Repository path: workshop/translations/may-night-golova/R07-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-may-night-golova-R07-v1 — Gogol, «Майская ночь» ch. II «Голова», under R07 (fluency)

• Source. N. V. Gogol, «Майская ночь, или Утопленница», chapter II «Голова», Вечера на хуторе близ Диканьки (1831), from Russian Wikisource. 955 Russian words, the chapter entire. Public domain (author d. 1852). Text and processing note at ../source-ru.txt.
• Regime. R07 v1.0 (fluency), frozen 2026-07-28 at S048. Single pass, no revision, source only. The rule set is unchanged and is not edited by this run.
• Why this material. ARM-rule-coverage step 2, under the four selection criteria frozen in E-20260730h §4 C4 before the passage was chosen: realia-dense so F4 fires repeatedly, a free source with a freely reachable published English, a language the project already works in, and a passage no earlier lead translation has touched.
• Dialect declared under F5. American English, held throughout — the fourth R07 artifact and the fourth to declare American, which is what keeps the four comparable.
• Translated by the lead agent, in session. Cost $0; not ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• What is new in this run, and it is the whole point of it. At every contested site the live options are enumerated exhaustively before any code is assigned — every rendering the translator was actually willing to write — and two codes are recorded:
• excl — a cited rule excludes at least one live option. This is the test the project has in fact been applying (RS-20260730e §2).
• strict — exactly one live option survives all cited rules. This is what R07 §5 actually says.
• No published rendering of this chapter into any language was read before this text and its log were frozen. The comparator was located by heading grep only; the two prose lines that scrolled past during that grep belong to a different story in the same volume («The Nose») and are declared rather than ignored — note (bdn).

Translation

Unit A — ¶1 (210 Russian words)

Do you know the Ukrainian night? Oh, you do not know the Ukrainian night! Look closely at it. The moon looks down from the middle of the sky. The boundless vault of heaven has opened out and spread wider still. It burns and it breathes. The earth is all in silver light; and the marvelous air is cool and close at once, and full of languor, and it moves an ocean of sweet smells. It is a divine night! It is an enchanting night! The woods have halted, motionless and rapt, full of shadow, and have thrown an enormous shade of their own. These ponds are quiet and still; the cold and the darkness of their water are shut sullenly inside dark green walls of garden. The virgin thickets of bird cherry and sweet cherry have reached their roots timidly into the cold of the springs, and now and then their leaves murmur, as if they were angry and indignant, when the beautiful philanderer, the night wind, steals up all at once and kisses them. The whole landscape is asleep. But overhead everything is breathing; everything is wonderful, everything is solemn. And in the soul it is boundless and wonderful too, and crowds of silver visions rise in good order out of its depths. It is a divine night! It is an enchanting night! And all at once everything has come to life: the woods, the ponds, the steppes. The stately thunder of the Ukrainian nightingale comes pouring down, and it seems that the moon in mid-sky has stopped to listen to it. The village dozes on its rise as though it were under a spell. The crowds of cottages shine whiter and finer still in the moonlight; their low walls stand out from the darkness more dazzling still. The songs have died away. Everything is quiet. The devout are already asleep. Only here and there a narrow window is lit. In front of a few cottages only, a family that has sat down late is eating its late supper.

Unit B — ¶2–¶9 (308 Russian words)

"Yes, that is not how you dance the reel! I keep watching, and nothing comes right. What is my kinsman telling us there?... Well then: hey tra-la! hey tra-la! hey, hey, hey!" This was how a middle-aged peasant who had been drinking talked to himself as he danced along the street. "God's truth, that is not how you dance the reel! Why should I lie about it? God's truth, it is not! Well then: hey tra-la! hey tra-la! hey, hey, hey!"

"There, the man has gone out of his mind! It would be one thing if he were still a young fellow, but he is an old hog, and he dances along the street at night to make the children laugh!" cried an elderly woman who was passing with straw in her hand. "Go home to your own cottage! It is long past time to sleep!"

"I am going!" said the peasant, stopping. "I am going. I am not going to take any notice of some headman or other. What does he think — may the devil drown his father — what does he think, that because he is the headman, because he pours cold water over people in the frost, he can carry his nose in the air? Well, headman, headman. I am my own headman. There, may God strike me dead! May God strike me dead, I am my own headman. That is how it is, and not the other way..." he went on, coming up to the first cottage he happened on, and he stopped in front of the little window, sliding his fingers over the glass and trying to find the wooden handle. "Woman, open up! Woman, be quick, I tell you, open up! It is time for a Cossack to sleep!"

"Where are you going, Kalenik? You have come to the wrong cottage!" some girls called out behind him, laughing, on their way back from their merry songs. "Shall we show you which is your cottage?"

