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

T-les-shumit-R06-v1 — Korolenko, «Лес шумит», the opening (draft, frozen before revision)

This is the R04 v1.0 §Procedure step 2a artifact: the draft written out and committed as its own file before the self-revision began. It is an R06 output (lead single pass, no self-revision). Its pair is T-les-shumit-R04-v1.

Source. Владимир Галактионович Короленко, «Лес шумит» (Полесская легенда, 1885; first printed Русская мысль, 1886, кн. I). Russian text from ru.wikisource.org, ПСС 1914, modern-orthography edition. Public domain (Korolenko d. 1921).

Locus. The opening, paragraphs 1–5, «Лес шумел…» through «…стоит кучка молодых дубов.» — 276 Russian words. Stored at ../R04-v1/source-ru.txt.

Contamination: none, measured. This draft against the whole 9,344-word Fell 1916 The Murmuring Forest: 2 shared 7-grams, 0 twelve-grams, longest common run 8 tokens — against the R04 revision's 0 and 6 on the same comparator. On both statistics the revision sits further from the published translation than the draft does; which sites moved was not examined. Record: ../R04-v1/contamination/result-r06.json.

Cost $0; not ledgered (charter §3, A4).

The forest was murmuring…

There was always a murmur in that forest — even and long-drawn, like the echo of a distant bell, calm and dim, like a quiet song without words, like an indistinct memory of something past. There was always a murmur in it, because it was an old, dense pine-wood which the saw and the axe of the timber-dealer had not yet touched. Tall hundred-year-old pines with mighty red trunks stood in a sullen host, their green crowns closed tightly together above. Below it was quiet, and there was a smell of resin; through the covering of pine needles with which the ground was strewn, bright ferns had broken up, spreading richly in a fantastic fringe and standing motionless, without stirring a leaf. In the damp corners green grasses ran up on tall stems; white clover bent under its heavy heads, as though in a quiet languor. And above, endlessly and without a break, the forest murmur drew on, like the dim sighing of the old pine-wood.

But now these sighs were growing deeper and stronger. I was riding along a forest path, and although I could not see the sky, I could feel, from the way the forest was growing sullen, that a heavy cloud was rising quietly above it. The hour was not early. Here and there a slanting ray of the sunset still broke through between the trunks, but in the thickets a hazy dusk was already creeping out. A storm was gathering towards evening.

For today every thought of shooting had to be given up; it was all one could do to reach a night's lodging before the storm. My horse knocked his hoof against the bared roots, snorted and pricked his ears, listening to the forest echo that cracked back so resonantly. Of his own accord he quickened his pace towards the familiar forest lodge.

A dog began to bark. Between the thinning trunks daubed walls flicker into sight. A blue thread of smoke curls under the overhanging green; a lopsided hut with a shaggy roof has taken shelter beneath a wall of red trunks; it seems to be growing into the earth, while the straight and haughty pines rock their heads high above it. In the middle of the clearing, closed up tight against one another, stands a little cluster of young oaks.