Repository path: workshop/translations/duel/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«Дуэль» XV, ¶660–700 — the quarrel — English, R06 v1

Source. Антон Чехов, «Дуэль» (1891), chapter XV. Copy-text: ru.wikisource.org, which reproduces Полное собрание сочинений и писем в 30 томах, т. 7, стр. 353–455, from the FEB electronic edition (feb-web.ru/feb/chekhov/texts/sp0/sp7/sp7-353-.htm). Licence PD-old-70. Retrieved 2026-08-08. Paragraph numbers below are indices into the cleaned plain text (workshop/experiments/E-20260808h-trajectory/materials/duel.txt), which is committed with this artifact.

Span. ¶660–700, 41 paragraphs, 1,107 Russian words → 1,268 English words.

Regime. R06 v1.0 — lead single pass, source only, no return pass. Written straight through; where a choice was unresolved at the moment of writing, the option written is the one below and the alternative is in the log.

Priming. None. Constance Garnett's The Duel (Project Gutenberg #223) was downloaded to materials/ sealed and unopened before this translation was written, and was not opened until after this file was committed. No other English rendering of «Дуэль» was consulted. The project has no prior rendering of this work (workshop/translations/ has no duel directory; note (bhb) check run before translation).

Contamination: suspected, measured after the freeze at 0bad3cc. 23 shared twelve-grams and a longest common run of 18 tokens against Garnett 1916. See §Contamination below for the breakdown and for what it does and does not license.

Cost. $0. Lead translation is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

The translation

"How do you feel after yesterday?"

"Splendid," answered Laevsky, reddening. "As a matter of fact, nothing particular happened…"

"Until yesterday I supposed that hysterics were something only ladies had, and so at first I thought you had St Vitus's dance."

Laevsky smiled ingratiatingly and thought:

How indelicate of him. He knows perfectly well that it is painful to me… "Yes, it was a funny business," he said, still smiling. "I have been laughing all this morning. The curious thing about a fit of hysterics is that you know it is absurd, and laugh at it inwardly, and howl at the same time. In our nervous age we are the slaves of our nerves; they are our masters and do what they like with us. Civilization has done us a bad turn there…"

Laevsky talked, and it was disagreeable to him that von Koren listened seriously and attentively and looked at him attentively, without blinking, as though he were studying him; and he was vexed with himself that, for all his dislike of von Koren, he could not get the ingratiating smile off his face.

"Though I must admit," he went on, "there were more immediate causes for the attack, and quite substantial ones. My health has been badly shaken lately. Add to that boredom, being perpetually without money… the absence of people and of common interests. My position is worse than a governor's."

"Yes, your position is hopeless," said von Koren.

These calm, cold words, which held in them either mockery or an unasked-for prophecy, offended Laevsky. He remembered the zoologist's look of yesterday, full of mockery and disgust, was silent a little, and asked, no longer smiling:

"And how do you come to know my position?"

"You were speaking of it yourself just now, and besides, your friends take such a warm interest in you that one hears of nothing but you all day long."

"What friends? Samoylenko, I suppose?"

"Yes, he among them."

"I would ask Alexandr Davidych, and my friends generally, to concern themselves rather less about me."

"Here comes Samoylenko; ask him to concern himself rather less about you."

"I do not understand your tone…" muttered Laevsky; he was seized by a feeling as though he had only this moment understood that the zoologist hated him, despised him and was jeering at him, and that the zoologist was his bitterest and most implacable enemy. "Keep that tone for somebody else," he said quietly, having no strength to speak loudly for the hatred that was already crowding his chest and his throat, as the desire to laugh had crowded it yesterday.

Samoylenko came in without his coat, sweating and purple from the stuffiness of the kitchen.

"Ah, you here?" he said. "Good day, my dear fellow. Have you dined? Don't stand on ceremony — say it out: have you dined?"

"Alexandr Davidych," said Laevsky, getting up, "if I came to you with a private request of some kind, that did not mean that I released you from the obligation to be discreet and to respect other people's secrets."

"What's this?" said Samoylenko, taken aback.

"If you have no money," Laevsky went on, raising his voice and shifting from foot to foot in his agitation, "then don't give me any, refuse me; but why go ringing it from every back street that my position is hopeless and the rest of it? I cannot endure these benefactions and friendly services where a kopeck's worth is done and a rouble's worth talked about! You may boast of your good deeds as much as you please, but nobody gave you the right to lay my secrets bare!"

