Repository path: workshop/experiments/E-20260804i-name-or-prose/purposes.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R15 — the two purposes, frozen before a word was rendered

Both were written before the six loci were re-read for this session and before either rendering was begun. Neither translator's log had been started. The same source text, the same translator, one pass each, straight through.

A declaration E-20260804h's pre-run critic taught this project to make up front. These two briefs do point at the two dimensions the 1904 record splits Garnett and Hapgood on. That is not a leak here; it is the independent variable of PR2, which asks whether two purposes can manufacture the dimensional trade two translators had. The difference from E-20260804h, and the reason the same objection does not transfer: the texts these briefs produce are not the texts whose separation PR1 measures. PR1 is about Garnett and Hapgood, who were given no brief by anyone in this project, and the sites are classified by seats that see no English at all.

R15-CRIB

You are translating «Певцы» for a reader who has the Russian open beside your English and will check you against it, phrase by phrase. That reader wants to know what the Russian says and how it says it: which word is doing the work, where a diminutive or an intensifier sits, what is stated and what is only implied, where the syntax turns. Nothing may be silently dropped, smoothed, or supplied. Where the Russian repeats, repeat. Where it names a thing your reader will not know, keep the thing and let the sentence carry it; do not swap it for an English near-equivalent. Where a construction has no English shape, take the awkward shape rather than the wrong content.

You are not writing a gloss or an interlinear, and you are not licensed to be ungrammatical. It is still English sentences. But if a choice comes down to this reads better against this shows what the Russian did, take the second.

No footnotes, no brackets, no notes of any kind.

R15-ENGLISH

You are translating «Певцы» for a reader who will never see the Russian and does not know it exists — someone reading a nineteenth-century Russian story in an English collection, for pleasure, at one sitting. That reader must never stumble. The prose has to move as English prose of its own period moves: its rhythms, its idiom, its way of handling a long descriptive sentence.

Where the Russian has a word your reader has no picture for, give them a picture. Where a construction would come across as a foreign shape in English, find the English shape that does the same job. Where the Russian repeats and English would not, do what English would do.

You are not licensed to add incident, invent detail, or change what happens. It is the same story. But if a choice comes down to this shows what the Russian did against this reads as English, take the second.

No footnotes, no brackets, no notes of any kind.