Repository path: workshop/translations/bezhin-lug/R04-v2/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Turgenev, «Бежин луг» (1851) — the boys' night talk, complete

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 the whole of the boys' night talk: 143 paragraphs, 3,825 Russian words, running from «Сперва они покалякали о том и сем…» to «Костя вздохнул и закрыл глаза.» It begins where the narrator stops describing the boys and they start speaking, and ends where the talk stops. Nothing inside it is skipped. The unit was chosen whole because the sense this translation was made to bear on — consistency — is a whole-text sense, and a class of items cannot be shown uniform or non-uniform over a passage chosen to contain them.

Text and provenance. Retrieved from ru.wikisource (Бежин_луг_(Тургенев), raw wikitext), template and footnote markup stripped mechanically. Stored as source-ru.txt, SHA-256 9033b289cf6610c3d82035c5cf802d2cc5a6e2edec4e568dc19ffafae34db066. The narrower passage of the same sketch translated at S026 (T-bezhin-lug-R04-v1, the five portraits, 377 words) is the paragraph immediately preceding this one and does not overlap it.

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

Contamination: high, and MEASURED at S026 on this same sketch — RS-20260725c-contamination-sweep put the lead's CI(7) at 1.26 against the Garnett–Hapgood baseline, the mildest of six cells and still above 1. «Бежин луг» is among the most translated Russian short stories in existence. No claim of independence from remembered renderings is made, and this session's design does not rest on one (see the priming declaration below, which is sharper than the S026 one and is the reason the design was built the way it was).

Priming, declared in full, because it is worse than usual here

Before a word was translated, this session ran two things that put English strings from the published comparators in front of the lead. Both are recorded here rather than in a limits section, because they bear on the exact sites the study limb measures.

1. A string-frequency probe over Garnett 1895 and Hapgood 1903, run to decide whether the class was worth studying at all. It printed counts only, no sentences, for these strings: domovoy, house-, water-, wood-, rusalk, mermaid, nymph, Trishka, goblin, sprite, spirit, unclean, drowned, Parents, Saturday, forest, ghost, Antichrist. The lead therefore knew, before translating, that one comparator transliterates domovoy, that water-/wood- compounds occur, and that nymph and sprite occur. That is priming on precisely the class under study.
2. The dependence gate printed one shared run verbatim — the fourteen-token run the two comparators share — and it falls inside this passage, in the narrator's aside about Akulina. The lead's rendering of that sentence is primed and is not independent evidence of anything.

What follows from this, and it is a constraint on the study limb, not a caveat on it. The lead's class-site choices are excluded by construction from any test of whether independent translators converge. This translation's contribution to the study limb is the frozen log below: the reasons recorded at each class site, at the time of choosing, which no published translator supplies and which is the only kind of evidence that can reach consistency's "without cause" clause. Reasons are not made independent or dependent by knowing another translator's lexical choices.

Neither English text was read — in whole, in part, or in the passage — before this file was committed.

Bezhin Meadow — the boys' night talk

At first they gossiped of this and that, of tomorrow's work, of the horses; but suddenly Fedya turned to Ilyusha and, as though taking up an interrupted conversation, asked him:

"Well, and so — you really saw the house-spirit?"

"No, I didn't see him; and he can't be seen, either," answered Ilyusha in a hoarse, weak voice, the sound of which suited the expression of his face as well as any sound could — "but I heard him... And I wasn't the only one."

"And where does he keep, at your place?" asked Pavlusha.

"In the old rag-mill."

"Why, do you go to the factory, then?"

"Of course we do. My brother Avdyushka and I are layer-men there."

"Look at that — factory hands!.."

"Well, and how did you hear him, then?" asked Fedya.

