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

T-hastrman-R06-v1 — Jan Neruda, «Hastrman» (1878), whole, CS→EN

• Source. Jan Neruda, «Hastrman», in Povídky malostranské (Praha: Grégr a Dattel, 1878). Public domain (Neruda d. 1891, PD old 70). Czech Wikisource transcription, fetched 2026-08-12, stored at ../source-cs-full.txt. 44 paragraphs, 1,752 Czech words — the complete story, not an excerpt.
• Language pair: Czech → English. The project's second Czech source (the first was T-ruska-R06-v1 / T-ruska-R04-v1, «O měkkém srdci paní Rusky», S139) and its second work by Neruda, from the same collection.
• Regime: R06 — lead single pass, source only, no return pass. The log was written as the translation was written.
• Cost: $0. Lead translation is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• English result: 2,297 words, 44 paragraphs to the source's 44.

Contamination — declared, and NOT measured, with the reason

contamination: suspected. No measurement was possible and that is the honest statement. Two English renderings of this story exist — Edith Pargeter's (The Tales of the Little Quarter, 1957) and Michael Henry Heim's (Prague Tales, 1993, where it is "The Water Sprite", p. 167) — and both are in copyright. Neither is freely and legitimately reachable; the only full texts surfaced by search were unauthorised uploads, which charter §7 forbids this project to consult. So tools/dependence_check.py was not run on this work, because there is no comparator to run it against, and CLAUDE.md's standing rule is followed in its explicit form: where no comparator is reachable, say so on the artifact.

What this does and does not permit. It bars any use of this translation in a design whose validity turns on independence from a published rendering. It does not bar the use this translation was made for: E-20260812e-dose compares this text against edited copies of itself, differing only inside sites declared below, so every form in that experiment shares whatever this text shares with Pargeter or Heim, and the comparison is blind to it.

Priming. No published rendering into any language was read before the freeze. The lead had translated a different Neruda story from the same collection in an earlier session and had read that translation's log; the register of that rendering is therefore not independent of this one.

The translator's log

Written as the draft was written. Frozen at this commit, before E-20260812e-dose's design existed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

The one thing the lead knew in advance, declared here rather than discovered later. ARM-dose was constituted before this translation began, so the lead knew while translating that a manipulation of culture-bound items would follow, and chose this story partly for their density. It did not know which sites would be selected, what the doses would be, or which contrasts would be run — E-20260812e-dose did not exist. The site table in §D24 is the lead's own inventory, made in the act of translating, and the seeded dose assignment that consumes it was made afterwards.

D1 — the title, and the joke the title is

Hastrman is the water-goblin of Czech folklore: a green-coated man who sits by the water, sometimes with a comb, sometimes with a pipe, and drowns people. The old man is called this by the neighbourhood children for three reasons the story gives in one breath — his green tailcoat, his cry of "the sea!", and his name, which is Rybář, "Fisherman". Only the first two survive into English. Kept as hastrman, italicised, unglossed in the body. A gloss inside the prose ("the water-goblin") would explain the children's joke and thereby destroy the fact that a child's nickname is not explained. Water sprite and nix were both live; nix is closer in folklore and much further in tone. Live alternative not taken: rendering the surname as Fisher so the name-joke lands, at the cost of Czechifying every other name in the story and not this one.

D2 — «Ďjó»

Rybář's tic. Neruda writes it as a spelling, not a word: a light whistle followed by a syllable that "had the force of assent". It is probably a worn-down ba jo / ejhle jo. Rendered "D'yo", which keeps the strangeness and refuses to translate it into an English filler. "Aye", "Just so" and "Ah yes" were all considered and all reject the point, which is that the neighbourhood cannot parse it either.