"What secrets?" asked Samoylenko, bewildered and beginning to grow angry. "If you have come to abuse me, then go away. Come back later!"

He remembered the rule that when you are angry with your neighbour you should begin counting to a hundred in your head and you will grow calm; and he began counting rapidly.

"I must ask you not to concern yourself about me!" Laevsky went on. "Kindly pay me no attention. And whose business is it what I am and how I live? Yes, I want to go away! Yes, I run into debt, I drink, I live with another man's wife, I have hysterics, I am commonplace, I am not so profound as certain people — but whose business is that? Respect the individual!"

"You must excuse me, old man," said Samoylenko, having counted to thirty-five, "but—"

"Respect the individual!" Laevsky cut him off. "This perpetual talk at other people's expense, the oh-ing and ah-ing, the perpetual tracking, the eavesdropping, these friendly sympathies… to the devil with them! They lend me money and offer me terms as though I were a schoolboy! I am treated like the devil knows what! I want nothing!" cried Laevsky, swaying with agitation and afraid that the hysterics might come on him again. (So I shall not be leaving on Saturday, flashed through his mind.) "I want nothing! I only ask, if you please, to be relieved of this guardianship. I am not a schoolboy and I am not out of my mind, and I ask that this surveillance be taken off me!"

The deacon came in and, seeing Laevsky pale, waving his arms and addressing his strange speech to the portrait of Prince Vorontsov, stopped by the door as though rooted to the spot.

"These perpetual peerings into my soul," Laevsky went on, "are an insult to my human dignity, and I ask these volunteer detectives to have done with their spying! Enough!"

"What did you— what did you say, sir?" asked Samoylenko, having counted to a hundred, turning purple and coming up to Laevsky.

"Enough!" repeated Laevsky, gasping for breath and taking up his cap.

"I am a Russian physician, a nobleman and a councillor of state!" said Samoylenko, spacing out his words. "I have never been a spy, and I will allow no man to insult me!" he shouted in a cracked voice, laying the stress on the last word. "Silence!"

The deacon, who had never seen the doctor so majestic, so puffed up, so purple and so terrible, clapped his hand over his mouth, ran out into the hall and there doubled up with laughter. As through a fog Laevsky saw von Koren get up and, putting his hands in his trouser pockets, stand in an attitude of waiting to see what would come next; and this calm attitude struck Laevsky as insolent and insulting in the highest degree.

"Be so good as to take your words back!" shouted Samoylenko.

Laevsky, who no longer remembered what words he had said, answered:

"Leave me in peace! I want nothing! I want only that you and these German Yid upstarts should leave me in peace! Otherwise I shall take measures! I shall fight!"

"Now it is clear," said von Koren, coming out from behind the table. "Mr Laevsky wishes to divert himself with a duel before his departure. I can give him that satisfaction. Mr Laevsky, I accept your challenge."

"Challenge?" said Laevsky quietly, going up to the zoologist and looking with hatred at his swarthy forehead and curly hair. "Challenge? By all means! I hate you! I hate you!"

"Delighted. Early tomorrow morning, out by Kerbalay's, with all the details to your taste. And now get out."

"I hate you!" said Laevsky quietly, breathing hard. "I have hated you a long time! A duel! Yes!"

"Take him away, Alexandr Davidych, or I shall go," said von Koren. "He will bite me."

Von Koren's calm tone cooled the doctor; he somehow came to himself all at once, recovered his senses, took Laevsky round the waist with both hands and, drawing him away from the zoologist, muttered in a caressing voice that shook with feeling:

"My friends… my good, kind friends… You have lost your tempers and that will do… that will do… My friends…"

Hearing that soft, friendly voice, Laevsky felt that something unheard-of and monstrous had just happened in his life, as though he had come within an inch of being crushed by a train; he was very near weeping, waved his hand and ran out of the room.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written, decision by decision. Frozen with the draft; the commit is the freeze. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Evaluative sentences carry internal-judgment-only and are marked.

The address system, which is what this passage is made of

D1 — the shape of the problem. The span runs three address relations at once and the whole scene is built out of the difference between them. Von Koren and Laevsky are on вы throughout (¶658–673) — enemies, formally polite. Samoylenko and Laevsky are on ты (¶675–679, ¶682) — old friends. Then Laevsky goes to вы with Samoylenko at ¶681 and never comes back, and Samoylenko follows him at ¶686, in the middle of a sentence: «Что ты… что вы сказали?» English has one second-person pronoun. Every one of these moves is unavailable in the target language as a pronoun move, and they are not decoration: the quarrel is the change of address.

