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

T-dva-generala-R04-v1 — Салтыков-Щедрин, «Повесть о том, как один мужик двух генералов прокормил» (1869), complete

Source. М. Е. Салтыков-Щедрин, «Повесть о том, как один мужик двух генералов прокормил», 1869. source-ru.txt, from ru.wikisource (PD-old-70), retrieved 2026-07-29. 2,059 Russian words, the complete tale. Regime R04 (single pass, then one self-revision, both from the source alone). Version 1.

Contamination: none, measured. Selection gate on unit A before the rest was drafted (CLAUDE.md's standing rule, note (bcd)): longest common run with Seltzer 1917 of 8 tokens, 0 twelve-grams. Whole-work figure below. The 8-token run is "dream I had last night Your Excellency said" — and it falls on census site S02, which is the first thing this translation has to say about its own study limb: the one place the two translators converge for eight tokens is the one place English offers a single calque.

Two priming exceptions, declared, because both were incurred by the lead and neither was necessary:

1. The Gutenberg anthology's table of contents was read while locating the comparator, so the lead has seen Seltzer's title, "How a Muzhik Fed Two Officials". The choice of "muzhik" over "peasant" in this translation is therefore not independent and is not offered as evidence of anything. (It is also, separately, the choice this translator would defend: see D02.)
2. One clause of Seltzer's body was printed by the slice-boundary check that extracted the story from the anthology: "five kopeks. Now, Muzhik, rejoice." That is the tale's last clause, and it falls on census site S31. Nothing else of Seltzer has been read, then or since. Declared against S31 in the log.

A third exception belongs on the record even though it is about a work not translated here. Andreyev's «Баргамот и Гараська» was the first candidate for this limb and was rejected: checking whether the stored Lowe comparator ran to the end of the story printed its final lines, which are exactly the address-form hinge that made the story attractive. Method note (bdn) — a comparator's tail, printed during material triage, primes the site the triage was for.

The translation

The Tale of How One Muzhik Fed Two Generals

Once upon a time there were two generals, and as both were feather-brained, before long — at the pike's bidding, at my own desiring — they found themselves on a desert island.

The generals had served all their lives in some registry or other; there they had been born, there brought up, and there grown old, and consequently they understood nothing whatever. They did not even know any words, except: "Pray accept the assurance of my most perfect esteem and devotion."

The registry was abolished as superfluous and the generals were turned loose. Left off the establishment, they settled in Petersburg, in Podyacheskaya Street, in separate lodgings; each had his own cook and drew his pension. Only all at once they found themselves on a desert island, woke, and saw: the two of them lying under one blanket. Naturally they understood nothing at first, and began to talk as though nothing whatever had happened to them.

"A strange dream I had last night, Your Excellency," said one general. "I dreamed I was living on a desert island…"

He said it — and all at once up he sprang! And up sprang the other general too.

"Lord! What is this! Where are we!" they both cried out in voices not their own.

And they began feeling each other over, to make sure that this business had really befallen them awake and not in a dream. But however hard they tried to persuade themselves that the whole thing was no more than a dream, they had to be convinced of the sad reality.

On one side of them the sea stretched away; on the other lay a small patch of land, and beyond it stretched the same boundless sea. The generals fell to weeping for the first time since the registry had been shut.

They began to examine each other, and saw that they were in their nightshirts, and that each had an order hanging round his neck.

"A nice drop of coffee would go down well just now!" said one general — and then remembered the unheard-of thing that had befallen him, and wept a second time.

"But what are we to do?" he went on through his tears. "Supposing we was to draw up a report now — what good would come of it?"

"I'll tell you what," answered the other general. "Do you go east, Your Excellency, and I shall go west, and towards evening we shall meet again at this spot; perhaps we shall find something."

They set about finding where east was and where west. They remembered how their chief had once said: "If you wish to find the east, stand with your eyes to the north, and you will have what you seek in your right hand." They set about finding the north, stood this way and that, tried every quarter of the compass, but as they had served all their lives in a registry they found nothing.

