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

«Левша», chapters 6–8 — Russian → English, R06 v1

Source. Николай Семёнович Лесков, «Левша (Сказ о тульском косом Левше и о стальной блохе)», 1881. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 complete — 974 Russian words in 16 paragraphs. Text from ru.wikisource.org, Левша (Лесков)/Версия 2 (source note: Собрание сочинений в пяти томах, т. III, М., «Правда», 1981), stored at workshop/experiments/E-20260731d-sense-axes/materials/levsha_ch6-8_ru.txt. Public domain (Leskov d. 1895).

Regime. R06 — lead single pass, source only, no return pass. The log below was written decision by decision as the draft was written. Nothing was revised after the fact.

Priming. None. No English rendering of «Левша» was read, opened or searched for before this file and its log were frozen. The Gutenberg record for the PD comparator (#61172, The Steel Flea) was located by a metadata search only — title, author and id, no text — before translation, and its body was not downloaded until after the freeze commit. Note (bdn).

Contamination. suspected — measured, and the prior held rather than overturned.

The record of the order, which is the point of note (bcd). This file was committed at e2f8d96 with this block reading MEASUREMENT PENDING AT FREEZE and a prior of "none or suspected" written into it; the gate then ran, and no item set existed until after it had. The prior was recorded before the number and is not being fitted to it.

The measurement. tools/dependence_check.py, this translation (1,372 tokens) against the complete PD comparator (Project Gutenberg #61172, The Steel Flea, 13,967 tokens): 14 shared 7-grams, 0 shared 12-grams, 0 shared 15-grams, longest common run 11 tokens, tool verdict clean. The run is

not the truth itself neither the time nor the distance allowed

— eight function words and four nouns (истина, время, расстояние, дозволять) every one of which the Russian names in that order. There is no lexical choice inside it. workshop/experiments/E-20260731d-sense-axes/analysis/contamination.{txt,json}.

Why suspected and not none. On the project's scale (0 tokens Ovid → 21 Turgenev/Garnett) 11 is low, and S063 held suspected on an 11-token run with no lexical choice in it rather than clearing it. The specific reason here: only one English comparator was measurable. «Левша»'s best-known modern English rendering is in copyright and unreachable, so the gate ran against the PD one alone — and S065 measured that an obscure comparator can give the longer run (11 against non-canonical Fell, 10 against canonical Garnett), so a clean run against the reachable comparator is not evidence about the unreachable one. suspected names an unmeasured comparator, not a suspicious number.

What it bears on. Nothing in E-20260731d compares this translation with any other or judges it. The gate ran because it is a standing selection gate, and it selected.

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

Lineage. First translation of this work in the project. No prior version.

Evaluation pointers. No quality evaluation of this translation exists or is designed. Its decision sites are used as material by E-20260731d-sense-axes, which asks which sense-label describes each site — not whether any rendering is good. The lead never judges its own translation (charter §5).

Translation

Chapter six

Platov drove away out of Tula, and the gunsmiths, three men, the most skilful of them — one a cross-eyed left-hander with a birthmark on his cheek and the hair at his temples torn out during his schooling — took their leave of their fellows and of their own households and then, telling nobody anything, picked up little bags, put into them what was wanted in the way of food, and vanished out of the town.

The only thing noticed about them was that they went not towards the Moscow gate but the opposite way, in the Kiev direction, and it was thought they had gone to Kiev to bow down to the saints reposing there, or to advise there with one or another of the living holy men, who abide in Kiev always in abundance.

But this was only near the truth, and not the truth itself. Neither the time nor the distance allowed the Tula masters to walk to Kiev and back in three weeks and still manage afterwards to do the work that was to put the English nation to shame. They would have done better to walk and pray in Moscow, to which it is only "two nineties of versts", and no small number of holy saints repose there too. And in the other direction, as far as Orel, it is the same "two nineties", and past Orel to Kiev another good five hundred versts on top of that. A road like that you do not do quickly, and having done it you do not rest quickly either — your legs will be glassed over and your hands shaking a long while yet.