D3 — the costume paragraph, and the decision that governs the whole story

Neruda's first paragraph is an inventory of an obsolete Josephine wardrobe: cylindr, cůpek, fráček, vesta, spodky, přazky, punčochy, střevíce. Every one of these has an English domestic article standing behind it — beaver, pigtail, swallow-tail, waistcoat, smallclothes, buckles, stockings, pumps — and taking all of them would put the old man in an English print rather than a Prague street. The rule adopted and held to for the whole story: take the plain English word where the object is the same object, and refuse the English word that carries an English institution with it. So stockings and buckles yes; smallclothes and pumps no. Where the plain word does not exist, the Czech stands. §D24 records, for each of these, the three renderings that were live.

D4 — «baňatý cylindr se širokou střechou»

střecha is literally "roof" and idiomatically the brim of a hat; baňatý is "bulbous, pot-bellied". "his low but bulging top hat with its wide brim". The idiom was not preserved: an English "roof" here reads as an error, not as a figure. Lost: the rhyme with the fiakr's roof four sentences later, which in Czech is the same word twice. This is a real loss and it was seen at the time.

D5 — «cůpek»

The plaited queue of the eighteenth century, by 1878 an antique on a living head. "a little queue". Pigtail is the commoner English word and is a boy's or a sailor's; queue is the word for this object and is faintly technical. Kept the technical one.

D6 — «zelený fráček»

Double diminutive problem: frak → fráček is affectionate-belittling, and the coat is green, which is the goblin's colour. "his little green tailcoat", keeping the diminutive as an adjective because English has no other place to put it.

D7 — «šouraly se velké střevíce»

šourat se is to shuffle, and the subject is the shoes, not the man. "large shoes went shuffling along" keeps the shoes as the agent, which is the whole comedy of the sentence.

D8 — «nejstaršího fiakra»

A fiakr is a hired four-wheeler; the word is Viennese-Prague and not English. "the oldest cab in the city" — hackney and hansom were both available and both are London. The leather comes from the cab's roof; the English keeps that.

D9 — «jeho myšlénky … jdou uctivě asi krok za nim»

The best sentence in the first half and the one most at risk. Neruda's thoughts walk behind the old man, respectfully, at a step's distance, amusing him, so that he keeps glancing back at the rascals. Kept whole and literal. čtveráci — "rogues, wags" — is rendered "the rascals", which is the one word in the sentence that could have been an addition and is not: it is Neruda's.

D10 — «Hluboká cesta», «Petřín», «Hradčany», «Ostruhová ulice», «Svatomikulášské náměstí»

The Malá Strana street plan. All kept in Czech except the square, which is rendered "St. Nicholas Square" because Svatomikulášský is transparently the saint's name and the church is the one thing on the square an English reader can see. This is an inconsistency and it is deliberate: the streets are addresses, the square is a place with a building on it. The alternative — Náměstí svatého Mikuláše — was live and would have been more consistent and less legible.

D11 — «justiciár»

A seigneurial judge: the trained lawyer a landowner was obliged to keep to administer justice on the estate, an office abolished in 1848. "a retired justiciar", which is not an English word in this sense and is meant not to be. Magistrate was the tempting one and is wrong twice: it makes him crown rather than manorial, and it makes his pension ordinary. His whole pathos is that he is the survivor of an abolished world, like his queue.

D12 — «hoře Kozákově»

Mount Kozákov, the basalt hill above Turnov, the classic Bohemian source of semi-precious stones — which is why the box is full of them and why they are worth nothing. Kept. An English reader will not know it and neither will they know that the professor's verdict was predictable from the address.

D13 — «místo pískem samým natlučeným cukrem»

Scattering sand on a washed floor was ordinary; the children's fantasy is that the Šajvls use pounded sugar instead. Kept literally. Losing sand would lose the fantasy, because the extravagance is entirely in the substitution.

D14 — «maminčinu vatýrku»

vatýrka is the cotton wadding out of a quilted jacket. The student's jeer is that the old man's tobacco is quilt stuffing. "his mother's quilt stuffing" — three words for one, and the only place in the story where the English is longer than the Czech for lexical rather than syntactic reasons. Wadding alone was live and is too clinical to be an insult.

