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

Turgenev, «Бежин луг» (1851) — the five boys, complete passage

Source. Иван Сергеевич Тургенев, «Бежин луг», from Записки охотника. First published in Современник vol. XXV no. 2 (1851), pp. 319–338. Public domain (Turgenev d. 1883).

The unit is a passage, not the whole sketch — 377 Russian words, the block running from «Всех мальчиков был пять…» to «…Этому мальчику было всего лет семь.», i.e. the introduction and portraits of the five boys at the fire. Passage-level units of 100–500 words are the unit D-20260725-06's ratification named for candidate held-out material; this is the first one the project has built.

Text and provenance. Retrieved from ru.wikisource (Бежин_луг_(Тургенев), raw wikitext) and cross-checked against an independent site (skazki.rustih.ru) that shares no text pipeline with Wikisource. After whitespace normalisation the two are byte-identical over the whole passage, SHA-256 1e5d2c0b2064eee4… on both. Stored as source-ru.txt, SHA-256 b1295ae84e22c490fb651f752a54a0f766c3b5c892ab5be8790dd755764eacf2.

The cross-check settled one thing it was run for: the passage opens «Всех мальчиков был пять», not «было пять». That is not a Wikisource transcription slip — both sources carry it — and it is a real feature of Turgenev's text.

Regime. R04 — lead close translation, source only. No API call, no cost, never ledgered (charter §6, A4).

Contamination: high. «Бежин луг» is among the most translated Russian short stories in existence; Constance Garnett's rendering is on Project Gutenberg and plausibly sits in the lead's training data. No claim of independence from remembered renderings is made or should be read in.

Contamination, MEASURED 2026-07-25 (S026) — the mildest case in the sweep, which is not the same as neutral. RS-20260725c-contamination-sweep measures CI(7) = 1.26 under the conservative extreme of the metric, the lowest of six cells, and finds the overlap symmetric between Garnett and Hapgood (A = 1.04). The aggressive extreme reports 3.33 for this cell and that figure is an instrument artifact, not a result: an OCR running head inside Hapgood's scan made the rule ban a, of, the, you, cutting the baseline from 19 shared 7-grams to 3. The lead had predicted this cell would be the most contaminated of the six, on the reasoning that «Бежин луг» is the most anthologised sketch in the cycle; it measures least. Still above 1, and still the most central text in its cell — mildest is not neutral.

Priming, declared. The sketch was chosen because both Constance Garnett (1895) and Isabel Hapgood (1903–04) translated the whole of Записки охотника, which makes it a candidate pair for D-20260725-06's ratified filter. In getting that far the lead saw the two volume titles (A Sportsman's Sketches; Memoirs of a Sportsman) and archive.org/Gutenberg catalogue entries. Neither English text was fetched, opened or searched before this file and its log were committed, and the passage was selected from the Russian alone. Freeze order per NEXT.md note (f), which has now been load-bearing four sessions running.

Bezhin Meadow — the five boys

There were five boys in all: Fedya, Pavlusha, Ilyusha, Kostya and Vanya. (I learned their names from their talk, and I mean to introduce them to the reader now.)

The first of them, the eldest of the lot, Fedya, you would have put at about fourteen. He was a slender boy, with handsome, fine, slightly small features, curly fair hair, light eyes, and a perpetual half-merry, half-absent smile. By every sign he belonged to a well-off family, and had ridden out to the field not from need but simply so, for the fun of it. He had on a bright print shirt with a yellow border; a small new coat, thrown on cape-fashion, kept its hold only just on his narrow little shoulders; from his pale-blue belt hung a comb. His boots, with their low tops, were his own boots, sure enough — not his father's.

The second boy, Pavlusha, had tangled black hair, grey eyes, broad cheekbones, a pale, pockmarked face, a large but well-shaped mouth, a head huge all over — the size, as they say, of a beer cauldron — and a squat, ungainly body. An unprepossessing lad, there was no denying it; and yet I liked him: he looked at you very intelligently and straight, and there was strength in his voice too. There was no cutting a figure in his clothes: they consisted of nothing but a plain hempen shirt and a pair of patched trousers.

The face of the third, Ilyusha, was rather an insignificant one: hook-nosed, drawn out, weak-sighted, it wore a sort of dull, sickly carefulness; his compressed lips did not stir, his knitted brows did not part — he seemed to be screwing up his eyes all the while against the fire. His yellow, almost white hair stuck out in sharp little tails from under a low felt cap that he kept pulling down over his ears with both hands. He had on new bast shoes and leg-cloths; a thick cord, wound three times about his middle, drew his tidy black smock carefully in. Neither he nor Pavlusha looked more than twelve.

The fourth, Kostya, a boy of about ten, roused my curiosity by his thoughtful and sorrowful gaze. His whole face was small, thin, freckled, and tapered to a point below like a squirrel's; his lips could hardly be made out; but a strange impression was made by his large black eyes, shining with a liquid glitter: they seemed to want to say something for which, in speech — in his speech at any rate — there were no words. He was small in stature, of a puny build, and dressed rather poorly.