To some it even seemed that the masters had bragged too big in front of Platov, and then, once they had thought it over, had turned coward and had now bolted altogether, carrying away with them the Tsar's gold snuffbox, and the diamond, and the English steel flea in its case that had made them all this trouble.

However, such a supposition was likewise entirely without foundation, and unworthy of skilled men upon whom the hope of the nation now reposed.

Chapter seven

The Tula folk, clever men and knowing in the metal line, are known also as the foremost authorities in religion. Their fame in this respect fills their native country, and holy Athos as well: they are not only masters at singing with Babylons, but they know how the picture "evening bells" is painted, and if one of them dedicates himself to a greater service and goes into monasticism, such as these have the name of the best monastery stewards, and out of them come the ablest collectors. On holy Athos they know that the Tula folk are the most profitable people there is, and if it were not for them the dark corners of Russia would surely never have seen very many holinesses of the distant East, and Athos would have gone without many a useful offering out of Russian bounty and piety. Nowadays the "Athos Tula men" cart holinesses about the whole of our native land and masterfully collect collections even where there is nothing to take. Your Tula man is full of church piety and a great practitioner of that business, and so the three masters who had undertaken to back up Platov, and all Russia along with him, were making no mistake in heading not for Moscow but south. They were going not to Kiev at all but to Mtsensk, the district town of Orel province, in which there stands an ancient "stone-hewn" icon of St Nicholas, which floated here in the most ancient times down the river Zusha on a great cross of stone itself. This icon is of a "dread and most terrible" aspect — the hierarch of Myra in Lycia is shown on it "at full height", clothed all over in silver-gilt raiment, and dark of face, and in one hand he holds a church and in the other a sword — "victory in war". Now it was in this "victory" that the sense of the thing lay: St Nicholas is in a general way the patron of the trading and the soldiering business, and the "Mtsensk Nikola" in particular, and it was to him that the Tula men went to bow down. They had a service sung at the icon itself, then at the stone cross, and at last returned home "in the night season" and, telling nobody anything, set to the business in dreadful secrecy. All three of them came together in one little house, the left-hander's, locked the doors, shut the shutters at the windows, kindled a lamp before Nikola's image and began to work.

A day, two, three, they sit and go nowhere, all the while tapping away with their little hammers. They are forging something or other, and what they are forging — nothing is known.

Everyone is curious, and nobody can find anything out, because the ones working tell nothing and do not show themselves outside. All sorts of people went to the little house, knocked at the doors under all sorts of guises, to ask for fire or for salt, but the three artificers unlock for no demand whatever, and even what they live on is not known. They tried frightening them, as though a house next door were burning — would they not jump out in the fright, and would it not come out then what had been forged by them; but nothing took these cunning masters. Only once did the left-hander stick himself out as far as the shoulders and shout:

"Burn away, then, we have no time" — and he hid his plucked head again, banged the shutter to, and they set to their business.

Only through the small chinks was it to be seen how a little fire glinted inside the house, and to be heard how the thin little hammers tapped out upon the ringing anvils.

In a word, the whole business was conducted in such fearful secrecy that nothing could be found out, and moreover it went on right up to the return of the Cossack Platov from the quiet Don to the Tsar, and in all that time the masters neither saw nor spoke with anyone.

Chapter eight

Platov travelled in great haste and with ceremony: he himself sat in the carriage, and on the box two whistle Cossacks with lashes would seat themselves on either side of the driver, and so poured it on him without mercy, that he should gallop. And if any Cossack dozed off, Platov would poke him himself with his foot from the carriage, and off they would tear more furiously still. These measures of inducement acted so successfully that nowhere at any station could the horses be held, and always they overleapt a hundred bounds past the stopping place. Then the Cossack would act back upon the driver in reverse, and they would come round again to the entrance.

