Repository path: workshop/translations/kowalski/R06-v1/passageA.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-kowalski-R06-v1-A — Szymański, «Stolarz Kowalski», opening, passage A: the single-pass draft

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. Passage A is the opening through "…grają na słońcu cudownymi blaski."

Regime. R06 — lead single pass. This is the frozen draft that R04 §Procedure 2a requires before the revision begins.

Contamination. Not yet measured at the time of freezing; the gate runs against Benecke & Busch 1921 on the R04 revision. No English rendering of any part of this work has been read.

Target register, declared in advance at register.md: unmarked modern literary English, British dialect, no period marking.

Nothing was written down but this. Passage A is the ONDEMAND arm of mode-rule.md §1: no census, no marked locus, no note of any alternative, until this and the R04 revision are frozen.

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, worthy readers, have most likely a very inexact notion. From the middle of April the sun over Yakutsk already begins to give a decent warmth, and in May, dropping out of sight for a bare few hours, it fairly bakes; 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 some hundreds of feet down, 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 then, and turning to the east, towards the river, with their necks stretched out, listen intently for a moment. If the sounds die away or turn out to be false, the listeners go off 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 roar like the bellow 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 of it scatters 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 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 marvellous glitterings.