Repository path: workshop/translations/bargamot/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-bargamot-R04-v1 — Andreyev, «Баргамот и Гараська» (1898), RU→EN

Regime R04 (lead close translation, source-only), v1.0 frozen. The single-pass draft was frozen first as T-bargamot-R06-v1 (R04 §Procedure 2a), in two commits: Unit A at baf67c9, Unit B at f555036 — and the Unit A commit contains no Unit B text, because Unit B was not drafted until Unit A's contamination gate had run.

• Source: Леонид Андреев, «Баргамот и Гараська», 1898. Text from ru.wikisource.org (PD-old-70), which cites ostu.ru/personal/andreev/biblio/Rasskazi/Barg1.html. Retrieved 2026-07-28. Stored verbatim as source-ru.txt; non-breaking spaces normalised, no other change.
• Translated by: lead agent, in session, from the Russian alone. No API call. $0, never ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Comparator for the contamination measurement: W. H. Lowe, The Little Angel, and Other Stories (London: Francis Griffiths, 1915), Project Gutenberg #49598, public domain. Not read for the selected passage before this page was frozen — see Priming.
• Extent: Unit A 171 Russian words → 247 English (the gate paragraph) · Unit B 315 Russian words → 441 English, 16 paragraphs (the pilot passage). 486 Russian words → 688 English in total.
• Lineage: draft T-bargamot-R06-v1 → this. No panel involvement at any stage.
• Why this work: Unit B is the reference text of the known-difference pilot pair that ARM-tierD-repair step 2 asks for (wiki/findings/results/RS-20260728g-scale-usage.md; the fault variant is variant-F1.md in this directory). It is Russian→English because the Tier D run's own materials are, and a stage that gates that run has to sit on the same language pair.

Contamination

suspected, and measured — the declaration is not a placeholder.

Priming, declared because it happened. Before the passage was selected, the lead had seen Lowe's English of roughly the first third of the story — down to the "gunners" walking to church — while establishing that a freely readable comparator existed at all. The passage translated here begins well past that point and was chosen for that reason, which is what R04 §Procedure 1 prescribes ("the passage selected must be one whose rendering has not already been seen"). One term crossed the line and is declared rather than disguised: "gunner" for пушкарь was seen in Lowe and is used in Unit A. Substituting a worse word to look independent would be cosmetic. It appears in no shared run reported below.

The measurement. Longest common contiguous token run, tools/dependence_check.py (frozen criterion: dependence at ≥12 shared tokens, E-20260725c-contamination-sweep §4). Comparator: Lowe's rendering of this same story, 3,461 words. Null-control floor: the same lead text against 47,453 words of Lowe's other Andreyev translations in the same volume — same translator, same author, same year, different stories — which is a floor that controls for translator idiom and period register, not merely for English.

Reading, and it is narrow. Every cell is far below the frozen ≥12-token criterion; the gate passes, and Unit B was translated only after Unit A's row existed. The same-story runs stand 8 (Unit A) and 9 (Unit B) against null-control floors of 5 and 4. That is a gap of three and five tokens on one story, and it licenses no claim about the lead's memory of this text; what it licenses is the selection decision it was run to make.

Diagnostic beside the frozen figure, per the S047 precedent on run inflation. Unit B's 9-token run crosses a sentence boundary — "…out of his pocket. | Raising…". The frozen metric does not bound runs at sentence or paragraph edges (E-20260725c §4), so 9 is the figure of record; sentence-bounded it is 8, and the 8-token run is the same string minus its last token. Reported, not substituted.

One observation is worth recording because it was not looked for. The R06 draft's longest same-story run is 7 and the R04 revision's is 8, and they are different runs. The self-revision changed "which proved not to be nearly so infinite" to "which turned out to be not nearly so infinite" — and that change is what created the longer run. The revision moved the text one token closer to the published translation at the site it touched. One site, one passage, one token: this is an anecdote, not a measurement, and it is written down here so that it can be measured properly by somebody who decides it is worth measuring. (internal-judgment-only does not attach: no quality claim is made in either direction.)

The name-excluded column of tools/dependence_check.py is not quoted here, per NEXT.md's standing prohibition — it is uninformative on dialogue-heavy comparators, and Unit B is dialogue.