That is how they came rolling into Tula too — likewise flew a hundred bounds past the Moscow gate first, and then the Cossack acted upon the driver with the lash in the opposite direction, and they set about harnessing fresh horses at the porch. Platov for his part did not get out of the carriage, but only ordered a whistle Cossack to fetch him as fast as could be the craftsmen he had left the flea with.

One whistle Cossack ran off, that they should come as fast as could be and bring him the work with which they were to put the English to shame, and this whistle Cossack had run hardly any way at all before Platov is sending new ones after him one after another, to say as fast as could be.

He drove off every whistle Cossack and took to sending plain people out of the inquisitive public, and even puts his own legs out of the carriage from impatience and wants to run himself out of impatientness, and grinds his teeth so — everything is still showing itself to him too slowly.

That is how in those days everything was required very much in exactitude and in speed, so that not one minute should be lost for Russian usefulness.

Translator's log

Frozen with the draft. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. The one evaluative sentence in this log is marked; the page as a whole carries internal-judgment-only for it.

Numbering is the item numbering used by E-20260731d-sense-axes; sites the experiment did not use are numbered too, so the log is complete rather than a selection.

The standing problem of the whole passage, stated once. «Левша» is skaz: there is no author's voice, only a narrator who is a Tula townsman of no education and considerable rhetorical confidence, and every property of the text is a property of his speech. His speech is made of (i) non-standard morphology, (ii) coinages built on real Russian word-formation, (iii) Church Slavonic and chancery registers used wrongly, (iv) folk-epic formulae, and (v) scare quotes around phrases he is citing from somebody else. English can reproduce any one of these locally. It cannot reproduce all of them at every site, because English malformation reads as illiteracy far faster than Russian malformation does, and a text malformed at every site stops being readable. So I budgeted: the coinages get kept, the morphology mostly gets flattened, the quotation marks always get kept. Where I spent the budget and where I did not is most of what follows.