"I'll tell you what, Your Excellency: do you go to the right and I to the left; that will answer better!" said the general who, besides the registry, had also served in a school for soldiers' sons as a master of penmanship, and was consequently the cleverer of the two.

No sooner said than done. One general went to the right, and saw — trees growing, and on the trees fruit of every kind. The general wanted to get down at least one apple, but they all hung so high that one would have to climb for them. He tried to climb — nothing came of it, he only tore his shirt. The general came to a brook, and saw: fish there, swarming and swarming as in the fish-tanks on the Fontanka.

"If only a bit of fish like that could be had in Podyacheskaya!" thought the general, and his very face changed with appetite.

The general went into the wood — and there hazel-grouse were whistling, blackcock were displaying, hares were running about.

"Lord! The food of it! The food of it!" said the general, feeling that he was beginning to turn sick.

There was nothing for it; he had to go back to the appointed place empty-handed. He arrived, and the other general was already waiting.

"Well then, Your Excellency — did you come by anything?"

"Why, I found an old number of the Moscow Gazette, and nothing besides!"

The generals lay down to sleep again, but sleep would not come on empty stomachs. Now they were troubled by the thought of who would be drawing their pensions for them; now there came back to them the fruit they had seen in the day, the fish, the hazel-grouse, the blackcock, the hares.

"Who could have supposed, Your Excellency, that human food in its original state flies, and swims, and grows on trees?" said one general.

"Yes," answered the other general. "I confess that until now I too had supposed that rolls are born in the very form in which they are handed to one with the morning coffee!"

"So that if, for instance, a man wants to eat a partridge, he must first catch it, kill it, pluck it, roast it… Only how is all that to be done?"

"How is all that to be done?" the other general repeated, like an echo.

They fell silent and tried to get to sleep; but hunger drove sleep decisively off. Hazel-grouse, turkeys, sucking-pigs kept flickering before their eyes, juicy, lightly browned, with cucumbers and pickles and other salad.

"I believe I could eat my own boot at this moment!" said one general.

"Gloves are good too, when they have been long worn!" sighed the other general.

All at once the two generals looked at each other: an ominous fire glowed in their eyes, their teeth chattered, a dull growling came from their chests. They began slowly crawling towards each other, and in the twinkling of an eye they were at each other's throats. Shreds flew, there was a screeching and a groaning; the general who had been a master of penmanship bit off his colleague's order and swallowed it on the spot. But the sight of flowing blood seemed to bring them to their senses.

"The power of the Cross be with us!" they both said at once. "Why, at this rate we shall eat each other! And how did we come here! Who is the villain that has played us such a trick!"

"We must divert ourselves with some conversation or other, Your Excellency, or there will be murder done here!" said one general.

"Pray begin!" answered the other general.

"How, for instance, do you suppose it is that the sun first rises and afterwards sets, and not the other way about?"

"You are a strange man, Your Excellency: but surely you too first get up, and go to the department, and write there, and afterwards lie down to sleep?"

"But why not admit the reverse order: first I lie down to sleep, I see various dreams, and afterwards I get up?"

"H'm… yes… For my part, I confess, all the while I served in the department I always thought like this: 'Now it is morning, and then it will be day, and then supper will be served — and it is time for bed!'"

But the mention of supper cast them both into dejection and cut the conversation short at its very beginning.

"I heard from a certain doctor that a man can live a long while on his own juices," one general began again.

"How so?"

"Why, thus, sir. One's own juices, it seems, produce other juices; these in their turn produce further juices, and so on, until at last the juices give out altogether…"

"And then what?"

"And then one must take some food or other…"

"Faugh!"

In short, whatever the generals began to talk about, it came round every time to the recollection of food, and this irritated the appetite still further. They resolved to stop talking, and, remembering the number of the Moscow Gazette that had been found, fell greedily to reading it.

