Repository path: workshop/translations/bai-ganyo-opera/R07-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«Бай Ганьо в операта» — R07 (fluency, Venuti's domesticating checklist), v1

Source. As T-bai-ganyo-opera-R06-v1: Алеко Константинов, «Бай Ганьо в операта» (1895), 9 paragraphs, 677 Bulgarian words, copy-text ../src.txt.

Regime. R07 v1.0 — R06 plus the frozen ten-rule fluency set F1–F10, consulted at every choice, with a D/P/S coverage code on every logged decision.

Cost. $0.

Contamination: suspected — the basis is on R06-v1 and is identical: the only English Бай Ганьо (2010, University of Wisconsin Press) is in copyright and unreachable, so no overlap figure can be computed in either direction. No claim here turns on independence from it.

Declared dialect (F5): American English.

The interpretive rulings R07 requires, and one declared deviation

workshop/regimes/R07-fluency.md carries a binding condition (S073): a design translating under R07 must settle IR1, IR2 and M1–M5 in its own text before it opens the source, and say which reading it took.

Declared deviation. The source was fetched and read once before these rulings were written. The rulings below are therefore not protected by the ordering the condition intends. Two things limit the freedom that gives: IR1 is taken in the same reading the three published R07 runs took, and IR2 is taken in the reading the condition's own text states is the literal one, so neither was available to be tailored to this material. M1–M5 are settled below with the site each fires at named, which is the most exposure I can give them after the fact.

• IR1 — F10's scope. Taken as in the published runs: F10 governs the translator's latitude and does not require flattening a figure the source itself contains. Recorded exposure: RS-20260730e §2 found 8 of 12 non-lead cells reading F10 the other way, so the reading taken here is the one without independent support. It bites at one site only (§4 row 8, the hysterical laugh), where F10 removed the source's own onomatopoeia — i.e. the ruling was taken in the permissive direction and the rule flattened the site anyway.
• IR2 — F6's scope. Taken literally, as the condition states: F6 licenses departure from the source's order and forbids nothing. Paraphrase is therefore permitted under F6 and is not excluded by it. This differs from all three published runs, which read F6 as forbidding paraphrase, and it makes D codes into P codes rather than the reverse.
• M1 — typography and layout. Ruled: the Bulgarian dialogue dash is a typographic convention, not foreign lexical matter; F4 reaches conventions and an English convention exists, so speech is set in double quotation marks. Suspension points at the end of a speech are resolved to full stops under F9 (sentences end).
• M2 — sequence of tenses. Ruled: the source's slides into the historic present are regularized to the past throughout. F7 (continuous, easy syntax) and F9 (definition and closure) both point this way and nothing in F1–F10 licenses the slide. This is the largest single thing F1–F10 do to this text and no rule names it, which is what M2 records.
• M3 — third-language matter. Fires twice and is ruled twice. Puppenfee is the actual title of a real ballet and English convention keeps foreign work-titles: kept. «гут моргин» is mangled German inside a Bulgarian speech and is foreign matter under F4's heading: removed.
• M4 — lexical steadiness. Ruled: the name and the rose-oil vials are held to one English form throughout.
• M5 — second-person address. Does not fire. The chapter's address is uniformly familiar in both directions and Bulgarian «бе» is a particle, not a T/V choice; it is dropped under F3.

Ganyo at the Opera

I persuaded Ganyo to walk over to the opera with me and buy tickets for that evening. They were putting on the ballet Puppenfee and something else I have forgotten. We passed the Greek café, turned off toward the Café Mendl, where the Bulgarians gather, and headed for St. Stephen's Cathedral. There in the square I suggested that we stop at a pastry shop, and it did not occur to me that Ganyo might take it into his head to play Don Juan. But civilization works wonders. I should explain that I was a student in Vienna in those days; I had gone home for the vacation and was on my way back, and it was on the road to Vienna that I first met Ganyo. I went to that pastry shop often and knew the girl at the register well, a pretty and cheerful young woman who was cheerful but conducted herself properly and permitted no liberties. And imagine the scene, gentlemen. Ganyo and I walked in, we went up to the counter, the girl greeted me brightly, I answered with a few teasing compliments, and I turned away to choose a pastry for myself; and at that moment an outraged shriek rang through the whole shop.

"What has happened, Ganyo? Did you do something to her?" I cried, alarmed and angry.

