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

T-korotenkiy-roman-R06-v1 — Vsevolod Garshin, «Очень коротенький роман» (1878), whole

Source. Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (1855–1888), «Очень коротенький роман» ("A Very Short Novel"), first published in the humorous weekly «Стрекоза» (The Dragonfly), nos. 10 and 11, March 1878, over the signature «L'homme, qui preule». Copy-text: Russian Wikisource, page Очень коротенький роман (Гаршин), the ПСС-based text, fetched 2026-08-12 via the MediaWiki API and stored verbatim as workshop/translations/korotenkiy-roman/source.txt — templates and reference markers removed, the payloads of the three {{lang}} templates kept, twenty non-breaking spaces normalised to ordinary spaces, nothing else altered. SHA-256 dc6dfd76aebd741755559c2aa55fceb9ea0d92647afca26b285360fb085d953b. Public domain (author died 1888). 32 paragraphs, 1,495 Russian words.

Regime. R06 (lead single pass, source-only, no revision), v1.0. Translated from the Russian alone, straight through, with no return pass. Where a choice was unresolved at the moment of writing, the option written is the one that stands and the alternative is recorded below.

Scope. The whole story. 1,495 Russian words → 2,013 English words (Python str.split() over the body below, paragraph numbers stripped). Correction, same day, after the freeze: the figure first written here was "1,747 English words" and was an estimate I had not counted. The prose, the log and the registered prediction are unchanged; only this arithmetic is. The mistake is left visible because a translation artifact that quietly repairs its own numbers is worth less than one that shows them being repaired.

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

Contamination: none — and the basis is an absence, not a measurement. No English rendering of this story is reachable. Project Gutenberg's Garshin holdings are the Finnish Punainen kukka and Taiteilijan lemmentarina, and the three English anthologies that carry Garshin at all — Best Russian Short Stories (PG 13437), Short Story Classics (Foreign) vol. 1, Short-Story Masterpieces vol. 4 — carry only «Сигнал» ("The Signal"); PG 13437 was fetched and searched to confirm it. tools/dependence_check.py was therefore not run: it needs two texts and there is only one. Per the standing contamination rule (CLAUDE.md), a contamination: declaration without a measurement is a placeholder that can hide either end of the measured range, and this artifact says so on its face. The story is minor Garshin — but obscurity is not protective, and this project has three measurements saying so (notes (bez), (bgi)); the honest statement is not measurable, and contamination: none is carried only because the front-matter vocabulary has no value for that.

Evaluation pointers. E-20260812-unlicensed-typography / RS-20260812-unlicensed-typography (ARM-source-beliefs step 2). The lead does not judge this translation (charter §5). What the experiment does with it is arithmetic over its punctuation, not a quality judgment; the registered prediction in §Translator's log D11 was written before any count was taken, and this file was committed before the design was written.

The translation

[1] A hard frost, cold… January is out of doors and makes itself felt by every sort of poor person, by the yard-porters, by the constables — by everyone who cannot get his nose in somewhere warm. It makes itself felt by me too, of course. Not because I could not find a warm corner for myself, but out of a fancy of my own.

[2] Indeed, why am I wandering along the empty embankment? The four-branched lamps are burning brightly, though the wind bursts into the lantern and sets the gas flame dancing. In their bright light the dark bulk of the sumptuous palazzo, and its windows especially, look gloomier still. The blizzard and the murk are reflected in the huge plate-glass panes. The wind howls, moans over the icy waste of the Neva. "Ding-dang! Ding-dang!" — comes through the whirl of it. It is the chimes of the fortress cathedral ringing, and every stroke of the dismal bell falls together with the knock of my wooden leg on the iced granite flags and with the beating of my sick heart against the walls of its cramped lodging.

[3] I must introduce myself to the reader. I am a young man with a wooden leg. Perhaps you will say that I am imitating Dickens; you remember Silas Wegg, the literary man with a wooden leg (in the novel "Our common friend")? No, I am not imitating: I really am a young man with a wooden leg. Only I became one so very lately…

[4] "Ding-dang! Ding-dang!" The chimes strike first their dismal "Lord, have mercy," and then the hour. Only one o'clock! Seven hours yet till daylight! Then this black night full of wet snow will go away and give place to a grey day. Shall I go home? I don't know; it is absolutely all one to me. I have no need of sleep.