Unit A — the gate paragraph

But Bargamot's good humour was spoilt in the basest fashion. From round the corner came uneven footsteps and a hoarse muttering. "What ill wind blows him here?" thought Bargamot; he looked round the corner, and was offended to the depths of his soul. Garaska! In his own drunken person — he was the one thing wanting! Where he had contrived to get soused before daybreak was his own secret, but that he had got soused was beyond all doubt. His behaviour, an enigma to any outsider, was perfectly plain to Bargamot, who had made a study of the gunner soul in general and of Garaska's base nature in particular. Drawn by an irresistible force, Garaska had been pressed from the middle of the street — along which he was accustomed to proceed in state — hard up against a fence. Braced on both hands, peering into the wall with a concentrated, questioning stare, Garaska swayed, mustering his strength for a fresh struggle with unexpected obstacles. After a short spell of strenuous reflection Garaska shoved off from the wall with energy, backed rump-first to the middle of the street, and, executing a decisive turn, strode off at a great pace into space — which turned out to be not nearly so infinite as it is said to be, being in fact bounded by a quantity of lamp-posts. With the very first of them Garaska entered into the closest of relations, folding it in a firm and friendly embrace.

Unit B — the pilot passage

"You'll do your talking at the station! March!" — Bargamot's mighty hand went forth towards Garaska's greasy collar, a collar so greasy and so torn that Bargamot was plainly not the first guide Garaska had had along the thorny path of virtue.

Giving the drunkard a slight shake and imparting to his body the proper direction and a certain stability, Bargamot hauled him off towards the destination aforesaid, exactly like a powerful tug towing behind it a wisp of a schooner that has met with disaster at the very mouth of the harbour. He felt deeply wronged: instead of the rest he had earned, here he was trudging to the station with this little sot. Ah! Bargamot's hands itched, but the knowledge that on so great a day it was somehow not the thing to set them to work held him back. Garaska stepped out briskly, combining, in a remarkable way, self-assurance and even insolence with meekness. He evidently had a thought of his own, and he now began to approach it by the Socratic method!

"Tell me now, Mister Constable, what day is it we've got today?"

"You'd do better to hold your tongue!" Bargamot answered with contempt. "Soaked before daylight."

"And have they rung at Michael the Archangel's?"

"They've rung. What's that to you?"

"Then Christ, it means, is risen?"

"Well, He's risen."

"Then allow me…" — Garaska, who had been conducting this conversation half turned towards Bargamot, turned round to face him with decision.

Bargamot, intrigued by Garaska's strange questions, let the greasy collar slip mechanically out of his hand; and Garaska, having lost his point of support, lurched and fell, without managing to show Bargamot the object he had just taken out of his pocket. Raising only his upper body, propped on his hands, Garaska looked down — and then fell face forward on the ground and set up a wail, the way peasant women wail over a corpse.

Garaska wailing! Bargamot was astounded. "Some new joke he's thought up, I suppose," he decided, but he was interested all the same to see what would come next. What came next was that Garaska went on wailing without words, like a dog.

"What's the matter, have you gone off your head?" Bargamot prodded him with his boot.

He wails. Bargamot in thought.

"Well, what's tearing you up?"

"M-my little e-egg…"

Garaska, still wailing, but more quietly now, sat up and raised his hand in the air. The hand was covered with some kind of slime, and to the slime there clung fragments of dyed eggshell. Bargamot, still at a loss, begins to feel that something bad has happened.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-07-28 (S050), before any evaluation of this translation was designed, and before the fault variant variant-F1.md was constructed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Anchors are verbatim, unique substrings of the English above.

Register — the governing problem

D1. The story runs two registers against each other and the joke is the collision. Andreyev narrates a drunk and a policeman in a slum in the vocabulary of diplomacy, epic and the civil service: «в области международных отношений», «в сфере внутренней политики», «вышеуказанной им цели», «сократовским методом», «длань». The people are rendered in dialect and diminutive. The whole translation problem is that English can do the mock-official register but tends to flatten the peasant one, so the two halves of the joke do not come out equal. Every decision below is a local instance of that.

D2. «Мощная длань» — длань is a Church Slavonicism for palm/hand, in a sentence about grabbing a drunk by the collar. English has no one-word equivalent of the right height (palm is anatomical, hand is neutral). Chosen: compensation on the verb rather than the noun — «устремилась» (shot out, rushed) → "went forth", anchor "mighty hand went forth". Rejected: puissant hand (costume); mighty palm (wrong body part in English idiom). The Slavonicism is lost as a lexical fact and reinstated as a syntactic one, and that is a trade, not a solution.

D3. «вышеуказанной им цели» → "the destination aforesaid". Вышеуказанный is a form that lives in reports and statutes. Aforesaid is its exact English habitat. Rejected: the destination he had named (draft; correct and register-blind).

D4. «сократовским методом!» — kept, with its exclamation mark, anchor "by the Socratic method!". The mark is doing the narrator's eyebrow-raise and the draft had dropped it.