D15 — «Rosenau» / «Rousseau»

The story's second joke about value: the old man's one philosophical sentence is Rousseau's, quoted faithfully off a misprint. Both spellings kept exactly as Neruda has them. The sentence itself (Svoboda je jako ty šťavnaté potraviny a silná vína…) is Neruda's Czech of a French original and was translated from the Czech, not looked up: the point is that Rybář has it word-perfect from a bad book, and going to Rousseau's French would have smoothed a text the story wants slightly wrong.

D16 — «Frankreich»

The canons discuss France in German, inside a Czech sentence, in quotation marks. Kept as "Frankreich". Translating it to "France" deletes the fact that the clergy's politics happen in another language — which, in 1878 Prague, is the sentence's content.

D17 — «šenkýř u Dvou slunců» and the grammar note

Mr Herzl is the šenkýř (tapster, publican) at the house sign of the Two Suns. Neruda then breaks the narrative to insist that the genitive plural of slunce is, in Malá Strana, slunců. Untranslatable and not deleted. Kept as a note about the Czech word, with the Czech word left standing in it, so that the English reader sees a narrator interrupting a story to defend a case ending. What is lost: an English reader cannot hear that the "correct" form is sluncí, so they get the pedantry without the error. Live alternative: cutting the sentence. Refused — it is the purest sample of the narrator's voice in the story.

D18 — «bankrotář»

Not "bankrupt" but the man who went bankrupt, as a permanent class. Neruda's quotation marks make it a local term of art. Rendered "a bankrupt" with the quotation marks kept, which recovers most of it.

D19 — «španělka s placatým knoflíkem ze slonové kosti»

A španělka is a cane of Spanish reed. "a Spanish cane", keeping the nationality because the sentence's job is to make the stick ceremonial. Malacca cane is the English article and is the English article — a different empire's import, and an English gentleman's.

D20 — «v druhém patře»

Czech druhé patro is the third storey off the ground; English usage splits, and there is no neutral rendering. "on the second floor", taking the reading that puts the professor where a Czech reader puts him only if the reader is British. Declared here because it is a site where the translation is forced to pick a nation and cannot decline. Live alternative: "two flights up", which is neutral and is not how anyone says it.

D21 — «gymnazijní profesor», «gymnazijní sbírka»

A gymnázium master and his school's mineral cabinet. "the gymnasium professor" and "our gymnasium collection" — retained, at the cost of the false friend (English gymnasium = a hall for exercise), because grammar-school master is an English institution and high-school teacher an American one, and the joke of the scene depends on his being a man of "an education somewhat uncommon in those days", which a grammar-school master would not have been.

D22 — «Tři zlaté v dvacetnících»

Three zlatý (gulden/florin), paid in dvacetník pieces (20 kreuzer, three to the gulden). "three gulden for it, in twenty-kreuzer pieces" — the Austrian coin kept, the arithmetic left for the reader to not do. Rendering it in shillings and sixpences was live and would have moved the story to England for the sake of a sum nobody needs.

D23 — «Fi — oblázky!»

The pivot of the story. Oblázek is a pebble — specifically a water-rounded one, which is what these are. "Pah — pebbles!" Fi is a hiss of disgust; "Faugh" was live and is a period English novel's word, "Pah" a person's.

D24 — the culture-bound site table, frozen

Every item in the translation where a culture-bound decision was actually taken, with the three renderings that were live at the moment of writing: TRA carries the source word over, DOM reaches for the nearest article of the English domestic world, NEU finds a location-free English phrase. base is the string as it stands in the translation below. brit is the lead's own frozen prediction, made now, of whether the DOM rendering is a STRONG or WEAK cue that the prose is English-written; SHAM is a location-neutral-for-location-neutral substitution, matched in edit size, which is not a culture-bound decision at all.

Windows are the four spans of the translation dense enough in such decisions to be manipulated. Boundaries are given as the first and last sentence, inclusive:

Site counts by window: H1 7 · H2 9 · H3 10 · H4 7. Total 33.