[5] In spring, too, I liked to walk whole nights through on this embankment. Ah, what nights those were! What is better than they are? It is not the stifling night of the south, with its strange black sky and its great stars that pursue us with their gaze. Here everything is light and trim. The many-coloured sky is cold and beautiful; the "dawn all night long" that the church calendar knows about gilds the north and the east; the air is fresh and keen; the Neva rolls by, proud and bright, and splashes quietly with little waves against the stones of the embankment. And on this embankment I am standing. And on my arm a girl is leaning. And this girl…

[6] Ah, my dear ladies and gentlemen! Why have I begun telling you about my wounds? But there it is — that is the stupid, poor human heart. When it is wounded it flings itself at every passer-by and looks for relief. And does not find it. It is perfectly understandable: who wants a stocking with a hole in it that nobody has darned? Everyone tries to kick it away with his toe as far from his own foot as he can…

[7] My heart did not need darning yet when, in the spring of this year, I made the acquaintance of Masha — surely the best of all the Mashas in the world. I met her on this very embankment, which was not nearly so cold then as it is now. And I had a real leg instead of this wretched stump of wood, a real shapely leg, the same as the left one I have left. I was on the whole passably well-built and certainly did not look, as I do now, like some sort of splay-legged thing. It is an ugly word, but I am in no state to mind words now… And so I made her acquaintance. It happened very simply; I was walking. She was walking (I am no philanderer at all — that is, I was not one, because I have the wooden leg now)… I don't know, something pushed me, and I began to talk. First of all, of course, about how I was not one of those impudent fellows, and so on; then about how pure my intentions were, and so forth, and so forth. My good-natured face (which now has a thick crease just above the bridge of the nose, a very gloomy crease) reassured the girl. I saw her to Galernaya Street and right up to the house where she lived. She was coming back from her old grandmother, who lived by the Summer Garden and to whom she went every evening to read novels aloud. The poor grandmother was blind!

[8] Now the grandmother is dead. So many grandmothers who were not old have died this year. I might have died too, and very nearly did, I assure you. But I held out. Gentlemen, how much grief can a man hold out against? You don't know? Neither do I.

[9] Very well. Masha ordered me to be a hero, and so I had to go to the army.

[10] The times of the crusades are over; the knights have vanished. But if the girl you love says to you, "This ring is me!" and throws it into the flames of a fire — well, of the very biggest fire, let us say the Feigin mill (how long ago that was!) — will you not throw yourself in to get it out? — "Ah, what a strange creature he is; of course not," you answer, "of course not! I shall go to Bouddé's and buy her a new one ten times as dear." And she will say that she is no longer that ring but this one, the expensive one? I shall never believe it. But then, I am not of your persuasion, reader. Perhaps the woman you are fond of would do exactly that. You are, no doubt, the owner of several hundred shares, and perhaps even a member of "Greger and Co." You even have "The Dragonfly" sent out to you in Bucharest for your amusement. Do you remember — perhaps as a child you happened to watch a butterfly that had flown into a flame? You were amused then too. The butterfly quivered, lying on its back and waving its short scorched wings. You found it interesting; then the butterfly began to bore you, and you crushed it with your finger. The poor little creature stopped suffering. Ah, kindly reader! If only you could crush me too with your finger, so that I might stop suffering as well! She was a strange girl. When war was declared she went about for several days gloomy and silent, and there was nothing I could do to divert her.

[11] "Listen," she said to me one day, "are you an honest man?"

[12] "I may allow that," I answered.

[13] "Honest men back their words with deeds. You were for the war: you must fight."

[14] She knitted her brows and pressed my hand hard with her own small one.

[15] I looked at Masha and said to her gravely:

[16] "Yes!"

[17] "When you come back I shall be your wife," she said to me on the station platform. "Come back!"

[18] Tears were choking me; I very nearly broke down. But I was firm and found the strength to answer Masha:

[19] "Remember, Masha, honest men…"

[20] "Back their words with deeds," she finished the sentence for me.

