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

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

Source. workshop/experiments/E-20260801b-census-author/runs/kowalski_pl_B.txt, 366 Polish words; passage B runs from "Ale dłużej trochę pobyć tu potrzeba…" to the end of the opening paragraph. The R06 draft required by R04 §Procedure 2a before the revision begins.

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

This is the MOMENT arm. The option census was written as this draft was written, at each locus, before the sentence was finished. It is filed separately at workshop/experiments/E-20260801b-census-author/census_moment.json and frozen with the R04 revision, whose options are the union of what was weighed across both passes — the same convention E-20260731e used.

But one needs to stay here a little longer, one needs to live through at least one winter, to understand what drives those crowds to the river bank. It is not the magnificent spectacle that draws them. These are people who in the struggle with a long-drawn cold and inhuman frosts have already exhausted their strength, who with longing and impatience have waited this long while for the blessed warmth; they run here now to see the final triumph of the sun, the final annihilation of the intolerable cold. And a heartfelt joy, a childlike joy, shines on the yellow Yakut faces; the wide mouths, laughing good-naturedly, look wider still; the little black eyes glow like coals. The whole crowd reels with joy as if drunk: "Glory be to God, glory be to God!" people shout to one another, and turning towards the huge mountains of ice being broken up by the force of the friendly element, they revel, they drink their fill of the defeat of the implacable enemy, who now, pressed by the raging waves, crumbles, is crushed, and perishes.

After the moving and the passing of the ice on the Lena, the ground thaws quickly, and although it thaws to a bare two feet, nature makes hurried use of the three months' warmth; in a relatively very short time everything here unfolds and comes into flower. The great valley in which Yakutsk lies looks enchanting then: fertile, here and there already under the plough, covered by turns with birch groves, with a multitude of lakes, thickets and lush meadows, it presents itself, from the steep and fairly high hills that ring it, as an enormous park threaded with the silver ribbon of the broad Lena. And the valley's natural beauty, its inborn charms, are heightened still further by the gloomy taiga that surrounds it on every side: amid vast tracts of wild and inaccessible country, this valley is like an oasis flung down in the middle of a desert. The Yakut people too — in every respect the more capable of the many Siberian peoples — know how to value the gifts of the life-giving sun, and take them in with a full chest; let out of their cramped and stinking winter yurts, they fill their harsh land with a movement and a life that beats at double the pulse and throbs loudly and strongly. After the general festival, the spring ysyakh, the holiday mood of the people does not slacken at all. The grass grows as if on yeast, cows and mares give more and more milk, and the ambrosia of the Yakut gods, the "strength-giving kumys", does not run dry in the "chorons".

And so I think that both the sight of the beautiful valley and the seeing at every step of people enjoying the delights of summer worked on me excitingly; and having lived to see my first spring in Yakutsk, I too made use of its gifts with my whole being: every day, going out beyond the town, I revelled in the beauties of the quickened natural world; every day I gave myself a sun-bath.