D2 — the strategy chosen, stated before the local decisions. I did not try to render the pronoun switch as a pronoun switch (there is nothing to switch to), and I did not use thou: on this project thou has been shown to import a period and a scripture register rather than an intimacy (framework/v0.1 §4 on Oxenford's Kleist; the archaism costs more than the relation is worth here). What I did instead was put the relation on two carriers English does own:

1. Vocatives. Samoylenko's intimate address nouns — голубчик → "my dear fellow" (¶675), братец → "old man" (¶682) — are kept, and then allowed to vanish. From ¶686 on Samoylenko addresses Laevsky by no name and no endearment at all, which is what the Russian does too. Laevsky drops "Alexandr Davidych" after ¶676 for the same reason. The disappearance of the vocative is the English trajectory.
2. Politeness formulae raising the register of the request. Laevsky's Прошу вас обо мне не заботиться! is written "I must ask you not to concern yourself about me!" and the following imperative gets "Kindly pay me no attention"; Samoylenko's Извольте взять ваши слова назад! is "Be so good as to take your words back!". These are stiffenings that a reader can hear against the plain imperatives of the ты stretch ("go away", "come back later", "don't stand on ceremony").

D3 — ¶686, the crux, and the one place where I added a word. «Что ты… что вы сказали?» is a man beginning a sentence to a friend and finishing it to a stranger. The self-correction is the whole event. Options live at the moment of writing:

• (a) "What… what did you say?" — keeps the broken-off structure, loses the correction entirely; the English reads as a man too angry to finish a sentence, which is a different thing.
• (b) "What did you say, Ivan Andreitch?" — carries it by name, replacing the intimate address with the formal one. Attractive, and the text's own repertoire supports it (Achmianov calls him Иван Андреич at ¶708). But it replaces a break with a smooth sentence, and the break is half the effect.
• (c) "What did you— what did you say, sir?" — chosen. The dash keeps the self-interruption; "sir" is the correction. It is an addition: there is no vocative in the Russian.
• (d) "What did you— what did you say, Mr Laevsky?" — the same move with von Koren's later Г. Лаевский (¶693). Rejected because "Mr Laevsky" from Samoylenko sounds like a third party announcing him rather than a friend freezing over.

What (c) gives up, recorded plainly: one word of English is not in the source, and "sir" carries a class colouring — an army doctor saying "sir" to a younger civil servant is not exactly what a Russian вы does. I could not find a nil-addition option that keeps both the break and the correction. internal-judgment-only: I think (c) is the best of the four; I am not the party who gets to say so.

D4 — ¶681, the other switch, deliberately given no marker of its own. Laevsky's move to вы is carried only by the register lift of D2.2 and by the loss of "Alexandr Davidych". No word was added. The consequence is that Laevsky's switch is fainter in the English than Samoylenko's, where the Russian has them at about equal strength; I took that unevenness rather than add a second vocative.

D5 — the structural echo at ¶671 / ¶681, preserved deliberately. Laevsky says to von Koren «Я попросил бы Александра Давидыча… поменьше обо мне заботиться» and then, minutes later, says it to Samoylenko's face: «Прошу вас обо мне не заботиться!» The same verb, once about the man and once at him. English keeps the verb in both — "I would ask Alexandr Davidych… to concern themselves rather less about me" / "I must ask you not to concern yourself about me" — so the second lands as a repetition. This constrained D2.2: the stiffening had to sit in the framing ("I must ask"), not in the verb, because the verb was spoken for.

Other decisions

D6 — the colour chain. багровый occurs three times and tracks Samoylenko's rage: ¶674 (purple from the kitchen), ¶686 (багровея, turning purple), ¶689 (багровым, purple and terrible). One English word across all three — "purple" — even where "flushed" or "crimson" would sit better locally, because the recurrence is doing work.

D7 — благовестить (¶678). Literally to ring the bells for good news; a church verb used of gossip. "Go ringing it from every back street" keeps the bell and the streets and loses the liturgical specificity. Alternative considered: "why proclaim it from every back street", which loses the bell. Chose the bell.