Four notes on the table, written before any use of it:

1. Site 10 and site 25 have TRA = DOM. Turnov is already the Czech word and has no English domestic equivalent that is not a deletion; the second floor is already the English article and already British (D20). Both are declared so that any build which needs the three forms distinct can exclude them by rule rather than by taste.
2. Sites 12, 18, 30 and 32 have base = TRA or base = DOM. Cotton, shirtsleeves, moldavite and brim are not Czech words; the culture-bound decision at those sites is between an English-domestic phrasing and a location-free one, and the translation happens to have taken one of the two ends. Declared rather than tidied.
3. The translation is written in British spelling and the base is therefore not orthographically neutral. Any experiment on these windows must normalise spelling by one mechanical map applied identically to every form and assert that no British spelling survives — RS-20260811h's G4b. Residual British lexis in the untouched material (Mr without a point, towards) is a constant across forms, and raises the floor of any "does this read British" question for all forms equally.
4. brit is one annotator's prediction and has no second coder — the same limitation RS-20260811h §6.6 records. It is written down now, before anything is measured, which is the only property that makes it worth anything.

The translation

He always walked with his hat in his hand. However fierce the blaze, of frost or of sun, the most he would do was to hold his low but bulging top hat with its wide brim above his head like a parasol. His grey hair was combed flat to his skull and gathered behind into a little queue, pressed and bound so tight that it did not even sway — one of the very last queues in Prague; even then there were only two or three of them left here. His little green tailcoat, with its gold buttons, had only a short body, but the tails were long, and they beat against Mr Rybář's lean little figure at his scrawny calves. A white vest covered his stooping chest; black breeches went only as far as the knee, where two silver buckles shone; then came snow-white stockings as far as two more silver buckles, and beneath those large shoes went shuffling along. Whether those shoes were ever renewed I do not know, but they always looked as though the leather for them had been taken, cracked as it was, from the roof of the oldest cab in the city.

Mr Rybář's dry, pointed face was lit by a perpetual smile. He was an odd sight when he went down the street. Every twenty paces he would stop and turn to the right and to the left. It seemed as though his thoughts were not inside him, as though they walked respectfully a step or so behind him and kept entertaining him with cheerful notions, so that Mr Rybář had to smile and now and then glance back at the rascals. When he greeted anyone he merely raised the forefinger of his right hand and gave a light little whistle. That same light little whistle came whirring out whenever Mr Rybář began to speak, too, and he usually began with "D'yo", which had the force of assent.

Mr Rybář lived on Hluboká cesta, right at the bottom on the left, with a view of Petřín. But even if he were already at his own door, the moment he caught sight of foreigners turning right up towards Hradčany he would go after them. When they stopped at the wide prospect and admired the beauty of our Prague, he would stand beside them, raise his finger and whistle: "D'yo, the sea! — Why do we not live by the sea!" Then he would follow them into the Castle, and when the foreigners stood admiring the walls of St Wenceslas's chapel inlaid with Bohemian gemstones, he would whistle a second time: "I should think so! Here in Bohemia a herdboy throws a stone after his flock, and the stone is often worth more than the whole flock!" He never said any more to them than that.

For his name, for his green tailcoat and for that "the sea!", we called him the hastrman. But we held him in respect, old and young alike. Mr Rybář was a retired justiciar, from somewhere near Turnov. Here in Prague he lived with a young close relative of his, who had a minor official for a husband and by him already two or three children. The story went that Mr Rybář was fabulously rich. Not so much in money as in gemstones. In his little room, they said, there stood a tall black cabinet, and in that cabinet nothing but low square black boxes, good and large, and in each box the inside was divided by snow-white pasteboard into nothing but squares, and in each square there lay on a wad of cotton a glittering gemstone. There were people who had seen it. He had found and gathered it all himself, they said, on Mount Kozákov. We children used to tell one another that at the Šajvls' — that was what Mr Rybář's relatives were called — when the floor was washed they strewed it, instead of sand, with nothing but pounded sugar. On Saturdays, on scrubbing day, we always envied the Šajvl children horribly. Once I was sitting above the ditch to the left beyond the Bruska gate, near Mr Rybář. For there Mr Rybář would settle himself comfortably in the grass for an hour every fine day and smoke a short pipe. That time two older students happened to go past. One of them snorted and said: "He's smoking his mother's quilt stuffing!" From that day on I took the smoking of one's mother's quilt stuffing to be a luxury only very wealthy people could allow themselves.