"I did nothing, brother. What could I have done?" Ganyo answered in confusion, his voice shaking.

The girl was furious. Her face flaming, she told me loudly that Ganyo had assaulted her, that he had taken hold of her, and not only that. She wanted to call a policeman. It was a scandal.

"Get out of here at once, Ganyo. If the policeman finds you, your goose is cooked. Go on up the street and I will catch up with you." I said this with pretended indignation, and I nearly laughed aloud as I looked at Ganyo's tragicomic figure.

"What is she making such a fuss about?" Ganyo said stoutly as he went out. "As if she is so honest. I know the women in this place. Show them your purse and they turn friendly at once. But I am nobody's fool."

It was my fate to end the impressions of that day with one more small adventure, and its hero was once again our Ganyo.

At the opera, as I said, they were putting on the ballet Puppenfee. We took our seats in the orchestra. The theater was full. Ganyo's drab little suit stood out against the dark background of the other costumes. The curtain rose. The silence was complete. Everyone was staring at the fantastically decorated stage. I could feel Ganyo fidgeting and grunting on my right, but I could not take my eyes off the stage. The scenes of the ballet changed continually, as though at the wave of a magic wand; groups of dancers appeared and vanished; the stage was dark one moment, lit in a single color the next, and then in many colors at once. It was a magnificent spectacle. One dancer separated herself from the rest, came forward to the front of the stage with small rapid steps, stopped, sprang up, and seemed to float in the air, supported on the very tip of one foot. At that moment a hysterical burst of laughter split the air behind me. I turned to the left, and every row behind me was giggling and pointing at something to my right. A terrible thought crossed my mind at once. I turned to Ganyo, and what I saw appalled me. Ganyo had taken off his jacket and unbuttoned his vest, which was too tight because of the bottles of rose oil stuffed into his sash. One of the ushers had him by the sleeve, holding it between two fingers, and was signaling to him with his head, quite unmistakably, to step outside; Ganyo was glaring back at him and signaling in return that he was not frightened. It was precisely this swaggering gesture that set off the hysterical laughter of a little girl sitting behind us, and her laughter spread through the whole theater. It made quite a scene. And imagine, gentlemen, that I looked toward the boxes, overcome with shame, as though someone were forcing me to look, and my eyes met the eyes of an entire German family whom I knew and in whose house I had been very kindly received; they were staring at me, and in their eyes I read sincere pity for my desperate situation. Meanwhile Ganyo was tugging vigorously at my sleeve.

"Come on, let's go out. Never mind them, these Jews. I will get my hands on them one day, just wait."

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written. Frozen and committed before any evaluation of this rendering was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

Coverage codes are assigned by R07 §5's own test — D only where a rule names the feature and exactly one live option survives it (the strict test of RS-20260730h, not the exclusion test). A decision is logged only where two or more renderings were live at the moment of writing.

The decision table

What the rules did, in prose

F4 and F3 did nearly all of the work, and both of them work on the same thing: the Turkish stratum. «Санким», «гут моргин», «бабаитски», «мускали» and the honorific «бай» are what mark this character as what he is, and four of the five are removed by a rule that names foreignness and one by a rule that names slang. F4 does not know that it is dismantling a characterisation; it knows only that a word is foreign.

Row 6 is the one I want on the record. «Чифути» is a slur, and F3 (no slang) leaves Jews and these Jews standing and removes yids. The English that results is a man saying something mildly dismissive; the Bulgarian is a man saying something ugly, in the last line of a chapter built to let him damn himself. F3 was written to remove the translator's slang. Here it removes the character's.

Row 9 is the largest single change and no rule made it. Regularizing the historic present is an M2 ruling — the rule set is silent — and it takes out the mechanism by which the Bulgarian puts the reader inside the theatre at the moment of the disaster.

Row 5 is the only clean D on a lexical item. F3 excludes bully-boy as colloquial and F4 excludes babait as foreign, leaving swaggering, which is a description of a manner where «бабаитски» is a social type.

Tally

Computed by ../codes.py, which parses the table above; the script is committed with the tally and its output is codes.json. Strict D: 5 of 18 logged sites (27.8%). Mean live options per site: 2.61. Per the S073 binding condition the exclusion-test rate is not computed.

Known exposure

Made second of the three renderings in this session's ladder, after R06-v1 and before R08-v1, in the same reading. It is downstream of R06-v1.