"It was like this. My brother Avdyushka and I, and Fyodor Mikheyevsky, and Ivashka Squint-eye, and the other Ivashka, the one from Red Hills, and Ivashka Sukhorukov besides — and there were other lads there too; there were about ten of us lads in all, the whole shift as you might say; only it fell out that we had to spend the night in the rag-mill — that is, it wasn't that we had to, exactly, but Nazarov the overseer wouldn't have it; he says, 'What do you want, lads, to be trailing home for; there's a lot of work tomorrow, so don't you go home, lads.' So we stayed, and we're all lying there together, and Avdyushka starts saying, 'Well, lads, and what if the house-spirit comes?' And he'd not got the words out, Avdey hadn't, when all at once somebody starts walking about over our heads; only we were lying down below, and he was walking above, at the wheel. We hear him: walking, and the boards bending under him, and cracking; there — he's passed right over our heads; and all at once the water sets up a roaring at the wheel, a roaring; and the wheel begins to knock and knock, and to turn round; only the sluice-boards at the mill-house were let down. We wonder: who's raised them, then, for the water to come through? Anyway, the wheel turned and turned, and then stopped. Then he goes off to the door up above and starts coming down the stairs, and coming so, as if he were in no hurry; the steps fairly groan under him... Well, he came up to our door, and waited, and waited — and the door all at once flew wide open. We started up, we look — nothing... All at once, look you, at one of the vats the mould begins to stir, and rises, and dips itself, and goes walking, walking about in the air, as if somebody were rinsing with it, and then back into its place. Then at another vat a hook comes off its nail, and back onto the nail; then it's as if somebody went to the door, and all at once he sets to coughing, and hawking, like some sheep, and so loud with it... We all came down in a heap and crawled under one another... How frightened we were that time!"

"Fancy that!" said Pavel. "What set him coughing?"

"I don't know; from the damp, maybe."

They were all silent for a while.

"Well," asked Fedya, "are the potatoes done?"

Pavlusha felt them.

"No, still raw... There, it splashed," he added, turning his face towards the river — "must be a pike... And there's a little star rolled down."

"No — I'll tell you something, lads," began Kostya in his thin little voice; "listen to what my dad was telling the other day when I was by."

"Well, we're listening," said Fedya with a patronizing air.

"You know Gavrila, the carpenter from the settlement?"

"Yes, of course; we know him."

"And do you know why he's always so low, always saying nothing — do you know? Here's why he's so low. He went once — my dad was telling it — he went off, lads, into the forest after nuts. So he went into the forest after nuts, and lost his way; he'd got in — God knows where he'd got to. So he walked and walked, lads — no! he can't find the road; and it's night already. So he sat down under a tree: I'll wait for the morning, says he — sat down and dozed off. So he dozed off, and all at once he hears somebody calling him. He looks — nobody. He dozed off again — they call again. He looks again, and looks: and there in front of him on a branch sits a rusalka, swinging herself and calling him to her, and she herself dying with laughter, laughing... And the moon shining strong, so strong, plain the moon shines — everything to be seen, lads. So she calls him, and she herself all bright and white, sitting on the branch, like some roach, or a gudgeon — or there's a crucian, too, that's whitish like that, silvery... Gavrila the carpenter fairly went numb, lads, and she keeps laughing away and keeps calling him to her with her hand, like this. Gavrila had all but got up, he'd all but obeyed the rusalka, lads, but the Lord put it into his head, it seems: he did cross himself after all... And how hard it was for him to make the cross, lads; his hand, he says, was simply like stone, it wouldn't turn... Ah, you — well!.. And the moment he made the cross, lads, the little rusalka left off laughing, and all at once she burst out crying... She cries, lads, and wipes her eyes with her hair, and her hair is green, green as hemp. So Gavrila looked at her and looked, and began to ask her: 'What are you crying for, you forest weed?' And the rusalka up and says to him: 'You shouldn't have crossed yourself,' she says, 'man; you might have lived with me in gladness to the end of your days; and I'm crying, I'm grieving, because you crossed yourself; and I shan't be the only one to grieve: grieve you too, to the end of your days.' Then, lads, she vanished, and it came clear to Gavrila at once how to get out of the forest, that is... Only ever since then he goes about low."

"Ugh!" said Fedya after a short silence — "but how can an unclean thing out of the forest like that spoil a Christian soul? He didn't obey her, did he?"

"Well, there you are!" said Kostya. "And Gavrila said her little voice was thin like that, and plaintive, like a toad's."

