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

T-jutrenje-R06-v1 — Laza Lazarević, «Први пут с оцем на јутрење» (1879), two sections

Source. Laza Lazarević (1851–1891), «Први пут с оцем на јутрење» ("The First Time at Matins with My Father"), first published 1879. Copy-text: Serbian Wikisource, page Први пут с оцем на јутрење, fetched 2026-08-11 via the MediaWiki API and stored verbatim as workshop/translations/jutrenje/source-sections.txt. Public domain (author died 1891).

The project's twentieth source language and its first South Slavic one. Serbian appeared once anywhere in this repository before today.

Regime. R06 (lead single pass, source-only, no revision), v1.0. Translated from the Serbian alone. No English rendering of this work was read, and none is reachable — see Contamination.

Scope. Two sections, not the whole story: §I = paragraphs 0–8 (the frame and the father's portrait) and §II = paragraphs 78–99 (the night of the card game, through the mother's prayer). 1,519 Serbian words → 1,948 English words (the bracketed bridge, 126 words, is not counted). The story entire runs to 5,269 Serbian words; the untranslated middle is summarised in a bracketed bridge below, which is not translation and is marked as such.

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

Evaluation pointers. E-20260811h-domestication-channel / RS-20260811h-domestication-channel (ARM-realia-channel step 2). The lead does not judge this translation (charter §5). Six windows drawn from it supply six of the eight passages in that experiment; the three renderings recorded per site in the log below are the experiment's three arms.

I

"I was nine years old then," he says. "I don't remember all of it very exactly. I'll tell you as much as I've kept. My sister, who is older than I am, knows about it too; my younger brother nothing at all. I've not gone soft in the head, to go telling him!

My mother told me a great deal of it when I was grown and began asking. My father, of course — never a syllable.

He dressed Turkish-fashion, my father did, as one would expect. I can see him now, putting it on: a džemadan of red velvet with several tiers of gold braid; over that a ćurče of green broadcloth. A silah worked with gold, and thrust into it a ramrod with an ivory grip, and a little knife with silver mounts and an ivory grip. Over the silah a tranbolos, and its fringes beating against his left side. Čakšire with silk cording and tasselled trim, and the wide legs coming down over the middle of a calf in a white stocking and a flat shoe. On his head he would set a tunos and tip it a little to the left; in his hands an ebony čibuk with an amber mouthpiece; and tucked under his belt on the right, embroidered with gold and glass beads, his tobacco pouch. A proper dandy!

As for his temper — he is my father, true enough, but having begun I may as well not fumble about it — as for his temper, it was a strange one. Grave past all bearing, and nothing out of him but orders; and what he said once he had said, and if you didn't do it — run where you can! Short with everyone, and always to have his own way; that is, nobody so much as dared put a thing to him the other way about. When he lost his temper in earnest he swore hallelujah. He struck only with the flat of his hand, and only once, but, brother, when he laid on you were flat out that same instant. He was quick to anger: he would darken, bite his lower lip, twist his right moustache and turn it up, his brows would meet over his forehead, and those black eyes would flash. Lord! Let somebody come to him then and say I hadn't known my lessons! I don't know what it was I was so afraid of — after all, suppose he did box my ear the once, what of it? But those eyes: when he rolled them at you, like a stone out of a sling, then you, not knowing why or wherefore, shook like a switch.

He never laughed — not the way other people do. Once, I know, he had my little brother on his knee. He had given him his watch to play with, and my Đokica set about it and kept pushing the watch into my father's mouth and howling with all his might because he would not open it. My sister and I nearly died of laughing, and something of it got to my father too, so that two or three times he drew the left side of his mouth out a little, and the skin gathered at his left eye. That was a great rarity, and that is how he laughed at things over which somebody else would have split his jaws loud enough to be heard in Tetreb's tavern.

And I know, too, when my uncle died — the one my father was in partnership with and was very fond of. My aunt, my mother, the connections, we children: crying, wailing, keening, the whole house shrieking with us; and my father nothing, not so much as a tear, not so much as an "oh". Only when they carried him out of the house my father's lower lip began to go, trembling, trembling; and he leaned against the door, white as a rag, and said nothing.

What he had said he would not go back on, not to save his head — and no matter that he repented of it inwardly. I know when he turned Proka out of his service. I could see he repented it and was sorry, but give way he would not. Of all the shop-boys he had liked that Proka best. Only once did he strike him: for not turning the tap properly on the small cask when he was drawing rakija, so that near a whole caskful of it ran out. Otherwise never so much as a flick! He trusted him with everything, sent him round the villages after money owed and whatever else. — And do you know what he turned him out for? For nothing on God's earth! He caught him pitching coins. — Well, you may wonder at that later on.