"'Yesterday,'" read one general in an agitated voice, "'a state dinner was given by the honoured chief of our ancient capital. The table was laid for a hundred persons with astonishing luxury. The gifts of every land had appointed themselves a rendezvous, as it were, at this enchanted feast. Here was the "golden sterlet of the Sheksna," and the nursling of Caucasian forests — the pheasant — and, so rare in our north in the month of February, the wild strawberry…'"

"Faugh, Lord! Can you really find no other subject, Your Excellency?" cried the other general in desperation, and taking the paper from his colleague, read out the following:

"'From Tula they write: yesterday, on the occasion of the catching of a sturgeon in the river Upa (an event such as even the oldest inhabitants cannot recall, the more so as the sturgeon was identified as the district police officer B.), there was a festival at the club here. The hero of the occasion was borne in on an enormous wooden dish, garnished about with little cucumbers and holding a sprig of greenery in his jaws. Doctor P., who was steward on duty that same day, watched solicitously to see that every guest received his piece. The sauces were of the greatest variety and almost capricious…'"

"Excuse me, Your Excellency — you seem to be none too careful in your own choice of reading!" the first general interrupted, and taking the paper in his turn, read out:

"'From Vyatka they write: one of the oldest inhabitants here has invented the following original method of preparing fish soup: take a live burbot and flog it beforehand; and when, from mortification, its liver has enlarged…'"

The generals hung their heads. Everything they turned their eyes upon — everything bore witness to food. Their own thoughts plotted against them, for however they tried to drive off the images of beefsteaks, those images forced their way through by main violence.

And all at once inspiration dawned upon the general who had been the master of penmanship…

"I say, Your Excellency," he said joyfully, "what if we were to find a muzhik?"

"That is — how do you mean… a muzhik?"

"Why, yes, an ordinary muzhik… the sort of muzhik there generally is! He would hand us our rolls this minute, and catch us hazel-grouse, and fish!"

"H'm… a muzhik… but where is one to get him, this muzhik, when there is not one?"

"What do you mean, there is not one — there are muzhiks everywhere, one has only to look for him! He is certain to have hidden somewhere, shirking his work!"

This thought so heartened the generals that they leapt up as though shaken awake and set off to hunt for a muzhik.

Long they wandered about the island without any success, but at last the sharp smell of chaff-bread and sour sheepskin put them on the scent. Under a tree, belly upward, his fist under his head, slept a most enormous great muzhik, evading his work in the most barefaced manner. There was no limit to the generals' indignation.

"Asleep, you lie-abed!" they flew at him. "I dare say you don't so much as turn an ear, when here are two generals dying of hunger these two days! Now then — quick march, to work!"

The great muzhik got up: he saw that the generals were severe. He would have taken to his heels, but they had gone quite rigid, fastened on to him.

And he set about it before their eyes.

First of all he climbed a tree and picked the generals ten of the ripest apples apiece, and took one sour one for himself. Then he grubbed in the earth — and got potatoes out of it; then he took two pieces of wood, rubbed them one against the other — and drew out fire. Then out of his own hair he made a snare and caught a hazel-grouse. Finally he made up the fire and baked so much provision of every kind that it even entered the generals' heads: "Ought we not to give the parasite a morsel too?"

The generals watched these muzhik exertions, and their hearts played merrily within them. They had already forgotten that yesterday they had nearly died of hunger, and thought: "See how good it is to be generals — one comes to no harm anywhere!"

"Are you satisfied, gentlemen generals?" the lie-abed muzhik asked meanwhile.

"Satisfied, my good fellow; we see your zeal!" answered the generals.

"Might I be permitted to rest now?"

"Rest away, my lad — only twist us a bit of cord first."

The muzhik gathered wild hemp there and then, soaked it in water, beat it, worked it — and by evening the rope was ready. With this rope the generals tied the muzhik to a tree, so that he should not run off, and lay down to sleep themselves.

A day passed, and another; the muzhik grew so dexterous that he took to boiling soup in the hollow of his hand. Our generals grew merry, and soft, and well-fed, and white. They began saying that here they lived at no cost to themselves, while in Petersburg meanwhile their pensions kept a-piling up and a-piling up.

"And what do you think, Your Excellency — was there really a confusion of tongues at Babel, or is it only so, a mere allegory?" one general would say to the other, after breakfasting.

"I think, Your Excellency, that there really was, because otherwise how is one to explain that there are different languages in the world!"