"Show me, my dear young women!"

"Young women? Do you hear," one of them put in, "what a polite man Kalenik is! For that we ought to show him his cottage... but no, dance for us first!"

"Dance?... Oh, you crafty girls!" Kalenik said, drawing the words out, laughing and shaking his finger at them and stumbling, because his legs could not keep to one spot. "And will you let me kiss you all around? I will kiss every one of you, every one!" And he set off after them at a slant. The girls raised a shout and scattered; but afterward they took heart and ran across to the other side, seeing that Kalenik was not very quick on his feet.

"There is your cottage!" they called to him as they went off, pointing to a house a good deal larger than the rest, which belonged to the village headman. Kalenik obediently plodded off in that direction, beginning to abuse the headman again.

Unit C — ¶10 (437 Russian words)

But who is this headman, who has stirred up such unfavorable talk and gossip about himself? Oh, the headman is an important person in the village. By the time Kalenik reaches the end of his road we shall certainly have managed to say something about him. Everyone in the village takes off his cap at the sight of him, and the girls, even the youngest, wish him good day. What young fellow would not want to be headman! The headman has free access to every snuffbox; and a sturdy peasant stands respectfully with his cap off the whole time the headman is thrusting his thick coarse fingers into the man's birchbark snuffbox. In the village assembly, or commune, although his authority is limited by a certain number of votes, the headman always gets the upper hand and sends off almost anyone he pleases to level and smooth the road or to dig ditches. The headman is morose, he is stern to look at, and he does not like talking much. Long ago, a very long time ago, when the great Empress Catherine of blessed memory traveled to the Crimea, he was chosen to be one of her escort; he held that post for two whole days and was even honored with a seat on the box beside the Empress's coachman. And ever since that time the headman has known how to hang his head thoughtfully and importantly, to stroke his long mustache, which curls downward, and to throw a hawk's glance out from under his brows. And ever since that time, whatever anyone begins to talk to him about, the headman always contrives to turn the talk to how he drove the Empress and sat on the box of the royal carriage. The headman likes now and then to pretend that he is deaf, especially if he hears something he would rather not hear. The headman cannot bear finery: he always wears a coat of black homespun cloth, he belts himself with a colored woolen sash, and nobody has ever seen him in any other costume, except perhaps at the time when the Empress traveled to the Crimea, when he wore a blue Cossack coat. But hardly anyone in the whole village could remember that time; and he keeps the coat in a chest under lock and key. The headman is a widower; but his wife's sister lives in his house, and she cooks his dinner and his supper, washes the benches, whitewashes the cottage, spins thread for his shirts, and manages the whole household. In the village they say that she is no relation of his at all; but we have seen already that the headman has many ill-wishers, who are glad to spread any slander they can. What may have given occasion for it, though, is that his wife's sister never liked it when the headman went out into a field where the women were reaping, or called on a Cossack who had a young daughter. The headman has only one eye; but that one eye is a villain and can pick out a pretty village girl a long way off. He does not turn it on a comely little face, however, until he has looked carefully about him to see whether his wife's sister is watching from somewhere. But we have told nearly everything that needs telling about the headman; and drunken Kalenik has not yet got halfway home, and he went on treating the headman for a long time to all the choicest words that could come into his lazily and incoherently turning tongue.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written and frozen with it. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. A site is logged when two or more renderings were live at the moment of writing.

Codes per E-20260730h §4 C4. excl = a cited rule excludes ≥ 1 live option. strict = exactly one live option survives all cited rules (R07 §5's own text). n is the number of live options enumerated; surv the number surviving.

IR1, carried over unchanged from T-postmaster-R07-v1 and T-petits-poemes-R07-v1: F10 governs the translator's latitude and does not license flattening what the source says. It is carried because the three runs must stay comparable, and it is carried knowing that RS-20260730e §4 found nobody willing to defend it — 8 of 12 non-lead cells took the literal reading IR1 rejects. That is declared here rather than quietly re-decided.