This was at Đurđevdan. Proka came into the shop to have his book signed over again. My father took out ninety groš and said: "There — there's your wages. I have no further use for you; go and look for somewhere they pitch coins." Proka pulled his fes down over his eyes and cried like rain and begged. It touched my father, I saw it plainly; but do you suppose he gave way? God forbid! He only took out one dukat more and gave him that: "There — and now be off with you." Proka went; and my father repented inwardly that he had driven out, for nothing on God's earth, the best boy he had.

He never joked; not with us children, not with our mother, not with anybody. He lived strangely with my mother. It is not that you could say he was — God forbid — like some men are, wanting to make her presents and the rest of it; but somehow: always cold, always short with her, worse than with a stranger, and there it is. And she, poor soul, good, brother, as a saint, would gaze at him the way an ostrich gazes at its egg. If he snapped at her she would nearly die of crying, and had to hide her tears from us as well as from him. He never went anywhere with her, nor did she dare mention that he might take her anywhere. He would not have her meddle in the trade or in his business. She said to him once:

[Bridge — not translation. Paragraphs 9–77 of the source, summarised. The mother's mild question about the rakija is answered with "the money is in your hands"; the father takes to cards. His watch goes, then comes back with a chain he did not have; the black lamb-skin cap that only the treasurer owns appears on his head; a bundle of banknotes is thrown on the table and the mother takes it up with two fingers, "this is the devil's". The black horse is led away. The mother begs him to leave off; he tells her that if she says one word more about it he will do something to himself. The trade is abandoned, the shop-boy sent away, and his partners begin coming to the house.]

II

They all came one evening. There came with them besides a certain P. Zelembać, some pig-dealer who, they said, "did business with Pest". His moustaches waxed to points, his hair parted at the back, and his side-whiskers grown down to the cheekbones. Fat in the face, podgy in the body; a little hat tilted on his head, and a gold chain across his waistcoat — the very same as the one my father had. On his hand some ring or other, and it glittered, brother, so that you couldn't look into it. He waddled as he walked; he spoke big and hoarse, and all the while smiled with those small eyes, green as poison, so that a kind of fear took you, as at an owl.

They came, I say. Stojan straight to the hearth, and roast the coffee.

They lit four candles. The tobacco smoke came up as out of a chimney. They drink their coffee, silent as Turks; only the card slides, and you hear a dukat ring.

That was a terrible night.

We had shut ourselves into the other room with our mother. She was not crying any more. Nor was my sister. Drained in the face, their eyes sunk and staring in a frightful fright. Against this, the time my uncle died was nothing.

Several times our father came into our room. He was all over sweat. He had pulled his džemadan open and unbuttoned his shirt, and you could see the thick black hair on his chest. He had gone black as a Turk.

"Give me more!" he says to my mother.

She set her heart. Silent as a stone, she opens the chest and pours a handful into his hand, and he ties it up in a cloth.

He looks wild, and away to one side, and shifts from foot to foot the way I do when my friends are waiting outside and I am standing there while my sister cuts me some bread. He takes the money with his head turned away, and as he goes out he mutters as if to himself: "Only this once more!" And then he simply runs from the room. But "this once more" — he came into our room, I think, five times, and that at about three in the morning.

"Give!" he says to my mother; and he had gone the colour of earth in the face.

My mother went to the chest, her legs giving under her, swaying all the way. And then I saw, from under the quilt, how that great father of mine shuddered and caught hold of the stove.

"Quicker!" he says to my mother, shifting from foot to foot and wiping the sweat with his sleeve.

My mother held it out to him.

"Give it all!" he said.

"The last ten dukats!" she said. But it was no longer a voice, nor a whisper, but something like a death-rattle.

He snatched up the money and fairly ran out of the room.

My mother sank down beside the chest and fainted. My sister screamed. I jumped out of bed. Đokica jumped too. We sat down on the floor beside her and kissed her hand: "Mamma, mamma!"

She put her hand on my head and whispered something. Then she sprang up, lit a taper and set the lamp burning before St George.

"Come, children, pray to God to deliver us from ruin!" she said. Her voice rings like a bell, and her eyes shine like the evening star in the sky.