D5. «легонькую шхуну» — a double-diminutive of an already light thing. Draft flimsy schooner; revised to "a wisp of a schooner", which buys the smallness back at the cost of a metaphor Andreyev does not use. Live alternative not taken: a little light schooner.

D6. «бабы» → "peasant women", not women. Баба is class-marked and the simile is about a specific kind of public mourning. The draft's women made it a universal.

Dialect and the substandard

D7. The load-bearing loss, and it is one word. «Христос, значат, воскрес?» — значат for значит is a substandard vowel, one letter, and it is Garaska's entire social position inside a sentence about the Resurrection. Nothing was found for it. Options considered and rejected: "Christ is riz, then?" (imports American Southern speech and a different century); "So Christ, like, is risen?" (imports 1990s); apostrophised spelling ("Christ 'as risen, then?") — rejected because Cockney h-dropping is as located as riz is. Chosen: "Then Christ, it means, is risen?" — which carries the calque of значит and none of the class marking. Anchor: "Then Christ, it means, is risen?". This is the decision I would most expect an independent translator to make differently, and the note is here so that a difference can be read as a difference rather than as an error.

D8. «господин городовой» addressed with the familiar imperative «А скажи» — deference in the noun, cheek in the verb, at the same time. Chosen: "Tell me now, Mister Constable" — the bare imperative keeps the cheek, the capitalised title keeps the deference. Rejected: Would you tell me, Mister Constable (kills the cheek); Tell me, copper (kills the deference).

D9. «До свету нализался» — verbless, subjectless, contemptuous. Chosen: "Soaked before daylight." — kept elliptical. Note that Unit A's «наклюкаться» is rendered "get soused": two different Russian slang verbs for the same act, two different English ones, deliberately, because Andreyev does not repeat himself here.

D10. «Яи-ч-ко…» — яйцо → яичко, diminutive, broken by sobbing across a syllable boundary. The diminutive is the pathos: it is one egg, and it is small, and it was his. Chosen: "M-my little e-egg…" — which adds a possessive the Russian does not have. Rejected: "An e-e-egg…" (keeps the indefiniteness, loses the tenderness); "The li-ttle e-egg…" (unspeakable). The addition is licensed by the pocket he took it from four paragraphs earlier and is logged as an addition, not as a rendering.

D11. «Да чего тебя расхватывает?» → "Well, what's tearing you up?". Расхватывать here is regional and physical — being pulled apart. Rejected: what's got into you (idiomatic and colourless).

Syntax, tense and the ending

D12. The last paragraph changes tense and English will not let it pass unnoticed. «Баргамот, продолжая недоумевать, начинает чувствовать» — present, after a page of past. Kept as a present: "begins to feel that something bad has happened." The risk is that an English reader reads it as an error rather than as a shift. Rejected: normalising to began (safe, and it deletes the one formal event in the passage).

D13. «Воет. Баргамот в раздумье.» — two fragments, the second with no verb at all. Kept as "He wails. Bargamot in thought." Rejected: Bargamot stands thinking (supplies the verb Andreyev withheld).

D14. «Приподнявшись одним туловищем» — literally having raised himself by the trunk alone. Draft kept trunk, which in English is an elephant or a tree before it is a torso. Revised to "Raising only his upper body". What is lost: the slight anatomical oddity of the Russian, which suits a man too drunk to stand.

D15. «завыл, как бабы воют по покойнике» and then «продолжал выть без слов, по-собачьи» and then «Воет.» — four occurrences of выть in eleven lines, and English wail was kept for all four. Alternatives (howl, keen) were live and were rejected: howl pre-empts «по-собачьи» (like a dog), which is the sentence that makes the dog explicit; keen is Irish.

D16. «Гараська воет!» → "Garaska wailing!" — a verbless English exclamation for a Russian finite verb, because "Garaska is wailing!" reads as reportage and the Russian is Bargamot's astonishment breaking into the narration.

D17. «не первым руководителем Гараськи на тернистом пути добродетели» → "not the first guide Garaska had had along the thorny path of virtue". Руководитель is an official's word (supervisor, director); guide is softer. Considered and rejected: not the first to have directed Garaska, which keeps the officialese and loses the sentence's rhythm.

D18. «У Баргамота чесались руки» → "Bargamot's hands itched" — the idiom exists in English with the same meaning and the same body part, which happened twice in this passage and neither time by design.

D19. «как будто неудобно» → "it was somehow not the thing". Неудобно here is social, not physical. Rejected: awkward, improper (both too definite for «как будто»).

