda are already at the same place. Since he said 持って行った, perhaps they were still walking toward each other when he said お疲れさん.

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