"Did your father tell it himself?" Fedya went on.

"Himself. I was lying up on the shelf, I heard it all."

"A strange business! Why should he be low?.. Seemingly she took to him, since she called him."

"Aye, took to him!" put in Ilyusha. "I daresay! She wanted to tickle him to death, that's what she wanted. That's their way, those rusalkas."

"But there must be rusalkas here too," observed Fedya.

"No," answered Kostya, "this is a clean place here, and open. Only one thing — the river's near."

All fell silent. Suddenly, somewhere far off, there came a long, ringing, almost wailing sound, one of those unaccountable sounds of the night which arise sometimes out of a deep stillness, rise, stand in the air and at last slowly disperse, as though dying away. You listen — and it is as though there were nothing, and yet it rings. It was as if someone had cried out for a long, long time under the very rim of the sky, as if someone else had answered him in the forest with a thin, sharp laugh, and a faint hissing whistle sped along the river. The boys looked at one another, and shivered...

"The power of the Cross be with us!" whispered Ilya.

"Oh, you crows!" cried Pavel. "What are you scared of? Look here, the potatoes are done." (They all moved up to the little pot and began eating the steaming potatoes; only Vanya did not stir.) "What's the matter with you?" said Pavel.

But he did not come out from under his mat. The little pot was soon empty.

"And have you heard, lads," began Ilyusha, "what happened at our place the other day, at Varnavitsy?"

"At the dam?" asked Fedya.

"Yes, yes, at the dam, the broken one. There's an unclean place for you, unclean and lonely with it. All round it nothing but gullies and ravines, and in the ravines nothing but adders."

"Well, what happened? Tell us..."

"This is what happened. You may not know it, Fedya, but there's a drowned man buried there at our place; and he drowned himself long, long ago, when the pond was still deep; only his little grave can still be made out, and even that hardly: just — a little mound... So, the other day, the bailiff calls Yermil the huntsman; he says, 'You go, Yermil, to the post.' Yermil always goes to the post for us; he's done for all his dogs — they don't live with him somehow, they never have lived, though he's a good huntsman, good at everything. So Yermil went for the post, and lingered in the town, and he's driving back, and he's tipsy. And it's night, and a light night: the moon shining... So Yermil drives across the dam: that's the way his road came out. He's driving along like that, Yermil the huntsman, and he sees: on the drowned man's grave there's a little lamb, white like that, curly, pretty, walking about. So Yermil thinks: 'I'll take him — what's he to be lost like that for'; and he got down and took him up in his arms... But the lamb — nothing. So Yermil goes to his horse, and the horse stares away from him, snorts, shakes her head; anyway he prr'd her quiet, got on her with the lamb and rode on again: he holds the lamb in front of him. He looks at him, and the lamb looks him straight in the eyes, like that. It came over him uncanny, over Yermil the huntsman: I don't remember, thinks he, that sheep ever looked anybody in the eyes like that; anyway, no matter; he began stroking him along the wool, like that, and says, 'Sheepy, sheepy!' And the ram all at once bares his teeth and back at him: 'Sheepy, sheepy...'"

The teller had not got the last word out when both dogs rose at once, dashed away from the fire with convulsive barking, and vanished into the dark. All the boys were terrified. Vanya jumped out from under his mat. Pavlusha rushed after the dogs, shouting. Their barking quickly grew distant... There came the sound of the uneasy running of the startled herd. Pavlusha shouted loudly: "Grey! Zhuchka!.." In a few moments the barking ceased; Pavel's voice came from far off already... A little more time passed; the boys looked at one another in perplexity, as though waiting for something to happen... Suddenly there was the thud of a galloping horse; she stopped short at the very fire, and Pavlusha, clutching her mane, sprang nimbly down from her. Both dogs bounded into the ring of light as well, and at once sat down with their red tongues hanging out.

"What is it? what's the matter?" the boys asked.

"Nothing," answered Pavel, waving his hand at the horse — "just something the dogs got the scent of. I thought it was a wolf," he added in an indifferent voice, breathing quickly with all his chest.