So the "hastrman" would take his walk — but no; let us not call him that, we are not children any longer! — always only along the Bruska ramparts. If he met one of the canons, whose walks also always came this way, he would stop and exchange a few friendly words with him. Once — I did like listening to what grown people said — I heard him talking with two canons who were sitting on a bench. He stood. They were talking about "Frankreich" and about some sort of "freedom", strange talk altogether. Suddenly Mr Rybář raised his finger and whistled: "D'yo, I hold with Rosenau! Rosenau says: Freedom is like those rich foods and strong wines which nourish and fortify the strong natures that are used to them, but overpower, intoxicate and destroy the weak." And then he nodded with his hat and went on.

The taller and fat canon said afterwards: "What is it he always has about this Rosenau?" The shorter, but also fat one replied: "A writer. Most likely a writer."

But I remembered that sentence as the sum of all higher wisdom. Of Rosenau and of Mr Rybář I had an equally exalted conception. When later, as I grew up, I came to have all sorts of books in my own hands, I found that Mr Rybář had in fact quoted quite faithfully that day. With this one difference, that the sentence in question had been written not by Rosenau but by some Rousseau. Evidently a sorry accident had brought Mr Rybář together with a careless misprint.

He truly lost none of my respect for it. A good man, an immensely good man! —

It was on a sunny day in August, at about three in the afternoon. Whoever happened to be walking along Ostruhová street stopped; whoever happened to be standing outside in his shirtsleeves called something quickly into the house; people came running out of the shops. They were all watching Mr Rybář as he strode down.

"He's off somewhere to show off his riches," said Mr Herzl, the tapster at the Two Suns. I note that the genitive plural of the word slunce is, in the language of the Malá Strana, quite definitely slunců.

"Oh ho!" cried Mr Vitouš, the grocer on the corner, "things must be bad, he's taking something to sell!" I am sorry to have to say that Mr Vitouš did not enjoy any great esteem among the neighbours. The story went about him that he had once come near bankruptcy, and to this day a good Malá Strana neighbour looks at a "bankrupt" quite differently from the rest of the world.

But Mr Rybář walked calmly on, a little faster than usual. Under his left arm he carried one of those square black boxes of which so much had been said. He pressed it firmly against his body, so that the hat doffed in the hand below seemed glued to his leg. In his right hand he had a Spanish cane with a flat ivory knob, a sign that Mr Rybář was going somewhere on a visit; at no other time did he carry a stick. When he was greeted he raised the stick and whistled much more loudly than usual.

He went down Ostruhová street, crossed St. Nicholas Square and entered the Žamberecký house. There, on the second floor, lived the gymnasium professor Mr Mühlwenzel, mathematician and natural scientist. A man, that is, of an education somewhat uncommon in those days. The visit did not last long.

The professor was in a good humour. His burly, thickset body had just rested itself with an afternoon sleep. The long grey hair wreathing his bald crown bristled here and there in comfortable disorder. His blue eyes, full of wit and always kindly, shone. His cheeks, always red anyway, were burning. Those broad, good cheeks were rather badly torn about by smallpox, and gave the professor cause for a standing joke. "That's the way of the world," he would say. "When a girl laughs and has a dimple in her cheek, she's said to be pretty; when I laugh I have a hundred dimples, and I'm said to be ugly all the same."