We ran to her under the icon and all knelt down, and Đokica knelt in front of our mother, turned his face to her, crosses himself and, poor orphan thing, reads aloud that half of the Our Father he had learnt so far. Then he crosses himself again and kisses our mother's hand, and looks up at her again. Two streams of tears run from her eyes. They were fixed on the saint and on heaven. Up there was something that she saw; up there her God, whom she was looking at and who was looking at her. And then a kind of blessedness and a kind of light spread over her face, and it seemed to me that God had stroked her with his hand, and that the saint smiled, and that the dragon under his lance gaped. Afterwards my eyes were dazzled, and I fell face down on the hem of her dress and on her left hand, with which she held me up, and prayed for the hundredth time: "God, thou seest my mother! God, I pray thee for my father!" And then, and I do not know why: "God, kill that Zelembać!"

We prayed like that a long time.

Afterwards my mother got up, climbed on a chair and kissed St George. My sister did the same, and then she lifted me and Đokica up, and we kissed him too. Then my mother took the dry sprig of basil that stood behind the icon, and the little bottle of Epiphany water that hung beneath it, wetted the basil with the water and, whispering something, crossed the room with it. Then she softly opened the door, came on tiptoe to the great room, and crossed its door with the sprig.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-11, before E-20260811h-domestication-channel existed. Written as the draft was written, per R06 §Procedure 3. Decisions and alternatives; not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

D1 — the frame is a spoken voice, and the whole register follows from it

The story is a man telling a story aloud: «вели» ("he says") in the first sentence, present tense sliding into past all through, «брате» ("brother") as filler, direct address to a listener. I fixed on a spoken English early and did not vary from it — contractions, dashes, "and there it is", "well, you may wonder at that later on". The cost is that Lazarević's written Serbian is more composed than the voice it imitates, and my English is not; I let the speech win, and the loss is real. internal-judgment-only.

D2 — бабо vs отац, and I could not keep it

The narrator alternates between «отац» (father) and «бабо» — the child's word, a Turkism, warmer and more local. English has father / dad / my old man, none of which sits in a nineteenth- century Serbian shopkeeper's mouth without either sentimentality or the wrong class. I rendered both as my father throughout and lost the alternation entirely. The one place where it costs most is ¶88, where «онај мој велики отац» stands against the бабо of the surrounding paragraphs; I have "that great father of mine" and the contrast it was leaning on is gone.

D3 — the dress paragraph, and the decision this whole session turns on

Paragraph 2 is thirteen culture-bound nouns in a hundred words: an Ottoman-Serbian merchant's costume, item by item. Three roads were open at every one of them, and I took the first:

1. carry the Serbian word over (džemadan, čakšire, čibuk) — the reader does not know what the thing is, but knows there is a thing they do not know;
2. substitute the nearest English article (waistcoat, breeches, pipe) — the reader sees a garment and does not see that it is foreign;
3. generalise (a short jacket, wide trousers, a long-stemmed pipe) — the reader sees a garment, and sees nothing else.

I took (1) here because the paragraph's whole work is that the father is dressed Turkish-fashion — the sentence says so — and a waistcoat cannot do that work. Elsewhere I did not take (1): the money in §II is dukats but the wages are groš and the coin-game is "pitching coins" and not krajcara, which is inconsistent, and I have left the inconsistency because R06 forbids the return pass. What is written below is the record of the roads not taken, which R06 §2 requires and which the study limb then puts to independent readers.

D4 — «играти крајцара» and the one site I knew about in advance

«Играти крајцара» is pitching coins at a mark — the coin is the krajcar, the Austrian kreuzer. The English game is pitch-and-toss, and pitch-and-toss was played with halfpennies. This is the exact shape of the word that generated the question the study limb asks (RS-20260811b §4: Garnett's Turgenev peasants gamble with halfpennies, and three readers pointed at that word and said British). I wrote "pitching coins" — road (3) — and I wrote it knowing that road (2) would have given me pitch-and-toss. Declared here because the choice was not innocent of the experiment: I knew this site was coming. It is the only one of the forty-one I can say that about.

D5 — Ђурђевдан is a date, a saint's day, and a labour contract at once

Servants in this world were hired and dismissed at St George's Day; that is why Proka comes to have his book signed over again o Đurđevdne. English has the identical institution under a different saint — Michaelmas, Lady Day, the term-day, the hiring fair. Carrying Đurđevdan over keeps the saint and loses the institution; writing Michaelmas keeps the institution and moves the story to England. I kept Đurđevdan and let the institution go, and a reader who does not know the custom will read the paragraph as being about a quarrel rather than about the end of a contract year.

D6 — St George is in this story twice, and one of them is England's

The icon the mother lights the lamp before is свети Ђорђе, and the hiring day is his day. St George is also the patron of England. Nothing in the translation can be done about that, and I have done nothing about it; it is recorded because it is a constant that could tilt any measurement of where this English seems to come from.

D7 — «Нано, нано!»

