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

«Хирургия» — Surgery (excerpt)

Source. Anton Chekhov, «Хирургия» (Осколки, 1884, no. 32), first two-thirds — from the opening description through the mutual insult that follows the failed extraction, 746 of the story's ~993 Russian words (the remainder, a further round of taunting, is cut to fit the entry's 300–800-word band; the excerpt is a complete narrative arc: deference established, the extraction, the footing collapse). Copy-text: ru.wikisource.org's text of the story (page revision 5640216, sourced there from Chekhov's ПСС 1975, vol. 3), fetched 2026-09-04. Public domain (author d. 1904). Unused elsewhere in this project (checked against wiki/index.md and the translations tree before selection).

Regime. R04 (lead close translation, source-only, self-revised in the same session). Written for framework/v0.3/entries/HB-footing-and-address.md §5's Application — the family's fresh 300–800-word translation limb.

Contamination: suspected, declared on a search rather than a measurement. «Хирургия» is a widely anthologized early Chekhov sketch and is plausibly represented in the lead's training data in some form. This session searched for a public-domain published English rendering to run tools/dependence_check.py against (Project Gutenberg's eight Constance Garnett Chekhov volumes — 13409, 13413–13417, 13437, 13505 — checked by full-text search for "surgery", "Kuryatin", "Vonmiglasov" and transliteration variants; a web search for the story's English title and character names) and found no comparator text within the session's effort — the story does not appear to be among the widely available public-domain English Chekhov volumes. No dependence measurement was therefore possible, and suspected is a declaration, not a measurement, exactly the case workshop/translations/README.md §Contamination names for a heavily-translated author. No published English of this story was read at any point, before or after translation: the rendering below is from the Russian source alone.

The district hospital. With the doctor away — gone off to get married — patients are seen by the feldsher, Kuryatin, a stout man of about forty in a shabby tussore jacket and frayed tricot trousers. His face wears an expression of duty combined with pleasure. Between the index and middle fingers of his left hand, a cigar, giving off a stench.

Into the waiting room comes the deacon Vonmiglasov, a tall, thickset old man in a brown cassock with a broad leather belt. His right eye, filmed white, is half shut; on his nose sits a wart that from a distance looks like a large fly. For a moment the deacon's eyes search for an icon, and finding none, he crosses himself before the bottle of carbolic solution, then takes a communion loaf from a red handkerchief and, with a bow, lays it before the feldsher.

"A-a-ah — greetings to you!" yawns the feldsher. "What brings you?"

"A blessed Sunday to you, Sergei Kuzmich... To your gracious kindness I have come... Truly and rightly it is said in the Psalter, if you'll excuse me: 'My drink is mingled with tears.' I sat down the other night with the old woman to take tea, and — not a drop, not a grain, God forbid, I might as well lie down and die... The moment I swallow the least sip, I've no strength left in me! And it isn't only the tooth itself, but this whole side of my face... How it aches, how it aches! It shoots into the ear too, if you'll excuse me, as if there were a nail or some such thing lodged in it: it shoots and shoots! We have sinned and transgressed... I have defiled my soul with shameful sins and wasted my life in idleness... For our sins, Sergei Kuzmich, for our sins! Father the priest scolds me after the liturgy: 'You've grown thick-tongued, Yefim, and you mumble. When you sing, nothing can be made out.' And what kind of singing can there be, I ask you, when a man cannot open his mouth, it's all swollen, if you'll excuse me, and I haven't slept the night..."

"M-yes... Sit down. Open your mouth!"

Vonmiglasov sits and opens his mouth.

Kuryatin frowns, peers into the mouth, and among teeth yellowed by age and tobacco makes out one adorned with a gaping cavity.

"Father Deacon, bless him, gave orders that I apply vodka with horseradish — it did no good. Glikeria Anisimovna — God grant her health — gave me a thread from Mount Athos to wear on the wrist, and gave orders too that I rinse the tooth with warm milk, and I'll confess, the thread I did put on, but as for the milk, I did not keep to it: I fear God, it being a fast..."

"Superstition..." (a pause). "It must be pulled, Yefim Mikheich!"

"You know best, Sergei Kuzmich. That is what you were trained for, to understand the matter as it truly is — what wants pulling, and what wants drops or some other remedy... That is what you, our benefactors, were put here for, God grant you health, so that we might pray for you day and night, our own fathers... to the end of our lives..."

"It's nothing..." says the feldsher modestly, going to the cupboard and rummaging among the instruments. "Surgery — it's nothing. It's all a matter of habit, a steady hand... Nothing to it... Only the other day, same as you, a landowner comes to the hospital, Alexander Ivanovich Egyptsky... Also with a tooth... An educated man, asks about everything, goes into everything, how and what. Shakes your hand, calls you by your name and patronymic... Lived seven years in Petersburg, sniffed out every professor there... We were a good while over him... Begs me in Christ's name: pull it for me, Sergei Kuzmich! Well, why not pull it? It can be pulled. Only one has to understand the business, one can't go at it without knowing... Teeth are of different kinds. One you pull with forceps, another with a goat's-foot lever, a third with a key... Depends which."

The feldsher takes up the goat's-foot lever, looks at it questioningly for a moment, then sets it down and takes the forceps.