"So there was a Flood, too?"

"There was a Flood too, because otherwise how should one explain the existence of antediluvian beasts? The more so as the Moscow Gazette relates…"

"And shall we not read the Moscow Gazette a little?"

They would hunt out the number, settle themselves in the shade, read it from cover to cover — how they had eaten in Moscow, eaten in Tula, eaten in Penza, eaten in Ryazan — and nothing, no sickness at all!

Be it long or be it short, the generals grew bored. More and more often they took to remembering the cooks they had left behind in Petersburg, and even wept a little on the quiet.

"What can be going on in Podyacheskaya now, Your Excellency?" one general would ask the other.

"Don't speak of it, Your Excellency! My whole heart has ached itself out!" answered the other general.

"Good it is here, good — there's no denying it! but all the same, you know, it's somehow awkward for a ram without his ewe! and one grudges the uniform too!"

"Grudges it, indeed! Especially a fourth-class one — only look at the embroidery and your head goes round!"

And they began to nag at the muzhik: fetch us, fetch us to Podyacheskaya! And what do you think! It turned out that the muzhik knew Podyacheskaya too, that he had been there, and drunk mead and beer, and it ran down his whiskers but never got into his mouth!

"Why, we are Podyacheskaya generals ourselves!" the generals rejoiced.

"And I — if ever you saw a man hanging outside a house, in a cradle on a rope, daubing the wall with paint, or walking about the roof like a fly — that same man is me!" answered the muzhik.

And the muzhik fell to casting about how he might gratify his generals for having favoured him, parasite that he was, and not disdained his muzhik's labour! And he built a ship — not a ship exactly, but such a vessel as would carry them across the ocean-sea right up to Podyacheskaya itself.

"Mind you don't drown us, though, you rascal!" said the generals, seeing the skiff rocking on the waves.

"Set your minds at rest, gentlemen generals; it is not the first time!" answered the muzhik, and began making ready to start.

The muzhik gathered soft swan's down and lined the bottom of the little boat with it. Having lined it, he laid the generals on the bottom, crossed himself, and pushed off. How much fright the generals took in on the way, from the storms and the various winds, how much they abused the great muzhik for his parasitism — that is neither to be described with a pen nor told in a tale. And the muzhik rows and rows, and feeds the generals on herrings.

And here at last is Mother Neva, and here the glorious Catherine Canal, and here the Great Podyacheskaya! The cooks threw up their hands to see what well-fed, white and merry generals they had got! The generals drank their fill of coffee, ate their fill of rich rolls, and put on their uniforms. They drove to the treasury, and how much money they raked in there — that is neither to be told in a tale nor described with a pen!

They did not forget the muzhik, however; they sent out to him a glass of vodka and a five-copeck piece in silver: make merry, muzhik!

Erratum E1 — the word counts, corrected 2026-07-29 in the session that published them

The stored source-ru.txt contained 111 literal   entities, residue of the wiki markup that the cleanup pass missed because it normalised the character U+00A0 and not the string. Each one glued an em-dash to the following word, so a whitespace-token count under-counted by 111 and the first figure published for this translation, "2,061 Russian words", was computed on a dirty file.

Corrected, and the correction is small because two errors cancelled: the entities are stripped; the body is 2,172 whitespace tokens, of which 2,059 contain a letter or digit and 113 are bare punctuation. The English is 2,876 whitespace tokens, 2,844 containing a letter or digit. The figure this artifact and every page citing it now carries is 2,059 → 2,844, on the letter-containing basis, which is the only basis on which the two languages are comparable at all.

Nothing else moves. Every contamination figure was computed on the English against the English by a tokeniser that keeps only [a-z]+, so the 8-token unit-A run, the 11-token whole-work run and both zero twelve-gram counts are unaffected, and the independent verifier recomputes them from the stored texts. The one place the old figure survives on purpose is critic/prompt.md, which is a dispatched prompt and is evidence of what was sent; editing it would falsify the record.