[21] I pressed her to my heart for the last time and flung myself into the carriage.

[22] I went to fight for Masha's sake, but I did my duty by my country honestly as well. I marched briskly through Roumania in rain and dust, in heat and cold. I gnawed the "company's" rusks with self-denial. When the first encounter with the Turks came, I did not funk it: for that they gave me a cross and made me a non-commissioned officer. When the second encounter came — something banged, and I banged down on the ground. A groan, a fog… A doctor in a white apron, with bloodied hands… Sisters of mercy… My cut-off leg with the birthmark below the knee… All of it flew past me like a dream. A hospital train with the most comfortable of beds and the most elegant of lady commissioners flies along and carries me to Petersburg.

[23] When you leave a city properly, on two legs, and come back to it with one leg and a stump instead of the other — that is worth something, believe me.

[24] They put me in the hospital; that was in July. I asked to have the address of Marya Ivanovna G. looked up at the address bureau, and a good-natured soldier-porter brought it to me. Still in the same place, on Galernaya!.. I write a letter, a second, a third — and get no answer.

[25] My good reader, I have told you everything now. You did not believe me, of course. And the story is an incredible one: some sort of knight and some sort of treacherous betrayer. "The very image of an old novel!" — My shrewd reader, you were wrong not to believe me. There are knights of that kind besides me…

[26] At last they fitted me with the wooden leg, and I could find out for myself what had been the cause of Masha's silence. I drove to Galernaya in a cab, then hobbled up the long staircase. How I used to fly up it eight months ago! At last, here is the door. I ring with my heart standing still:.. Steps are heard behind the door; Avdotya, the old maidservant, opens to me, and I, without listening to her joyful cries, run (if one can run on legs of different makes) into the drawing-room, Masha!

[27] She is not alone: she is sitting with a distant relation of hers, a very good young man who was finishing his university course while I was still there and reckoned on getting a very good post. They both greeted me very tenderly (on account of the wooden leg, probably), but both were embarrassed. In a quarter of an hour I had understood everything.

[28] I did not want to stand across their happiness. The shrewd reader smiles maliciously: do you really expect me to believe all these tales? Who gives up the girl he loves to some good-for-nothing for nothing?

[29] In the first place, he is not a good-for-nothing at all, and in the second place… I might, perhaps, tell you what in the second place… but you would not understand… You would not understand, because you do not believe that in our time there is goodness and truth. You would prefer the unhappiness of three people to the unhappiness of yourself alone. You do not believe me, shrewd reader. Well, don't believe me; God be with you!

[30] The day before yesterday there was the wedding; I was the best man. I performed my duties proudly at the ceremony in the course of which the creature dearest to me on earth was giving herself to another. Masha glanced at me timidly now and then. And her husband treated me with such embarrassed attentiveness. The wedding was a merry one. We drank champagne. The German relations shouted "hoch!" and called me "der russische Held." Masha and her husband were Lutherans.

[31] "Aha, aha," yells the shrewd reader, "now you are caught, Mr Hero! What did you want with a Lutheran confession? Why, this: that in December the Orthodox are not married in church! That is the whole of it, sir. And all your tales are pure invention."

[32] Think what you like, shrewd reader. It is absolutely all one to me. But if you had walked with me these December nights along the Palace Embankment, had listened with me to the storms and the chimes and the knock of my wooden leg; if you had felt what goes on in my soul on these winter nights, you would have believed… "Ding-dang! Ding-dang!" The chimes strike four o'clock. It is time to go home, to throw myself on my lonely cold bed and go to sleep. Goodbye, reader!

Translator's log

Frozen with the draft, written as the draft was written (R06 §3–§4). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only, which the front matter also carries whole.

D1 — the title. «Очень коротенький роман». Роман is both "novel" and "love affair", and the story is a love affair told as a novel and mocked as one ("Точь-в-точь старый роман!"). English has no word carrying both. Chosen: "A Very Short Novel", because the punning target in the text is the literary sense — the shrewd reader's jeer is at a genre, not at a romance. Alternative not taken: "A Very Short Love Story", which keeps the affair and loses the jeer. The diminutive коротенький (not короткий) is a further loss: nothing in English shortens "short" affectionately.