Unit A

D20. «самым подлым образом» and «подлую Гараськину натуру» — the same adjective twice, sixty words apart, and the link is the point: the manner of the offence is Garaska's nature. Draft had vilest / vile; revised to "the basest fashion" / "base nature" to keep the link at a lower temperature. Anchors: "spoilt in the basest fashion", "Garaska's base nature".

D21. «Кого это несет нелегкая?» — idiom, literally whom is the un-light one carrying here?, with a suppressed devil. Draft: "Who the devil is that?" — which makes the devil explicit and loses the motion. Revised to "What ill wind blows him here?", which keeps a suppressed agent and the carrying. Lost: the Russian's whom, i.e. Bargamot does not yet know it is Garaska.

D22. «был притиснут к забору … вглядываясь в стену … отпихнулся от стены» — Andreyev writes fence once and then wall twice for the same object. Kept as written (fence, then wall, wall). It is either a slip or free indirect drunkenness; harmonising it would decide that question silently.

D23. «имел обыкновение шествовать» → "was accustomed to proceed in state". Шествовать is processional, used of clergy and monarchs. Proceed in state is the register; walk would have been the meaning.

D24. «допятился задом» → "backed rump-first". Допятиться is to retreat backwards; задом makes it pleonastic and comic. Rejected: backed away (loses the pleonasm, which is the joke).

D25. «устремился в пространство, оказавшееся вовсе не таким бесконечным, как о нем говорят» — the mock-cosmological sentence. Draft "which proved not to be nearly so infinite"; revised to "which turned out to be not nearly so infinite", on rhythm. See §Contamination: this revision is the change that lengthened the shared run with Lowe from 7 tokens to 8, and it was made for reasons that had nothing to do with Lowe, whose text had not been read.

D26. «заключив его в дружеские и крепкие объятия» → "folding it in a firm and friendly embrace" — adjective order reversed from the Russian («дружеские и крепкие») because English wants the evaluative adjective nearer the noun.

D27. «сосредоточенно-вопросительно» — a compound adverb English cannot form. Split into "with a concentrated, questioning stare", which supplies a noun (stare) the Russian does not have; the Russian modifies «вглядываясь».

What was not decided

D28. Proper names are transliterated on the plain system already used in this project's Russian work (Bargamot, Garaska, Michael the Archangel). Баргамот is itself the villagers' corruption of Бергамотов → bergamot, the pear; the pun is set up in the story's first paragraph, which is not in this passage, so no decision about it was available here. Михаил-архангел is the church, named for the archangel; "Michael the Archangel's" keeps the ellipsis of church.

D29. Not decided, and flagged: whether "the station" should be "the lock-up" for «участок». Участок is the police station; the passage uses it three times and «в часть» once earlier in the story. "Station" throughout, uniformly, which loses a distinction the Russian may or may not be making.

Evaluation — first blind panel scores (RS-20260803-a4-set, S094)

provisional and internal-judgment-only: Tier D is NOT PASSED (RS-20260802-tierD-verdict), so these scores carry no evidential weight and may not support a framework recommendation. Three non-Anthropic jurors (P1, P2, P5), blind, authorship-stripped, rating this text alone against its source on a 1–7 scale, twice each; the figure is the mean over three jurors and two passes. Scored span: Andreyev, unit B only.

Instrument floor for comparison: 0.233 scale points (same juror, same text, independent repeat). Two of the three jurors sit at the top of the scale on ~72% of all cells, so these figures are compressed upward and the compression is unequal across jurors.

From this page's frozen translator's log alone, an independent seat that had seen neither the source nor the translation predicted the lowest-scoring sense would be naturalness; the sense that actually scored lowest was cultural-mediation. The full test, and the benchmark that deflates it, are in RS-20260803-a4-set §5.

Re-judged — cross-session stability check (RS-20260907-panel-judging-2, S253)

provisional and internal-judgment-only: Tier D is EXHAUSTED, permanently (config/models.md, S250) — these scores carry no evidential weight. Re-judged 159 sessions after the first scoring above, on the byte-identical text, same three non-Anthropic jurors, blind, order-swapped, twice each.

Cross-session shift from the S094 scores above: mean absolute 0.127 scale points overall (this item's own deltas are in RS-20260907-panel-judging-2 §2), against a within-session retest floor of 0.222 — the panel reads this text the same way five weeks and 159 sessions later. One juror (P2) was flagged degenerate this run (near-ceiling on 90% of its cells, SD > 0.30 on only 2 of 6 senses) — see RS-20260907-panel-judging-2 §3 for what that does and does not affect.