I could not help admiring Pavlusha. He was very fine at that moment. His plain face, quickened by the fast riding, glowed with bold dash and firm resolution. Without so much as a switch in his hand, at night, he had galloped off alone against a wolf without a moment's hesitation... "What a splendid boy!" I thought, looking at him.

"And have you seen them, then — the wolves?" asked the little coward Kostya.

"There are always plenty of them here," answered Pavel, "but they're only restless in winter."

He settled down again in front of the fire. As he sat down on the ground he dropped his hand on the shaggy nape of one of the dogs, and for a long while the delighted animal did not turn its head, glancing sidelong at Pavlusha with grateful pride. Vanya buried himself under the mat again.

"And the frights you were telling us, Ilyushka," said Fedya, whose part it was, as the son of a well-off peasant, to lead the singing — though he himself said little, as though afraid of letting down his dignity. "And then the devil must needs set the dogs barking... And it's true, I've heard that that place of yours is unclean."

"Varnavitsy?.. I should think so! Unclean isn't the word! More than once, they say, they've seen the old master there — the late master. He walks about, they say, in a long-skirted coat, and keeps groaning like this, and looking for something on the ground. Grandfather Trofimych met him once: 'What is it, sir, Ivan Ivanych,' says he, 'that you're pleased to be looking for on the ground?'"

"He asked him?" broke in Fedya, astonished.

"Yes, he asked him."

"Well, Trofimych is a fine fellow after that... Well, and what did he say?"

"'Break-grass,' he says, 'I'm looking for.' And he speaks so hollow, so hollow: 'Break-grass.' — 'And what do you want break-grass for, sir, Ivan Ivanych?' — 'It presses,' he says, 'the grave presses, Trofimych: I want to get out, I want to...'"

"Fancy!" observed Fedya. "He didn't live his life out, seemingly."

"What a wonder!" said Kostya. "I thought you could only see the dead on Parents' Saturday."

"You can see the dead at any hour," Ilyusha put in with assurance — he knew all the country beliefs better than the others, as far as I could tell. "But on Parents' Saturday you can see the living too — those, that is, whose turn it is to die that year. You've only to sit at night on the church porch and keep looking at the road. And they'll go past you along the road, those, that is, who are to die that year. Last year at our place old Ulyana went to the porch."

"Well, and did she see anybody?" Kostya asked with curiosity.

"To be sure. First off she sat a long, long while, and saw nobody and heard nobody... only it was as if a little dog kept barking, barking somewhere... All at once she looks: there's a boy coming along the path in nothing but a little shirt. She looked close — it's Ivashka Fedoseyev coming..."

"The one that died in the spring?" broke in Fedya.

"That very one. He comes along and doesn't lift his little head... But Ulyana knew him... And then she looks: there's a woman coming. She stared and stared — ah, Lord! — it's herself coming along the road, Ulyana herself."

"Was it really herself?" asked Fedya.

"By God, herself."

"Well, but she's not dead yet, is she?"

"The year's not up yet. But you look at her: there's nothing of her left but the soul holding on."

They all grew quiet again. Pavel threw a handful of dry twigs on the fire. They showed up sharply black against the flame that flared up suddenly, crackled, smoked, and began to curl, lifting their charred ends. The reflection of the light struck out on every side, quivering in gusts, and especially upward. All at once, from nowhere, a white dove flew straight into that glow, fluttered timidly in one place, all bathed in the hot brightness, and vanished, its wings ringing.

"Strayed from home, seemingly," observed Pavel. "Now it'll fly on till it runs into something, and where it strikes, there it'll pass the night till dawn."

"I say, Pavlusha," said Kostya, "wasn't that a righteous soul flying to heaven, eh?"

Pavel threw another handful of twigs on the fire.

"Maybe," he said at last.

"But tell me, please, Pavlusha," began Fedya, "did you have the heavenly foreshowing at your place too, at Shalamovo?"

"When the sun wasn't to be seen? To be sure."

"You were frightened too, I daresay?"