«Нана» is a dialectal, childish word for mother. Mamma is what I have, and it is a class up and a country over. Mam, mammy, nan were all live; each of them places the children in a specific English region, which is worse than placing them a class up.

D8 — small losses, itemised

• «псује алилуј» — literally "he swore hallelujah", an idiom for swearing violently. I kept the literal because it is strange in Serbian too. Alternative: "he swore blue murder".
• «пиљи у њега као ноје у јаје» — "gazes at him as an ostrich at its egg", a proverb for anxious devotion. Kept literal; a reader will take it as the narrator's own oddity, which is roughly right.
• «шишкав» (of Zelembać) — plump in a soft, unpleasant way. Podgy is close and English.
• «испијене у лицу … гледају страховито уплашено» — I have "staring in a frightful fright", which keeps the source's own repetition of the root. internal-judgment-only.
• «свитац» is a rush or waxed-thread taper for lighting the icon lamp; taper keeps the object and loses that it is the icon-lamp's own lighter.
• The bridge paragraph is summary, not translation, and is marked so in the text.

D9 — the three-way site table (the alternatives R06 §2 requires)

Forty-three culture-bound sites across the two sections. For each: the rendering in the text above (base), and the two roads not taken — TRANSFER (the source word carried over), DOMESTICATE (the nearest article, office, coin, measure or institution of the English domestic world), NEUTRALISE (a location-free English phrase). policy records which of the three the base text matches.

brit is the column that matters, and it is written here rather than invented later. A domesticating substitution is not automatically a nationally marked one. STRONG = the domesticating rendering names a specifically British thing (a sovereign, a firkin, Michaelmas, pitch-and-toss, indentures, a counterpane); WEAK = it is an English-domestic word with no particular nation in it (a pelisse, a bandolier, silver chapes); — = the site has no distinct domesticating option at all and is therefore held constant in every arm. The counts are frozen here because a study limb that scored its own sites for Britishness after seeing the answers would be worthless.

The DOMESTICATE column is a hypothetical throughout — I did not write those renderings into the translation and would not. It is recorded because a translator who did write them would be doing something ordinary, and because the study limb needs the road not taken to be written down before it can ask anybody about it. Any tally over this table is computed by workshop/experiments/E-20260811h-domestication-channel/analysis/parse_log.py, which parses this section, per workshop/translations/README.md.

Held constant in every rendering, and excluded from the table: all proper names of people and places (Đokica, Proka, Stojan, Zelembać, Tetreb, Pest, St George), the icon, the Our Father, the dragon and the lance, and every reference to Turks and Turkish-fashion. Nothing in any arm moves the story out of Serbia; that is the point of excluding them. The exclusion is the difference from E-20260811b, whose spans included St Petersburg, Yakov, the great Lena and Yamashiro-Ya, so that its MUTE arm could be read as relocating the story rather than generalising its furniture.

D10 — what the table says about my own practice, before anyone counts it

Reading down the policy column while writing it: I took the transferring road at the dress and at the money, the neutralising road at the household objects, and the domesticating road twice without noticing — broadcloth for čoha and Epiphany water for bogojavljenska vodica are English things standing in for Serbian ones, and I wrote them without registering that I had made a choice. The sites where I was aware of choosing are not the sites where I domesticated. That is a claim about one translator on one afternoon and is internal-judgment-only; it is written down before the count, so that the count can contradict it.

Two further things I am predicting before any reader sees any of this, so that they can fail:

• Q1 — the domesticating arm will be picked as "more British" over the neutralising arm at a rate well above chance, and the transferring arm will not, even though the transferring arm is every bit as conspicuously foreign. This is the halfpennies observation of RS-20260811b §4 turned into a prediction.
• Q2 — the effect will track the STRONG count and not the total site count: W3 (six) and W2 (five) will move, W6 (one) will not.

Contamination

none, and NOT MEASURED — no comparator is reachable. The standing rule (CLAUDE.md, "Contamination: measure before choosing") requires tools/dependence_check.py against a published rendering of the same source before the material is used. No English translation of «Први пут с оцем на јутрење» could be found: Project Gutenberg returns nothing for Lazarević or for Serbian stories; an Internet Archive advanced-search returns no edition; a web search returns no full text. There is therefore nothing to measure against, and this declaration is an assertion, not a measurement — recorded as such per the standing rule's last clause.

Why the design does not turn on it. E-20260811h is a within-passage manipulation: the three arms of every window differ only inside the declared sites and are otherwise the same English. Anything recalled from any source is present in all three arms equally and cannot produce a difference between them. This is RS-20260811b §9.7's reasoning, and it is the reason the unmeasurable declaration is tolerable here and would not be in a design that compared this translation against a published hand.