D2 — «Стужа, холод…». Two near-synonyms in apposition, the first the sharper. Chosen: "A hard frost, cold…". Alternative: "Bitter weather, cold…". The ellipsis is the source's.

D3 — «Динг-данг!». The chimes are transliterated in Russian, and the vowels are i–a, not the English i–o of "ding-dong". Chosen: "Ding-dang!", keeping the source's vowels. Alternative not taken: "Ding-dong!", which is the English idiom and would make the bell an English bell. This is the same decision-shape as RS-20260811b's halfpennies, arrived at from the other side: the naturalising option here is the one that would place the sound in England.

D4 — «Our common friend». Garshin's narrator cites Dickens and gets the title wrong (Our Mutual Friend), in English, in the Russian text. Chosen: reproduce the error verbatim, in quotation marks, uncorrected and unglossed. Alternative not taken: silent correction, which would delete a characterising slip by a narrator who is performing his literacy. The name Сайлас Бег is corrected to Silas Wegg, because that is a transliteration of the right name and not an error.

D5 — «известная по месяцеслову "заря во всю ночь"». Месяцеслов is the Orthodox church calendar, which prints the white-nights notation. Chosen: "the 'dawn all night long' that the church calendar knows about", keeping the quoted phrase quoted. Alternative: "the white nights", which is what it means and which deletes the almanac.

D6 — the money and the names. «Буд» is Bouddé, a Petersburg jeweller; «Грегер и Ко» is the Greger–Gorwitz–Kogan partnership that held the army commissariat contracts in 1877–78 and was a byword for war profiteering; «Стрекоза» is the magazine this story was printed in. Chosen: "Bouddé's" and "Greger and Co." transferred; "Стрекоза" translated as "The Dragonfly". The split is deliberate and is an inconsistency I am choosing: the two firms are opaque either way, but the magazine's joke — you read the very paper you are holding, for amusement, in Bucharest — only lands if the name is readable. Alternative not taken: "Strekoza" throughout, consistent and mute. No footnotes: this regime does not have them.

D7 — «раскоряка». A coarse word for someone whose legs splay. The narrator flags it himself ("Дурное слово"). Chosen: "some sort of splay-legged thing", keeping the vagueness of какого-то and the noun-ness. Alternative: "a bandy-legged creature", warmer and less ugly, which would make the narrator's apology for the word unmotivated.

D8 — «Честные люди делом подтверждают свои слова». The sentence is a formula, said twice and completed antiphonally at the parting. Chosen: "Honest men back their words with deeds", fixed verbatim on both occurrences so that D20 can complete D19. Alternative: "confirm their words by deeds", closer to the Russian verb and stiffer in the mouth.

D9 — the two composite stops, «Галерной!..» and «сердца:..». The source has !.. in [24] and :.. in [26]. The second is not standard Russian punctuation either; it is a colon followed by a suspension. Chosen: reproduce both exactly — "Galernaya!.." and "standing still:.." Alternative not taken: normalise to "Galernaya!…" and "standing still…", which is what an English house style would do. I am recording this as the decision I am least sure of: it is the one place where keeping the source's typography produces a mark English typography does not have.

D10 — December and January. The narrator says it is January in [1] and December in [31]–[32], and the plot turns on December (the Orthodox fast bars church weddings). The inconsistency is Garshin's. Chosen: reproduce both, uncorrected.

D11 — a registered prediction about my own punctuation, written before any count was taken. This translation is about to be counted against its source, mark for mark, by E-20260812-unlicensed-typography. Before running that count I record what I expect to find, so that the count is a test and not a description:

I expect to have kept nearly all of the source's exclamation marks and question marks — they sit in dialogue and in direct address, where I had no reason to move them. I expect to have kept the ellipses, which I was conscious of as a device. I expect my em-dashes to be up on the source's, perhaps by a third, because English syntax reaches for a dash where Russian uses the comma-plus-participle I kept having to break. I expect my semicolons to be roughly level. Net, I predict I finish within about 10% of the source on every mark except the dash, and within 40% on the dash.

If that prediction is wrong, the wrongness is the finding, and it is internal-judgment-only in neither direction: it is arithmetic.