"And not us only. Our master, though he'd explained to us beforehand that there'd be a foreshowing for us — when it grew dark he was so scared himself, they say, that there was no doing anything with him. And in the servants' hut the cook-woman, the moment it grew dark, d'you hear, up and broke all the pots in the oven with the oven-fork: 'Who's to eat now,' says she, 'the end of the world has arrove.' So the cabbage soup ran out over everything. And in our village, brother, such tales went about — that white wolves would run over the earth and eat people, that a bird of prey would fly, or that they'd even see Trishka himself."

"What Trishka's that?" asked Kostya.

"Don't you know?" put in Ilyusha warmly. "Well, brother, where do you hail from, not to know Trishka? You're stay-at-homes in your village, and no mistake! Trishka — that'll be such a wonderful man as will come; and he'll come when the last times are at hand. And he'll be such a wonderful man that they won't be able to take him, and won't be able to do anything to him: such a wonderful man he'll be. The Christian folk will want to take him, for instance; they'll go out against him with cudgels, they'll ring him round, but he'll turn their eyes aside — turn their eyes so aside that they'll go beating one another. They'll put him in prison, for instance — he'll ask for a drop of water in a dipper: they'll bring him the dipper, and he'll dive into it, and that's the last of him. They'll put chains on him, and he'll flutter his hands — and they'll simply fall off him. Well, and this Trishka will go about the villages and the towns; and this Trishka, the cunning man, will tempt the Christian folk... and there'll be nothing to be done to him... Such a wonderful, cunning man he'll be."

"Yes, that's it," Pavel went on in his unhurried voice, "that's the one. It was him we were waiting for at our place. The old men said that as soon as the heavenly foreshowing began, Trishka would come. Well, and the foreshowing began. All the people poured out into the street, into the field, waiting to see what would be. And our place, you know, is open and gives you a view. They look — and suddenly there's a man coming down the hill from the settlement, an outlandish sort, with a wonderful head... They all set up a shout: 'Oh, Trishka's coming! oh, Trishka's coming!' — and each his own way! Our village elder got into a ditch; the elder's wife stuck fast in the gateway, screaming blue murder, and so frightened her own house-dog that it broke its chain and away over the fence and into the wood; and Kuzka's father, Dorofeich, jumped into the oats, squatted down and set to calling like a quail: 'Maybe,' says he, 'the Enemy, the soul-destroyer, will spare a bird at least.' Such a to-do they were all in!.. And the man was our cooper, Vavila: he'd bought himself a new tub, and had put the empty tub on his head."

The boys all laughed, and again fell quiet for a moment, as often happens with people talking in the open air. I looked about me: solemn and regal the night stood; the damp freshness of late evening had given way to the dry warmth of midnight, and it had long yet to lie like a soft canopy over the sleeping fields; there was much time still before the first stir, before the first rustlings and whisperings of morning, before the first dewdrops of dawn. There was no moon in the sky: it rose late at that season. Countless golden stars seemed all to be flowing quietly, twinkling in rivalry, in the direction of the Milky Way, and truly, looking at them, you seemed dimly to feel for yourself the headlong, unhalting rush of the earth...

A strange, sharp, sickly cry rang out suddenly twice in succession over the river, and a few moments later was repeated further off...

Kostya shuddered. "What's that?"

"That's a heron crying," Pavel objected calmly.

"A heron," Kostya repeated... "And what was it, Pavlusha, that I heard yesterday evening," he added after a short pause; "you may know..."

"What did you hear?"

"This is what I heard. I was going from Kamennaya Gryada to Shashkino; and I went first all through our hazel wood, and then went by the little meadow — you know, where it comes out in the elbow — there's a deep pool there, you know; you know it's all overgrown with reeds; so I was going past that pool, lads, and all at once out of that pool somebody sets up a groaning, and so pitiful, so pitiful: oo-oo... oo-oo... oo-oo! Such a fright took me, lads: the hour was late, and the voice so full of pain. It fairly seemed I'd have cried myself... What could that have been? eh?"

"Thieves drowned Akim the forester in that pool the summer before last," observed Pavlusha; "so maybe it's his soul complaining."