He motioned Mr Rybář towards the sofa and asked: "Now then, how can I be of service?"

Mr Rybář set the box on the table and took off the lid. The bright little stones flashed.

"I'd — I only, what this here this — about what would this be worth —," he stammered.

Then he sat down and propped his chin on the knob of his stick. The professor gazed into the stones. Then he took out a dark one, weighed it in his hand and held it up against the light. "That is a moldavite," he said.

"A what?"

"A moldavite."

"D'yo, a moldavite," whistled Mr Rybář. It was just faintly to be seen in his face that he was hearing the word for the first time in his life.

"That one would do for our gymnasium collection; they're getting scarce. You could sell it to us."

"That's as may be. — And about what —"

"You'd get three gulden for it, in twenty-kreuzer pieces. Well?"

"Three gulden!" whistled Mr Rybář, very thinly. His chin lifted and dropped back onto the knob. "And the rest?" he whispered after a moment, out of a throat suddenly tight.

"Chalcedony, jaspers, amethysts, smoky quartz — that's nothing."

A few moments later Mr Rybář was back at the corner of Ostruhová street. He walked slowly up. For the first time the neighbours saw him with his hat on his head. The wide brim was pulled down over his forehead. The Spanish cane trailed by its tip along the ground and rattled on the paving. He noticed no one, he did not whistle once. Nor did he look back once the whole way. Evidently not one of his thoughts was romping about outside today; all his thoughts were inside him, deep down.

He did not leave the house again that day, not to the ramparts and not out beyond the Bruska. And it was such a beautiful day!

— — — — — —

It was already towards midnight. The sky was blue as at morning, the moon shone with its proudest, most enchanting brilliance, the stars quivered like white sparks. Petřín was covered with a magnificent silver mist; a silver flood lay over the whole of Prague.

The cheerful light poured into Mr Rybář's little room through both windows, flung wide open. At one window stood Mr Rybář. He stood there like a statue, rigid. From far off the weirs of the Vltava roared with a long, mighty note. Did the old man hear them?

Suddenly he started. "The sea! — why is there no sea here!" he whispered, and his lips trembled.

Perhaps a longing was surging in him like a beating sea.

"Eh!" he jerked himself round then and turned away. The open boxes were lying about the floor, and his glance touched them. Slowly he took up the nearest of them and shook the little stones out of it into his fist. "Pah — pebbles!" and he flung them out of the window.

Below there was a crack and a jangle of glass. Mr Rybář had not once remembered today that there was a greenhouse down in the garden.

"Uncle, whatever are you doing?" came a pleasant man's voice outside, evidently from the next window along. Mr Rybář involuntarily stepped back a pace.

The door creaked and Mr Šajvl came in. Perhaps the beautiful night had kept him at his window. Perhaps he had noticed an unusual restlessness in his old uncle and had heard a long-continuing rustle from his little room. Perhaps some of the old man's sighs, too, had carried loudly out of the window.

"Uncle, surely you don't mean to throw all those beautiful stones out?"

The old man gave a jerk. Then he whispered, staring fixedly towards Petřín: "They're worth nothing — pebbles —"

"I know they aren't worth much; I know that myself. But they are worth something all the same, to us and to you. You gathered them with such labour — uncle, leave them all for my children, please. They'll learn from them, you'll tell them about them —"

"Perhaps you thought," the old man whispered again, monotonously and with effort, "that I was rich, and I really —"

"Uncle," said Mr Šajvl in a voice firm and yet soft, and took the old man's hand, "are we not rich in you? My children would have no grandfather, my wife would be without a father, if we did not have you. You can see for yourself how happy we are around you; you are our blessing in this house —"

Suddenly the old man stepped right up to the window again. His mouth trembled; in his eye he felt an unspeakable pressure. He looked out. He could see nothing distinctly; everything glittered like molten diamond, everything was surging — right up to the window — right into his eye — the sea — the sea!

I shall tell no more, I cannot tell any more.