How it was caught: by the standing rule that a journal's quotations are machine-checked against the artifacts before the session lands (note (j)). Two of nine quotations failed, both Russian, and chasing them found the entities. The check was there for a different reason and found this one.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-07-29, before any evaluation of this translation was designed and before the independent device classification was dispatched. Decisions and alternatives. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only; the lead does not judge its own translation (charter §5).

The governing problem, stated before the decisions

English has one second-person pronoun. The tale has three address relations and every one of them is carried, in the Russian, partly by the pronoun. The whole of the satire is in the asymmetry: two men who address each other as «ваше превосходительство» address the man who feeds them as «лежебок», and are answered as «господа генералы». If the asymmetry goes, the tale is a comic anecdote about two fools; if it stays, it is what Saltykov wrote.

What was decided in advance, and what was not. The census (census.json) was frozen before a word of English was written, and it fixes where the sites are. No device was chosen in advance for any site. The classification of what device each site ended up using was done after the translation was frozen, by a model that has not seen this log — the lead's own classification is recorded separately and is not the primary.

Decisions

D01 — «генерал» kept as "general", not "official" or "Excellency". They are civil generals: they served in a «регистратура» and one taught penmanship. English "general" imports the army, which is exactly the incongruity Saltykov wants — men with orders round their necks who cannot find north. "Official" would remove the joke to make the sociology legible. Kept.

D02 — «мужик» kept as "muzhik". "Peasant" is a status; "muzhik" is a status and a term of address, and half the sites in the census turn on that. English has had the word since the nineteenth century. This decision is contaminated — the anthology's table of contents was read while locating the comparator, and it uses "Muzhik" — and is recorded as contaminated whatever its merits.

D03 — the folktale frame is kept foreign where it is formulaic. «по щучьему велению, по моему хотению» → "at the pike's bidding, at my own desiring"; «Долго ли, коротко ли» → "Be it long or be it short"; «ни пером описать, ни в сказке сказать» → "neither to be described with a pen nor told in a tale"; «мед-пиво пил, по усам текло, в рот не попало» → "drunk mead and beer, and it ran down his whiskers but never got into his mouth". These are load-bearing: the tale is a сказка, and its cruelty depends on being told in a nursery voice. Domesticating them to "once upon a time" throughout would have cost the frame.

D04 — «школа военных кантонистов» → "a school for soldiers' sons". A cantonist was the conscripted son of a soldier. "School for cantonists" is opaque without a note; the gloss is inside the phrase. Loss recorded: the compulsion is gone. Alternative considered and rejected: keeping "cantonists" and adding a footnote — the tale has no apparatus and acquiring one would change its register.

D05 — «четвертого класса» → "a fourth-class one". Fourth class in the Table of Ranks is where a civil servant becomes a "general". Left unglossed: the generals are boasting about embroidery, and a reader who does not know the Table still gets that a number is being worn.

D06 — «шекснинска стерлядь золотая» kept in quotation marks. It is Derzhavin, quoted by the newspaper. The quotation marks are the whole signal that the provincial paper is being grand; the reader who does not know Derzhavin still sees a paper quoting poetry about fish.

D07 — the generals' one substandard slip is kept and localised. «ежели теперича» → "Supposing we was to draw up a report now". The Russian is markedly non-standard and it is the only place the veneer cracks. Rendered with one subject-verb disagreement and nothing else, so that it reads as a slip rather than as a dialect. Alternative rejected: making the generals consistently demotic, which would have made them a different kind of fool.

D08 — «ихние» → "kept a-piling up and a-piling up". Substandard possessive in narration — free indirect, the narrator briefly speaking the generals' Petersburg. There is no substandard English possessive to reach for; the folk-verbal prefix carries the register shift instead, at a different point in the sentence. A displacement, and recorded as one.

D09 — «так-с» → "Why, thus, sir." The «-с» particle is the fossil of «сударь» and marks deference in a man who has no one to defer to. English "sir" tacked onto a clause is the nearest live equivalent. This site is NOT in the frozen census — see the census defects below.