"Now then, open your mouth a little wider..." he says, approaching the deacon with the forceps. "We'll have it out in no time... just so... Nothing to it... Only cut the gum a little... make the traction along the vertical axis... and that's all..." (he cuts the gum) "...and that's all..."

"Our benefactors, that's what you are... We fools would never think of it, but God has given you the light..."

"Don't argue with your mouth open..."

"This one comes out easily; sometimes there's nothing left but the roots... This one — nothing to it..." (he fastens the forceps). "Now hold still, don't twitch... Sit without moving... In the blink of an eye..." (he pulls). "The main thing is to get a good deep grip" (he pulls) "...so the crown doesn't break off..."

"Our fathers... Holy Mother... Ahh—"

"Not that... not that... what d'you call it? Don't grab with your hands! Let go of your hands!" (he pulls). "In a moment... There, there... It's no easy business..."

"Fathers... protectors..." (he cries). "Angels! Oh-oh-oh... Pull it, then, pull it! What are you dragging it out five years for?"

"It's a business... surgery... can't be done all at once... There, there..."

Vonmiglasov draws his knees up to his elbows, his fingers twitch, his eyes bulge, his breath comes in gasps... Sweat breaks out on his crimson face, tears stand in his eyes. Kuryatin snorts, shifts from foot to foot in front of the deacon, and pulls... The most agonizing half-minute passes — and the forceps slip off the tooth. The deacon jumps up and thrusts his fingers into his mouth. He feels the tooth still in its old place.

"You pulled it, all right!" he says, in a voice both weeping and mocking. "May you get a pull like that in the next world! Much obliged to you, I'm sure! If you don't know how to pull a tooth, don't take it on! I can't see the light of God..."

"And what do you go grabbing with your hands for?" the feldsher snaps. "I'm pulling, and you go shoving my arm and saying all kinds of foolish things... Fool!"

"Fool yourself!"

Translator's log

Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence below is internal-judgment-only.

1. фельдшер — retain the loanword feldsher, against domesticating to medical assistant or promoting to doctor. Chosen: English has borrowed feldsher for exactly this Russian/German-derived rank, and either domestication would misstate his actual qualification — the whole story turns on Kuryatin being unqualified to do what he is doing.
2. Сергей Кузьмич / Ефим Михеич (name + patronymic address) — transliterate directly, against dropping the patronymic or substituting an English form of respectful address. Chosen: the alternation of this exact form against bare commands and insults later is the footing device the piece turns on (HB-footing-and-address item 1); dropping it would erase the asymmetry before the translation could show its collapse.
3. Отец диакон велели / Гликерия Анисимовна… дали (a plural verb form applied out of respect to a named third party, not the addressee) — no English device attempted; rendered as an ordinary singular past tense. Live alternatives considered and rejected: an invented "they" (too confusing, reads as more than one deacon) or an honorific circumlocution ("was so good as to order") that would add weight the sentence does not carry at that point. Consistent with the entry's S1-a: this device class does not cross in this project's evidence, and no attempt here changes that.
4. The ты/вы distinction (deacon deferential throughout, feldsher's formal imperatives turning informal at the failed extraction) — not marked by any pronoun device; no live alternative was seriously considered, since English has none. The collapse is carried entirely by a shift in diction and formality, timed to the same clause as the Russian switch (the deacon's вы turns to тебя at "Тянул!"; the feldsher's вы-imperatives turn to ты at "А ты зачем руками хватаешь?").
5. Хирургия as a spoken refrain ("Хирургия — пустяки", "Дело-то ведь… хирургия") — kept as surgery both times it recurs in the feldsher's own dialogue, preserving the irony of a man invoking the discipline's name to reassure himself while failing at it. No alternative wording was considered; the repetition is doing the work and any variation would have muted it.
6. Александр Иваныч Египетский — transliterated straightforwardly (Alexander Ivanovich Egyptsky), the comic mismatch of the surname left untouched. Glossing or footnoting it was not considered: the joke is secondary to the footing plot this excerpt exists to show, and the passage does not depend on the reader catching it.
7. Excerpt boundary — ends at "Fool yourself!" rather than continuing into a further round of taunting in the full story. Chosen to keep inside the entry's 300–800-word band while preserving a complete arc: deference established, the extraction, the footing collapse into mutual insult.

Evaluation — first blind panel scores (RS-20260907-panel-judging-2, S253)

provisional and internal-judgment-only: Tier D is EXHAUSTED, permanently (config/models.md, S250), so these scores carry no evidential weight and may not support a framework recommendation. Three non-Anthropic jurors (P1, P2, P5), blind, authorship-stripped, rating this text alone against its source on a 1-7 scale, twice each; the figure is the mean over three jurors and two passes.

Instrument floor for comparison: 0.222-0.230 scale points (this session's own retest floor, RS-20260907-panel-judging-2 §2). One of the three jurors (P2) was flagged degenerate this run (near-ceiling on 90% of its cells) — see that page §3 for what this does and does not affect. Lowest cell: 6.000. Full account, the W3-since-S099 selection criteria, and the contamination caveat on this score: RS-20260907-panel-judging-2 §5.