1. «оружейники три человека» (¶1) — noun + numeral apposition, folk order, where standard Russian would be «три оружейника». English has no equivalent order. Options: normalise ("three of the gunsmiths"); reproduce as apposition ("the gunsmiths, three men"). Took the apposition, which is odd but not ungrammatical in English.
2. «косой левша» — the title character, and at this first mention still a common noun, lowercase, inside a description. Options: "Lefty" (a name from the first mention); "the left-hander"; "the cross-eyed one". Took "a cross-eyed left-hander" and kept it lowercase throughout, because Leskov keeps it lowercase throughout. What is given up: the moment later in the story where the epithet hardens into a name has nothing in my English to harden.
3. «волосья» — non-standard plural of «волосы». Flattened to "the hair". First deliberate spend of the morphology budget in the direction of not spending it.
4. «ничего никому не сказывая» (¶1) and «ничего никому не рассказывая» (¶11) — the same double-negative formula at the two ends of the secret. Rendered identically ("telling nobody anything") both times to hold the frame, at the cost of the prefix difference.
5. «Заметили ... и думали» (¶2) — subjectless third person plural; the town as an unnamed collective observer. English requires a subject. Options: supply "people"; passive. Took the passive ("The only thing noticed about them was", "it was thought"), which keeps the agent unnamed. This is compelled specification in the direction the pair forces, and would have been a penalty-free baseline resolution either way.
6. «посоветовать» — the narrator uses the non-reflexive verb where standard Russian requires «посоветоваться». A grammatical slip, not a coinage. English has a genuine non-standard counterpart: "to advise with someone". Took it. One of the few places where the morphology budget could be spent at no cost in readability.
7. «почивающим угодникам поклониться» / «почивает немало» / «почивала надежда нации» (¶2, ¶3, ¶5) — «почивать» three times: of the saints' relics, of the saints at Moscow, and finally of the nation's hope resting on three artisans. The third use is the joke and it only works because the first two established the liturgical sense. Rendered "repose" all three times. Alternatives considered and rejected: "lie" for the relics and "rest" for the hope, which reads better and kills the thread.
8. «посрамительную для аглицкой нации работу» (¶3) — «посрамительный» is Leskov's, formed from «посрамить» on a live pattern. English has no adjective of that shape and will not tolerate one ("shameful" means something else; "shamifying" is not English). Periphrased: "the work that was to put the English nation to shame". The coinage is lost outright; the root survives, and I held it to the same phrase at its second occurrence (¶15, «англичан посрамить»).
9. «аглицкой» — the narrator's folk form of «английской», recurring throughout the story. Options: an English folk deformation ("Inglish", "Anglish"); flatten to "English". Flattened, everywhere. This is the single largest systematic loss in the passage and it was a budget decision, not an oversight: the word appears often enough that a deformation would have become the loudest thing in the text.
10. „два девяносто вёрст" (¶3) — a folk measure, in Leskov's scare quotes, meaning ninety twice over. Calqued inside its quotes: "two nineties of versts". The quotes do the work of marking it as somebody else's phrase, which is exactly their function in the Russian.
11. «вёрст» — kept as "versts", unglossed, like the Russian. Copy-opaque.
12. «Этакого пути скоро не сделаешь ... не отдохнёшь» (¶3) — generalising second person singular with no addressee. English "you" does the same job. Kept.
13. «остекливши» — non-standard gerund; legs glassed over. Kept the metaphor literally ("glassed over") rather than the idiomatic "like jelly", because the image is the narrator's own and is not a dead idiom in Russian.
14. «Иным даже думалось» (¶4) — dative impersonal: the thought happens to them. "To some it even seemed". Keeps the non-agentive.
15. «набахвалили» — colloquial perfective with the "did a quantity of" prefix. "had bragged too big". The prefix's quantitative sense is carried by "too big"; the register is approximately held.
16. «и ... и ... и» (¶4, the snuffbox, the diamond, the flea) — polysyndeton. Kept all three "and"s against English's preference for a serial comma.
17. «Туляки» (¶6) — demonym with no English form. Options: transliterate ("Tulyaks"); periphrase ("the Tula folk", "the men of Tula"). Took "the Tula folk", and at ¶6's generic singular «Туляк» took "Your Tula man" — the English generic-familiar "your", which is the nearest thing English has to the Russian generic singular's tone.
18. «первые знатоки в религии» — "the foremost authorities in religion". The deadpan absurdity is in the collocation, not in any word, and it survives.
