Repository path: workshop/translations/kowalski/R04-v1/passageA.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-kowalski-R04-v1-A — Szymański, «Stolarz Kowalski», opening, passage A

Source. Adam Szymański, «Stolarz Kowalski» (written April 1886; Gebethner i Wolff, Warsaw, 1911), Polish Wikisource; cleaned copy at workshop/experiments/E-20260801b-census-author/runs/kowalski_pl_A.txt. 393 Polish words → 520 English. Passage A runs from the opening through "…grają na słońcu cudownymi blaski." Polish, the project's thirteenth source language, translated for the second time — chosen for comparability with the S073 Reymont loci this session's study limb re-codes, not for breadth.

Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source only, draft then self-revision. The draft is T-kowalski-R06-v1-A, frozen in commit af9c8dd before this revision began (R04 §Procedure 2a).

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

Target register, declared in advance in commit 1bc4b41 (workshop/experiments/E-20260801b-census-author/register.md): unmarked modern literary English, British dialect, no period marking.

Contamination: none, measured. See §Contamination below.

This is the ONDEMAND arm and its translator's log is a RECONSTRUCTION — deliberately. mode-rule.md §1: passage A was translated with no census, no marked locus, and no note of any alternative written down at any point. The ## Translator's log below was written afterwards, from the frozen source and the frozen English side by side, and it is the object under measurement, not a record of what happened at the moment of choosing. The usual guarantee that a log is contemporaneous does not hold here and is not claimed. Passage B (T-kowalski-R04-v1-B) is the same translator on the adjacent passage with the log written as it went.

Evaluation. None. No quality judgment about this translation is made or elicited by anyone in E-20260801b; the experiment consumes its option census and nothing else.

Chance introduced me to him; or, to put the thing more exactly, that chance could only have come about thanks to the Yakutsk spring — that spring of which you, honoured readers, have most likely a very inexact notion. From the middle of April the sun over Yakutsk already warms to some purpose, and in May, vanishing below the horizon for a bare few hours, it positively scorches; but until the great Lena works herself free of her winter irons, until the snows lying in the virgin taiga have melted, there is no spring here yet. Snows unwarmed by the inner heat of a ground frozen several hundred feet deep, ice a fathom thick, fight stubbornly against the power of the life-giving rays, and only after long and unflagging labour does the sun call into life both the innermost parts of the remote taiga and the queen of the waters hereabouts, Granny Lena, as the Yakuts call her.

In the last days of May, towards the close of the struggle between the kindly warmth and the remnants of the harsh winter, a man in Yakutsk for the first time will notice a rather curious phenomenon, one probably nowhere observed in Europe: every distant, indistinctly rolling boom acts somehow strangely on the people out in the street; children and old men, women and men alike stop short at it, and turning to the east, towards the river, with their necks stretched out, listen hard at something for a moment. If the sounds die away or turn out to be false, the listeners disperse quietly; but if the first boom does not weaken, and begins to repeat itself, and swells, and grows, filling the air with a thunder as of cannon-fire or of far-off storms, seconded by an underground rumble like the roar of an approaching tempest, then these people, so composed a moment before, come extraordinarily alive: joyful shouts — "the ice is breaking, the river has started! do you hear?" — ring out on every side, and noisily, hurriedly, the whole lot of them scatter in different directions to carry the longed-for news as fast as may be to those left behind in the houses. But at the houses of acquaintances too, and even of people barely known to him, every such man, running for all he is worth to his own people, will nevertheless knock as a matter of duty, flinging out everywhere the two magic words: "the Lena has started!" A moment later those words, repeated and modulated in every possible way, are sounding through the furthest houses, yurts and Yakut yards, and everyone who can walk and get out of doors dresses and races down to the river bank.

And on the bank a whole crowd is already standing, gazing in genuine rapture at one of the grandest natural spectacles this country has. Mighty floes, driven by the force of the water running in a bed seven versts across, rear up into houses, into whole mountains, break, crack, roar, and, showering down in thousands, in millions of ice-needles, play in the sun with wonderful flashes of light.

Contamination

tools/dependence_check.py, unmodified, against Else C. M. Benecke and Marie Busch, "Kowalski the Carpenter", in Selected Polish Tales (Oxford, 1921; Project Gutenberg 8378). The comparator span was located and written to workshop/experiments/E-20260801b-census-author/runs/benecke1921_kowalski.txt programmatically and has never been read by the translator at any point, before or after.

Passage A: longest shared run 6 tokens, 0 shared 7-grams, 0 shared 12-grams, 0 shared 15-grams, verdict clean — at the low end of the project's measured range, whose floor is the 0 tokens of the Ovid translation (CLAUDE.md, contamination rule) and not this. Figures are recorded in runs/contamination.json and reported in design.md §2 and on the result page. The gate ran on passage A before passage B was translated — note (bfd), which says a unit-1 gate bounds only the unit it was measured on, so B carries its own figure.

Translator's log

This log is the ONDEMAND census and it is a reconstruction. It is filed at workshop/experiments/E-20260801b-census-author/census_ondemand.json, written from the frozen source and the frozen English above, and frozen in its own commit before any item was built and before any rater was dispatched. Twenty sites, O01–O20, in source order, under mode-rule.md §§2–3.

Nothing in it is a quality claim about any rendering. options records what the translator judges it would have been prepared to write at that locus; chosen records what is in the text above.