D8 — когда делают на копейку, а говорят на рубль (¶678). "Where a kopeck's worth is done and a rouble's worth talked about." Kept the coins rather than converting to English money; the passage is already full of untranslated Russian furniture (Prince Vorontsov, Kerbalay, statsky sovetnik), so one more piece is not a foreign body.

D9 — статский советник (¶688). "A councillor of state." A rank in the Table of Ranks, not an office; "civil councillor" is the commoner English but reads as a job. Samoylenko is reciting a rank, so the rank-sounding version was chosen. Русский врач → "a Russian physician" rather than "doctor", to keep the formality of the recital; "doctor" is used everywhere else in the narration.

D10 — Замолчать! (¶688). A bare infinitive used as a barked command — army usage, and the joke of the sentence is that Samoylenko has stopped talking like a friend and started talking like a regiment. "Silence!" carries the bark; the infinitive's grammatical oddity is gone. Alternative: "Be silent!", which is stiffer but reads as biblical rather than military.

D11 — немецкие выходцы из жидов (¶692). An antisemitic slur, spoken by a character in a rage, about von Koren. Rendered plainly — "these German Yid upstarts" — rather than softened or glossed. Выходцы is "people who came out of", with a social sneer in it that "upstarts" carries; the slur itself is left as a slur. The alternative was "Germans of Jewish extraction", which is what the phrase denotes and not at all what it does. Recorded because it is a decision, not an accident.

D12 — мальчишка twice (¶683). "As though I were a schoolboy" / "I am not a schoolboy." Kept the same English noun for both, which forced "old man" rather than "my boy" at ¶682 for братец, so that Samoylenko's endearment and Laevsky's grievance would not collide on the same word.

D13 — ¶662's paragraph. The copy-text runs Laevsky's interior sentence and his spoken reply together in one paragraph. Kept as printed, with the interior thought in italics, rather than split.

D14 — Положение хуже губернаторского (¶664). A set phrase — "a position worse than a governor's" — whose joke is that a governor's position is proverbially enviable. Rendered flat and literally; the idiom dies. Alternative considered and rejected: an English set phrase ("a fine pickle"), which would have removed the governor and with him the provincial-Russian scale of Laevsky's self-pity. And Да, ваше положение безвыходно four lines later repeats положение, which an idiom would have broken.

D15 — what I could not do. Nothing in the English distinguishes the вы Laevsky uses to von Koren (cold, correct, between enemies) from the вы he turns on Samoylenko (a friendship being withdrawn). In the Russian they are the same form doing two opposite things, and the scene depends on the reader feeling that the second one costs something. I have no device for it and did not try to invent one.

Contamination

tools/dependence_check.py, run after this artifact was first committed (freeze commit recorded below), against the only free published English rendering of «Дуэль» reachable, Constance Garnett's The Duel (Project Gutenberg #223, 1916), chapter XV, and against the project's own prior renderings (note (bhb) — none exist for this work).

The longest run, 18 contiguous tokens: "and so at first I thought you had St Vitus's dance. Laevsky smiled ingratiatingly and thought: How indelicate…" — a proper noun with function words on either side of it, spanning a paragraph break.

What this is and is not. 19 of the 23 twelve-grams carry a proper name, and no fifteen-gram survives name exclusion at all; the residue is four name-free twelve-grams. This is the shape the recall floor predicts for a close rendering of dialogue-heavy prose whose attributions are all Laevsky, Samoylenko, von Koren, Alexandr Davidych — notes (bez), (bgf), (bgi): on constrained material a close rendering produces long runs whoever writes it, and this project has measured a published pair at run 17 on such material.

But the figure is uncalibrated and is reported as such (CLAUDE.md: where no comparator is reachable, say so on the artifact). Garnett 1916 is the only free published English of «Дуэль» this project could reach, so there is no second published hand to price 23 / 18 against on this passage, and run length alone is a poor proxy — that premise has failed three times.

What it governs. The declaration goes to suspected. The lead writes no arm of E-20260808h-trajectory; that was fixed in the design before this was measured, and the design excludes ¶660–700 from the experiment's site pool entirely, so no hand ever renders this passage. Where §7 of the result page sets this rendering beside Garnett's at the two switch points, it is labelled as a non-independent third reading and nothing is predicted on it.

Note (bhb) check: the project has no prior rendering of «Дуэль». Run before the translation, not after it — workshop/translations/ carries no duel directory and a repository grep for the characters' names returned nothing outside «Толстый и тонкий».