The last of them, Vanya, I did not notice at first: he lay on the ground, curled up meek as anything under an angular mat of bast, and only now and then put out from under it his light-brown curly head. This boy was no more than seven.

Translator's log

Frozen at commit time, before any evaluation of this translation was designed and before either published English text was fetched (charter §3, A4). Decisions and alternatives; not quality claims.

1. The opening count, and a grammatical oddity kept out of the English. «Всех мальчиков был пять» uses a masculine singular verb where modern standard Russian wants neuter «было». Two independent sources carry it, so it is Turgenev's. English has no corresponding wobble available at that point in the sentence without inventing a rusticism the narrator does not have — the narrator here is an educated gentleman-hunter, and the sentence is his, not the boys'. Rendered as flat "There were five boys in all", with the oddity recorded here rather than smuggled into the prose. Something is lost and the loss is not recoverable in kind.

2. The names, and an inconsistency in the original. The list gives Илюша; the third portrait, four sentences later, gives Ильюша with a soft sign. Turgenev's text is internally inconsistent about this boy's name. Both are the same name and both transliterate naturally to Ilyusha, which is what I used throughout — so the English silently regularises something the Russian does not regularise. Live alternatives were Ilusha for the first and Ilyusha for the second (preserves the difference, looks like a typing error in English), or a footnote (breaks the prose). I chose the regularisation and am flagging it because a transliteration difference is exactly the kind of thing a landmark matcher can trip over — NEXT.md action 2 names L2's transliteration variants as a known defect in the project's own audit instrument.

3. армячок. A diminutive of армяк, a peasant overcoat of coarse cloth. "Little armyak" (transliterate) keeps the specificity and stops the reader; "smock", "coat", "jerkin" all lose the cloth. I took "a small new coat" and let «надетый внакидку» — "thrown on cape-fashion", worn over the shoulders without the arms in the sleeves — carry the visual information that matters, since the point of the sentence is that a garment too big for him is sliding off. The cloth is lost.

4. с пивной котел. Literally "the size of a beer cauldron" — a brewing copper. The simile is folk speech, marked by «как говорится» ("as they say"), so the narrator is quoting an idiom, not inventing an image. Kept literal with the "as they say" intact rather than substituting an English idiom of size, because substituting one would make the narrator idiomatic where Turgenev makes him a reporter of other people's idiom.

5. лапти и онучи. Bast shoes and the strips of cloth wound round the leg beneath them. There is no English word for either that is not either an explanation or a borrowing. "New bast shoes and leg-cloths" is the explanation route. Note that the sentence's real content is social: Ilyusha's footwear is new and his smock is tidy, against Pavlusha's patched trousers — the passage is ranking five boys by household, and the objects are the evidence. A rendering that loses the objects loses the ranking.

6. заботливость. Usually "solicitude", "carefulness", "attentiveness" — a disposition to take care. Turgenev couples it with «тупую, болезненную» ("dull, sickly"), which makes "solicitude" read as care for others, wrong here: what the face expresses is an anxious carefulness turned inward, a boy braced against something. "Carefulness" is the flattest of the options and the one I took; "anxiety" was live and was rejected as too modern and too interpretive — it names the feeling, where Turgenev names the bearing.

7. на языке — на его языке по крайней мере — не было слов. «Язык» is both tongue and language. The obvious English is "for which there were no words in the language — in his language at any rate", and it is very nearly right; the risk is that "his language" in English suggests Russian, i.e. an idiom problem, where the Russian suggests his vocabulary, the resources of one poor ten-year-old. I used "in speech — in his speech at any rate", which loses the tongue/language pun and keeps the possessive doing the work Turgenev wants from it. The pun is a real loss.

8. смирнехонько. An intensive-affectionate diminutive of «смирно» (quietly, meekly) with no English morphological equivalent; the affection is in the suffix. "Meek as anything" puts the affection in a colloquial phrase instead — the register is roughly right, the mechanism is not.

9. Sentence architecture. Turgenev builds the Pavlusha portrait as one long accretive list of noun-plus-adjective pairs with no main verb repeated ("волосы были всклоченные, черные, глаза серые, скулы широкие…"). English cannot chain bare nominatives that way without reading as a police description. I kept it as a single sentence hung off one "had", which preserves the accumulation and the length but supplies a governing verb Turgenev does without.

10. What was deliberately not smoothed. Turgenev repeats the ordinal frame — «Первому… У второго… Лицо третьего… Четвертый… Последнего…» — and it is faintly mechanical, a catalogue. English translations are tempted to vary it. I kept all five ordinals in place, including the switch at the fifth from a number to "the last of them", because the switch is Turgenev's and it is the point at which the catalogue notices that the smallest boy was nearly missed.