The address sites — what each turn was given, and what it cost

G→G. «ваше превосходительство» → "Your Excellency", kept at every one of its fourteen occurrences, because its frequency is the joke: two men alone on an island, starving, keeping up the vocative. Two turns got more than the vocative:

• S03, S04 — «подите вы, ваше превосходительство» → "Do you go east, Your Excellency". The emphatic do you is an English polite-imperative that survives in period prose and marks a deference that a bare "go east" would not.
• S05 — this is the one G→G site where the Russian's grammar slips. «Ваше превосходительство» is neuter and takes «промыслило»; the general says «промыслил», masculine, agreeing with the man rather than with the title. English has the same fissure in a different place: strict usage is "has Your Excellency come by anything?", third person. Rendered "Well then, Your Excellency — did you come by anything?" — vocative kept, agreement dropped to the second person. The same slip, relocated from morphology to person.
• S08 — «Начинайте!» → "Pray begin!" The Russian marks politeness in the verb ending; the English has to put a word there, and pray is the period's word.

G→M. No pronoun is available, so the load moved to vocative, to the shape of the command, and to what is left out:

• S20 «лежебок» → "you lie-abed"; S26 «каналья» → "you rascal"; S23 «любезный друг» → "my good fellow"; S24 «дружок» → "my lad".
• Bare imperatives with no softener at all, throughout: "Now then — quick march, to work!", "Rest away, my lad — only twist us a bit of cord first.", "Mind you don't drown us." The generals never once say "please", "would you", or "might I", and this was a standing rule of the translation from the first G→M turn onward.
• S23 «видим твое усердие» → "we see your zeal" — the possessive твоё is gone and nothing replaces it. What replaces the marking is the vocative beside it.

M→G. The muzhik's deference had to be made out of syntax, since his pronoun is gone too:

• S28 «Не позволите ли теперь отдохнуть?» → "Might I be permitted to rest now?" Passive, modal, no agent. This is the sharpest of the three: the Russian marks deference with two syllables of verb ending; the English needs a whole clause shape.
• S27, S30 «господа генералы» → "gentlemen generals". Slightly odd English on purpose — a doubled honorific is what an unlettered man reaching upward produces.
• S29 «коли видели» → "if ever you saw". The pronoun marking is simply lost here and nothing was put in its place; what carries the class is the folk syntax of the whole turn ("that same man is me"). Recorded as a loss rather than argued away.

Census defects found by translating — the S054 shape again, and it is the second session running

The frozen census is wrong in two directions and translating found both.

1. Two sites are missing. «Если хочешь сыскать восток…» — the remembered maxim of their chief, a 2sg addressed downward to subordinates — and «Да так-с», the deferential particle at D09. Both are address-marking, both were in the source when the census was frozen, and neither was entered.
2. One entered site is not an address at all. S01, the chancery formula, is addressed to nobody: it is a written valediction the generals have memorised. It was entered as a site because it carries a 2pl imperative. It is left in, unrenumbered, and reported as a misclassification, because a census that is quietly corrected after the fact is not frozen.

This is note (bcl) firing from the inside for the second consecutive session — S054's census merged two Old English verbs and the translator then fell into the gap. Here the census missed two live sites and included one dead one, and the miss was found only because the translation had to render them anyway. The consequence for Part B is arithmetic and is not softened: the device counts are over 31 entered sites, of which one is not a site, and two real sites are outside the denominator.

What was lost, and it is not a small list

• The pronoun itself, everywhere. Every device above is a substitute, and every substitute puts the marking somewhere the Russian does not put it — in a vocative, in a clause shape, in an omission. (internal-judgment-only: the asymmetry seems to me to survive; whether it does is not mine to say, and an independent reader was asked instead.)
• The -с particle's whole social history, reduced to one "sir".
• «мужичина», the augmentative — "a most enormous great muzhik" the first time, plain "muzhik" thereafter, because English cannot keep an augmentative running.
• The conscription inside «кантонист» (D04).
• «тунеядец» — rendered "parasite", which is right in register but is a twentieth-century Soviet word in English ears, and Saltykov's is not.

Freeze

Frozen at the commit that adds this file, before the independent device classification was dispatched and before any figure from Part B existed. The whole-work contamination measurement is in contamination/.