"Well, and that's a thing, lads," Kostya answered, opening wide his already huge eyes... "I didn't know they'd drowned Akim in that pool: I'd have been frightened worse still."

"And then they say there are little frogs like that," Pavel went on, "that cry so pitifully."

"Frogs? Well, no, that's not frogs... what sort of... (The heron cried again over the river.) There it goes!" said Kostya involuntarily; "it's like the wood-spirit crying."

"The wood-spirit doesn't cry, he's dumb," Ilyusha put in; "he only claps his hands and crackles..."

"And have you seen him, then — the wood-spirit?" Fedya broke in mockingly.

"No, I haven't, and God preserve me from seeing him; but others have. Only the other day he led a peasant of ours astray at our place: he took him round and round the wood, and all round one and the same clearing... He barely got home by daylight."

"Well, and did he see him?"

"He did. He says he stands there so big, so big, and dark, and muffled up, like that, as if behind a tree, so that you can't rightly make him out, as if he were hiding from the moon, and looks, and looks with those great eyes of his, and blinks them, and blinks..."

"Ugh, you!" cried Fedya, shivering slightly and twitching his shoulders — "pfoo!.."

"And why was this foulness ever let loose about the world?" observed Pavel. "I don't understand it, really!"

"Don't rail at them, mind, or he'll hear you," observed Ilya. There was silence again.

"Look, look, lads," came Vanya's childish voice suddenly, "look at God's little stars — they're swarming like bees!"

He put his fresh little face out from under the mat, propped himself on his little fist and slowly raised his big quiet eyes. The eyes of all the boys were raised to the sky, and were not soon lowered.

"Well, Vanya," said Fedya affectionately, "is your sister Anyutka well?"

"She's well," answered Vanya, with a slight lisp.

"You tell her — why doesn't she come to see us?"

"I don't know."

"You tell her to come."

"I'll tell her."

"You tell her I'll give her a present."

"And will you give me one?"

"I'll give you one too."

Vanya sighed.

"Well, no, I don't want one. Better give it her: she's such a good little thing with us."

And Vanya laid his head on the ground again. Pavel got up and took the empty pot in his hand.

"Where are you off to?" Fedya asked him.

"To the river, to scoop up some water: I've a fancy for a drink of water."

The dogs got up and went after him.

"Mind you don't fall into the river!" Ilyusha called after him.

"Why should he fall?" said Fedya. "He'll take care."

"Yes, he'll take care. All sorts of things happen: he'll bend down, he'll start scooping the water, and the water-spirit will catch him by the hand and drag him under to himself. Afterwards they'll say: the lad fell into the water... Fell, indeed!.. There — there, he's got into the reeds," he added, listening.

The reeds were indeed parting and "rustling", as we say in our parts.

"And is it true," asked Kostya, "that Akulina the simpleton went out of her mind from that time, from having been in the water?"

"From that time... What is she now! But they say she was a beauty before. The water-spirit spoiled her. Seemingly he didn't reckon on her being pulled out so soon. So down there at the bottom, at his own place, he spoiled her."

(I have met this Akulina myself more than once. Covered with rags, terribly thin, with a face black as coal, a clouded gaze and teeth for ever bared, she will stamp for hours together in one spot somewhere on the road, pressing her bony hands hard to her breast and slowly shifting from foot to foot, like a wild beast in a cage. She understands nothing that is said to her, and only now and then laughs convulsively.)

"And they say," Kostya went on, "that Akulina threw herself into the river because her lover deceived her."

"That's just it."

"And do you remember Vasya?" Kostya added sadly.

"What Vasya?" asked Fedya.