19. «Их славою ... полна и родная земля» — instrumental-fronted, verb-late. Reordered to "Their fame in this respect fills their native country". The fronting of "their fame" is kept; the inversion is not.
20. «петь с вавилонами» — a real term of Russian church singing (ornamented flourishes) that reads as nonsense to anyone outside it, and Leskov does not gloss it. Options: gloss ("with elaborate flourishes"); copy-opaque calque. Took "singing with Babylons" — copy-opaque, and the English reader is left exactly where the Russian reader outside the trade is left.
21. «как пишется картина „вечерний звон"» — «писать» is the ordinary Russian verb for painting a picture, and "written" here would be a false friend that invents a strangeness the Russian does not have. Took "is painted". The quotation marks around the picture's title are kept.
22. «таковые слывут» — archaic/clerical demonstrative plus "have the reputation of". "such as these have the name of". Register held.
23. «святостей ... святости» (¶6, twice) — abstract noun pluralised and made concrete: holiness → holy objects for sale. Options: "holy things", "relics" (both normal English, both flatten); "holinesses" (keeps the pluralised abstract). Took "holinesses" both times. This is where the coinage budget was spent rather than at «аглицкой».
24. «собирают сборы» — figura etymologica, verb and object from one root. English has the same root pair available: "collect collections". Took it. Free.
25. «обвозят ... по всей нашей родине» — "our" is the narrator's only self-location in the whole passage; he is inside the country he is describing. Kept "our native land".
26. «направясь» — non-standard gerund for «направившись». Flattened to "in heading". Morphology budget again.
27. „камнесечённая" — scare-quoted compound, calqued as "stone-hewn" with the quotes kept.
28. «на большом каменном же кресте» — the particle «же» is doing "of stone, mind you" and cannot sit where it sits in English. Options: drop it; relocate. Relocated to the end as "on a great cross of stone itself". What is given up: «же» is unstressed and my "itself" is not, so the nudge became a poke.
29. „грозного и престрашного", „в рост", „военное одоление", „нощию", «мценский Никола» — five scare-quoted citations in one paragraph. Kept the quotes in all five. The contents: "dread and most terrible" (the intensive prefix пре- rendered by "most"); "at full height"; "victory in war"; "in the night season" for «нощию», where the Russian is Church Slavonic and English has a genuine liturgical-register equivalent — the one Slavonicism I was able to carry rather than flatten; and "Mtsensk Nikola", the familiar form of the saint's name kept familiar.
30. «одеян сребропозлащённой одеждой» — short-form archaic participle plus a Slavonic compound. "clothed all over in silver-gilt raiment": the compound is calqued, the short participle is not reproducible and is not reproduced.
31. «а лицом тёмен» — instrumental of respect with a short adjective. "and dark of face" — English has this construction and it costs nothing.
32. «Вот в этом „одолении" и заключался смысл ... и ему-то ... и пошли» — three emphatic particles in two clauses («вот ... и», «-то ... и»). English buys these with cleft sentences: "Now it was in this 'victory' that the sense of the thing lay", "and it was to him that the Tula men went". Two clefts in one sentence is more machinery than the Russian uses.
33. «в ужасном секрете» (¶6) / «в таком страшном секрете» (¶11) — Leskov varies the adjective across the two frames. Rendered "in dreadful secrecy" and "in such fearful secrecy" to keep the variation rather than the repetition. The alternative — identical wording both times, on the ¶1/¶11 principle of item 4 — was live and rejected, because here the Russian itself varies.
34. «двери заперли, ставни в окнах закрыли, ... лампадку затеплили и начали работать» — five clauses, verb-final, asyndetic until the last. English wants "and" between all of them and the verb second. Kept the asyndeton and the single final "and"; the verb-final order is not reproducible and was not attempted.
35. «лампадку затеплили» — a lampada, the hanging oil lamp before an icon, and «затеплить» is its dedicated verb. "kindled a lamp before Nikola's image": the dedicated verb survives as "kindled", the dedicated noun does not survive at all.
36. «День, два, три сидят» (¶7) — historic present inside past narration, and it runs to the end of the chapter with two returns to the past tense. Kept every switch exactly where Leskov has it, including inside single sentences (¶9: «Ходили ... стучались ... не отпираются»; ¶15: «отбежал ... шлет»). This produces English that reads as a tense error. It is the single most consequential formal decision in the passage and it was taken deliberately.