Unit A decisions

Unit B decisions

Unit C decisions

Missing rules, recorded per R07 §2

• M1 — nothing bears on typography or layout. Recurs, third run. Here: the suspension points of «Что ж это рассказывает кум?..» and «Потанцевать?..», and the em-dash speech attribution Gogol runs inside the quoted line. The rule set is silent on all of it. Three runs, three languages, three scripts, same gap.
• M2 — nothing bears on tense. Recurs, third run. The Unit C portrait is a gnomic present («Голова угрюм… Голова любит…») interrupted by a perfective past at «был выбран он в провожатые», and the paragraph closes by dropping into past narration at «долго еще угощал». F7 is about clause completeness, not sequence of tenses.
• M3 — nothing bears on third-language matter. Recurs, and this is the first time it has been tested on material chosen for it. It fired three times here — «дидько б утысся его батькови» (site 30), «добридень» (40) and «громада» (43) — where at T-petits-poemes-R07-v1 it fired once, on a single Latin word. F4's heading and F4's clauses disagree at every one of the three, and the rule set gives no way to choose between them. M3 is therefore not a curiosity of one Latin title; it is a hole that opens wherever a source is not monolingual.
• M4 — nothing bears on lexical consistency across a text. Recurs. «хата» and «изба» collapse into one English word (29); «свитка» and «жупан» collapse into another (46, 47); «голова» is held steady across eleven occurrences (31) and the pun at 32 survives only because of it. Every one of those was the translator's decision and none of them was the rule set's.

No sentence in this log is an evaluative claim about the translation. Where the log says a thing is "lost" it means the source states it and the English does not — a describable relation between two texts, not a judgment of the rendering.

What the log counts

55 logged decisions, 21 / 17 / 17 across Units A / B / C. 3.29 live options per site, declared; 2.18 survivors per site.

The gap is 69.1 percentage points, on the same 55 sites, coded by the same translator in the same breath. The seven strict Ds are sites 4, 8, 14, 21, 33, 48 and 54. R07 §5's own text yields one deciding rule at one site in eight; the test the project has in fact been applying yields one at four sites in five.

No S codes at all, against 8 / 2 / 3 in the three published runs. That is a consequence of the exhaustive-enumeration instruction rather than a fact about Gogol: enumerating every rendering the translator would write makes it very hard to reach a site where no rule bears on any option.

Every number above is recomputed from this table by workshop/experiments/E-20260730h-strict-coverage/analysis/parse_logs.py, which also reproduces the three published D-rates (13.6% / 36.1% / 66.7%) from their own logs to the digit. That reproduction is the parser's own control.

Contamination — measured, appended after the freeze

Declaration stands at suspected. The measurement is the project's second-highest per-unit run on a lead translation, and where it sits is more interesting than how long it is.

Comparator. Nikolai Gogol, "A May Night", in The Mantle, and Other Stories, trans. Claud Field (1916), Project Gutenberg #36238, public domain. Fetched to the session scratchpad, never stored in this repository (charter §7.5) and never displayed: the only things printed from the file before the measurement were structural line indices, word counts, and the count of six probe substrings. Two prose lines from a different story in the same volume scrolled past during a heading grep and are declared above. tools/dependence_check.py read the text; the translator did not. English chapter II is 1,084 words to the Russian's 955 and the lead's 1,438 — the comparator is the shorter text and is not obviously abridged at this chapter.

The 19-token run is "to say something about him everyone in the village takes off his cap at the sight of him and", rendering «успеем кое-что сказать о нем. Все село, завидевши его, берется за шапки». All five shared 15-grams disappear when proper nouns are excluded; 2 of the 8 12-grams survive that exclusion.

Three things this measurement establishes, and one it does not.

1. The overlap is not distributed. It is entirely in one register. Units A and B are 341 and 498 lead words with a longest run of 5 and 7; Unit C is 599 words with a run of 19. The three units are one chapter by one author translated in one sitting. What separates them is that Unit C is plain declarative exposition and the other two are lyric and dialogue — that is, the register where English offers a translator the fewest degrees of freedom.
2. The standing selection gate ran on Unit A, returned clean at 5 tokens, and did not bound the rest of the work. CLAUDE.md's rule is to gate before selecting; the practice that has grown up around it — gate on unit 1, then draft the rest — passed this passage on its cleanest third. This is a defect in the practice, not in the rule, and it is recorded as note (bfd) rather than patched here.
3. It adds a fourth measured point to the project's range, which now runs 0 (Ovid) · 5 (this text's Unit A) · 8–11 (Korolenko, Turgenev, Saltykov) · 16 (Baudelaire) · 19 (this text's Unit C) · 21 (Turgenev whole-work splice).

What it does not establish is whether the run is forced. S066 built and ran that probe on Russian and found 6 of 8 runs forced on the frozen rule; nothing here repeats it, and a forcing probe on this run is owed and was not run, because it was not in the frozen design and adding a condition after seeing the number is the thing this project's own method notes forbid.

What contamination bears on here, and what it does not. This artifact's use in E-20260730h is to supply live option sets and coverage codes — claims about what the rule set does, not claims about how good the English is. A remembered phrase changes whether a rendering is the lead's; it does not change whether F4 names the feature at issue. Stated so the declaration is not read as doing more work than it does.

Evaluation. The lead never judges its own translation (charter §5). The study limb this artifact is wired to asks non-lead readers a per-option factual question about rule texts, on the factual side of the S015 line, and does not score the prose.