"Why, the one that was drowned," answered Kostya, "in this very river. What a boy he was! ah, what a boy he was! His mother, Feklista — how she loved him, Vasya! And it was as if she felt it, Feklista did, that his death would come to him from the water. Sometimes Vasya would go with us lads to bathe in the river in summer — and she'd be all of a tremble. The other women would be all right, they'd go by with their troughs, waddling along, but Feklista would set her trough down on the ground and start calling him: 'Come back,' she'd say, 'come back, my light! oh, come back, my little falcon!' And how he came to drown, the Lord knows. He was playing on the bank, and his mother was there too, raking hay; suddenly she hears something like somebody blowing bubbles through the water — she looks, and there's nothing but Vasya's little cap floating on the water. And ever since then Feklista's not in her right mind: she'll come and lie down on the spot where he was drowned; she'll lie down, lads, and start up a little song — you remember, Vasya was always singing a little song like that — well, that's the one she starts up, and cries and cries herself, and complains bitterly to God..." — "And here comes Pavlusha," said Fedya.

Pavel came up to the fire with the full pot in his hand.

"Well, lads," he began after a silence, "this is a bad business."

"What is?" Kostya asked hurriedly.

"I heard Vasya's voice."

They all fairly shuddered.

"What are you saying, what are you saying?" Kostya stammered.

"By God. I'd just begun to bend down to the water, and all at once I hear somebody calling me in Vasya's little voice, and as if from under the water: 'Pavlusha, hey, Pavlusha!' I listen; and he calls again: 'Pavlusha, come here.' I came away. But I scooped the water up."

"Ah, Lord! ah, Lord!" said the boys, crossing themselves.

"Why, it was the water-spirit calling you, Pavel," added Fedya... "And we were only just talking about him, about Vasya."

"Ah, that's a bad sign," said Ilyusha deliberately.

"Well, no matter, let it be!" Pavel brought out resolutely, and sat down again. "There's no escaping your fate."

The boys quieted down. It was plain that Pavel's words had made a deep impression on them. They began to settle themselves before the fire, as though making ready to sleep.

"What's that?" Kostya asked suddenly, raising his head. Pavel listened.

"That's the little sandpipers flying, whistling."

"Where are they flying to?"

"Why, there where they say there's no winter."

"And is there really such a land?"

"There is."

"Far off?"

"Far, far off, beyond the warm seas."

Kostya sighed and closed his eyes.

Translator's log

Frozen at commit time, before the study limb's design was written, before either published English text was read, and before any coding scheme for class handling existed (charter §3, A4). Decisions and alternatives; not quality claims.

A. The class record — every item of the boys' supernatural lexicon

This table was written as the passage was translated, item by item, and is the reason this translation exists. For each item it records what was chosen and — the column that matters — whether a site-local reason drove the choice, i.e. a feature of this item that made the handling used elsewhere in the class unavailable or misleading here. The class was fixed from the Russian alone before translating: every noun or fixed nominal phrase in the boys' talk naming a being of the folk-supernatural world, the class of such beings, or a practice, place-kind, plant or sign belonging to that world, for which standard English has no established one-word equivalent. Fourteen items, forty-three tokens.

Read off the table before any comparison existed: the class is NOT uniform. Fourteen items take six different strategies — transparent calque (6), copy-opaque (1), copy as proper name (1), descriptive paraphrase (1), substitution (3), calque-of-a-deformation (1), substitution-inside-calque (1). The modal strategy is transparent calque at 6 of 14, and eight of the fourteen depart from it, of which eight carry a site-local reason recorded at the moment of choosing and the four non-departures carry none because none was needed.

The one thing I want on the record before anyone counts anything: at no point while translating did I experience a choice between "be consistent" and "be right here". The question never arose. I did not notice the class was non-uniform until I wrote the table out, and the table was written because the session's design required it, not because translating raised the problem. internal-judgment-only.

B. The three place-spirits, and why they are one decision and not three

домовой, леший and водяной are the same Russian formation: an adjective of place made a noun — the house one, the forest one, the water one. English will build that compound (house-spirit, wood-spirit, water-spirit) with nothing left over. So these three items are not three independent decisions but one decision taken once and applied three times, and any count that treats them as three sites of agreement is counting one thing three times. русалка is not of that formation, which is why she is transliterated while they are calqued: the difference in my English tracks a difference in the Russian morphology, not a change of policy. Whether that counts as cause under consistency's wording is exactly what this session's study limb asks, and I am not the one to answer it.