37. «молоточками потюкивают» / «тонкие молоточки ... вытюкивают» (¶7, ¶13) — the root тюк- is onomatopoeic and takes two different prefixes, по- (a little, desultorily) and вы- (out, completely). English has no verb of that root. Took "tapping away" and "tapped out", which carry the two prefixes and lose the sound. The diminutive «молоточки» survives as "little hammers"; «щёлочки» and «огонёк» in the same sentence survive as "small chinks" and "a little fire", so the diminutive cluster comes through at three sites out of four and the sound-symbolism at none.
38. «три искусника» — "the three artificers". «Искусник» is warmer and older than «мастер»; "artificer" is the nearest English has and it is more technical than warm.
39. «не выскочут ли ... и не объявится ли тогда, что ими выковано» (¶9) — a free-indirect question inside the townspeople's heads, with an impersonal passive at the end. Kept as a dash-bounded free-indirect stretch: "would they not jump out in the fright, and would it not come out then what had been forged by them". The clumsy "by them" is the Russian's clumsiness and was kept.
40. «Горите себе» (¶10) — the dative-reflexive of indifference: burn, and welcome. "Burn away, then" carries the indifference through a particle instead of a pronoun.
41. «щипаную голову» — "plucked head", pointing back to the torn-out temple hair of ¶1. The back-reference is held by using a plucking word at both sites ("torn out" / "plucked"); a stricter version would repeat one word and I did not do it.
42. «спрятал ... захлопнул ... принялися» — singular, singular, then plural, inside one sentence, with a non-standard reflexive ending on the plural. The number simply shifts from the left-hander to all three. Kept the shift ("he hid ... banged ... and they set to"); the non-standard ending is flattened.
43. «с тихого Дона» (¶11) — folk-epic fixed epithet. "from the quiet Don". Kept; it costs nothing in English and marks the narrator's register at no risk.
44. «свистовые казаки» (¶12 ff., four occurrences) — Leskov's coinage, from «свистать», for the Cossacks who are whistled up. No such term exists in Russian outside this story. Options: transliterate; periphrase ("Cossack outriders", which explains and deletes); calque. Calqued as "whistle Cossacks" and repeated at all four sites. Second large spend of the coinage budget.
45. «поливали без милосердия» — "poured it on him without mercy". The watering metaphor for whipping is the narrator's, not a dead idiom, and English will take it.
46. «ткнёт ... понесутся ... сдействует ... возворотятся» (¶12) — perfective futures used for habitual past action, an ordinary Russian resource with no English counterpart; English must use "would". Rendered with "would" throughout, which is compelled and unremarkable, and is the reason this paragraph's tense texture is flatter in English than in Russian even though ¶7–¶9's is not.
47. «меры побуждения» — chancery register in a folk narration: "these measures of inducement". Kept the register clash, which is the whole point of the phrase.
48. «сдействовал над ямщиком нагайкою» (¶12, ¶13) — «сдействовать» is a mock-bureaucratic verb, and «над» plus instrumental is the construction of an official acting upon a subordinate. The sentence describes a man being flogged. "acted upon the driver with the lash", "would act back upon the driver in reverse". This is the passage's clearest single case of a local formal choice whose entire function is characterising who is telling the story.
49. «возворотятся» — a non-standard blend of «возвратятся» and «воротятся». Flattened to "would come round again". An English malformation was available ("re-turn", "back-return") and I declined it, having already spent at «whistle Cossacks» eight words earlier. Recording it here because the decision was made by a budget and not by the site.
50. «сто скачков» (¶12, ¶13) — "a hundred bounds", kept identical at both sites; the repetition is what makes the second one funny.
51. «от нетерпения ... от нетерпеливости» (¶16) — two near-synonymous abstract nouns from one root in a single clause, the second one the less usual. English can do it: "from impatience ... out of impatientness". Took both. The alternative — one word twice, or one word once — would have removed the narrator's groping, which is the thing being shown.
52. «а зубами так и скрипит» — the «так и» intensive of continuous action. "and grinds his teeth so".
53. «в аккурате и в скорости» (¶17) — «в аккурате» is non-standard adverbial. "in exactitude and in speed" keeps the parallel prepositions and the abstract nouns; the non-standardness is lost.
54. «для русской полезности» — where standard Russian would say «для пользы России». The abstract noun in place of the plain one is the narrator's habit and the last joke of the chapter. "for Russian usefulness". Kept exactly.

One evaluative sentence, marked (internal-judgment-only): the flattening of «аглицкой» at item 9 is the decision in this log I am least confident was right, because it was taken once and then applied without re-examination at every later site.

What the log does not contain. No quality claim about any rendering above, and no comparison with any other translation, published or otherwise. None was read.