C. Register and the two voices

The narrator is an educated gentleman of the 1850s and the boys are peasant children whose Russian is thick with dialect, malapropism, diminutives, and the particles («вот», «этак», «мол», «то есть», «братцы мои») that hold oral narration together. The translation pitches the narrator at period-idiomatic (A-mansfield-garden-party's register point is later than this, but it is the project's only period anchor and the nearest available) and the boys at a marked but unlocalised rural English — lads, seemingly, fairly, says he, and no mistake — deliberately not any real English dialect. Giving Ilyusha Yorkshire or Somerset would place him, and the whole point of these boys is that they are Russian. The cost is that the boys' speech is marked in English without being from anywhere, which is a weaker effect than Turgenev's.

Four of Turgenev's oral particles have no English carrier and were absorbed into syntax rather than translated: «братцы мои» is rendered lads where it appears as address and dropped where it is pure punctuation; «этак» is carried by like that, so, or nothing; «мол» and «дескать» by the says-he/says-she frames; «то есть» by that is. Roughly a third of the particle occurrences are gone.

D. Fourteen further decisions, briefly

1. «рольня» — the building in a paper mill where rags are beaten. Rag-mill: keeps the rags, loses the beating engine the word is actually named after. Beater-house was the alternative and reads as jargon.
2. «в лисовщиках состоим» — mill hands who lift the sheets off the mould. Layer-men is the English trade word and will be opaque to most readers; the alternative, we work at the mill, loses the boys' pride in having a trade name.
3. «форма», «чан», «заставки у дворца» — mould, vat, the sluice-boards at the mill-house. The paper-making machinery is what makes Ilyusha's ghost story frightening (things that should be inert start working), so it is kept technical rather than generalised to things.
4. «Бяша, бяша» — the Russian call to a sheep. Transliterating it would leave the reader not knowing it is a call, which destroys the story: the horror is that the lamb answers with the man's own call-word. Substituted with an English call, Sheepy, sheepy. A substitution I would defend and a substitution nonetheless.
5. «казюли» — dialect for snakes; Turgenev glosses it in his own footnote. Adders keeps the creature and loses the gloss-worthiness. A footnote would have carried the fact that the word is странное even to Turgenev's Russian reader; I did not use one, and the translation is silently less strange than the original at that word.
6. «жбан» — a tall lidded wooden vessel. Tub is wrong in shape and right in the only thing that matters (it goes over a man's head). Pitcher, jar, keg all fit the head worse.
7. «Он ее отпрукал» — quieted the horse with the sound prr. He prr'd her quiet invents an English verb; it seemed better than losing the sound.
8. «сугибелью выходит» — where the meadow comes out in a sharp bend. In the elbow — a guess at the same body-metaphor; the Russian word is regional and I cannot be sure of it.
9. «светопрестановление» — the cook's mangling of светопреставление. Rendered by mangling the English instead (has arrove), i.e. the deformation is moved from the noun to the verb because end of the world will not deform. See class item 12: the same decision, taken twice, three lines apart, in two different word classes.
10. «полати» — the sleeping shelf over the stove. Up on the shelf: the object survives, the house does not.
11. «в чем душа держится» — of a dying woman. Kept literal (nothing of her left but the soul holding on) rather than idiomatic (she's only skin and bone), because Ilyusha is talking about a woman who has seen her own ghost, and the soul in that sentence is not a figure of speech.
12. «соколик», «светик» — my little falcon, my light. Both are dead metaphors in Russian endearment and live ones in English; the English is therefore more vivid than the Russian at the most affecting moment in the passage. I let it be vivid.
13. «кулички» — small waders. Sandpipers is a guess at species; little curlews was the alternative. The birds matter only as a sound going somewhere warm.
14. The Akulina sentence. «словно дикий зверь в клетке. Она ничего не понимает, что бы ей ни говорили» came out as like a wild beast in a cage. She understands nothing that is said to her. This sentence is primed — the fourteen-token run the two comparators share was printed by this session's dependence gate before I translated, and it is this sentence. I have left my rendering as it came, and it must not be cited as evidence that the Russian forces one English.