Repository path: workshop/translations/moya-familiya/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-moya-familiya-R04-v1 — Levitov, «Моя фамилия», ch. I ¶1–5

Source. А. И. Левитов, «Моя фамилия (Из воспоминаний временнообязанного)», in Горе сёл, дорог и городов (М., 1874); copy-text az.lib.ru/l/lewitow_a_i/text_0030.shtml (Левитов А. И., Сочинения, М.: Худож. лит., 1977). Span: «Как глубоко я завидую» → «…которым я теперь так завидую.», 352 Russian words, SHA-256 24a492fc3e8031f5… (full hash in workshop/experiments/E-20260807-narrator-unknown/materials/sources.json).

Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source only. Draft frozen first as T-moya-familiya-R06-v1 (§Procedure 2a). Translator: lead. Cost $0, never ledgered.

Contamination: none, on an absence of comparator. No English translation of Levitov was reachable — Project Gutenberg has no Levitov, and no English rendering of this text surfaced in the search recorded in materials/contamination.json. tools/dependence_check.py therefore has nothing to run against, and this declaration is an unmeasured one. CLAUDE.md's standing rule requires that where no comparator is reachable the artifact says so; it does. The search run was: Project Gutenberg full catalogue, and archive.org's English-language holdings for Levitov and Levitoff — 0 hits for either as an author of English-language literary texts.

Lineage. T-moya-familiya-R06-v1 → this. Evaluations: E-20260807-narrator-unknown (profiled as a source–target crossing item; not judged for quality anywhere).

How deeply I envy the people who have the right, with a bright gladness on faces that life has crumpled, to speak of their childhood as of a golden time, unforgettable. Sternly bowing my wild head, I look at these people from under my brows, and with a spite that tears my heart I listen to that kind and cheerful laughter with which they habitually recall and recount their first unsteady childish steps, and the help that the kindred faces about them — faces that loved them boundlessly and without profit to themselves — vied with one another in hurrying to bring. I listen, and I watch how, at the memory of those kindred figures, the tellers' kindly gladness gives way to a quiet sorrow filled with inexpressible love; and how at last, forgetting in those moments their solid years, with an altogether childish simplicity they begin to long passionately for the return both of their childhood and of those dear people who once cherished them — and who nevertheless, at this present minute, dwell irrevocably in that secret kingdom of death which never gives up its inhabitants.

Knowing that fatal law of the dark kingdom — never to let its inhabitants' eyes take their pleasure of the bright sun — my soul answers the wishes of the fortunate, to look upon such a one, to embrace and weep with such another, in this way, with an evil and silent gladness:

"No-o! Wait! He will not come out to you from there as fast as you would like. Unless you take the trouble to journey thither to him yourself…"

At that wordless thought my breast fills with an evil laughter, and it heaves so hard with it that out of the depths of it there come certain appallingly menacing growls…

Without the least embarrassment I confess that these bestial growls are produced in my breast by envy at another man's happiness; and since it is laid down that an envious man is always to be condemned and shunned, and since it is likewise laid down that the condemned, for their part, commonly try to justify themselves, then I, by force of these two age-old customs, say: I do not wish my childhood repeated, even were that possible; I shall never call it golden, nor even iron, since iron is capital of a sort all the same; I refuse to wish, even standing on the brink of ruin, that out of that kingdom of eternal rest and peace, whither the heavenly Father calls all them that labour and are heavy laden, there should come to me, for my rescue from that ruin, the people who once loved me exactly as those fortunate ones were loved whom I now so envy.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-07 (S125), at translation time, before the study limb of E-20260807-narrator-unknown was designed. Decisions and alternatives; no quality claims. Any evaluative sentence here is internal-judgment-only.

1. «буйную голову» — the folk formula, and what carries it. «Сурово понуривши буйную голову» uses the fixed epithet of Russian folk poetry (буйна голова, the wild/turbulent head), which in the source is doing tonal work: the narrator dresses his own sulk in the costume of a bylina hero. Options live: unruly head (draft — too domestic, reads as a schoolmaster's word), turbulent head, wild head. Chosen "Sternly bowing my wild head". English has no stock epithet of this kind for a head, so the formulaic quality is lost outright; what survives is only the oddity of the adjective. Nothing in the sentence carries the fact that this is a quotation of a genre.
2. «наперерыв спешили» restored in revision. The draft had "vied with one another to bring", which drops «спешили» — the hurrying that is the whole picture (relatives racing each other to help a toddler). Revised to "vied with one another in hurrying to bring". The revision is longer and clumsier and I took it anyway, because the loss was of an image and the cost is of a rhythm.
3. «бескорыстно» → "without profit to themselves". Disinterestedly is the dictionary word and is now unreliable in English (it is heard as uninterested). Selflessly is available but is a modern therapeutic word. The chosen phrase is a periphrasis and adds three words; it also, by accident, prepares the money-image in the last paragraph («железо все-таки капитал»), which the Russian does not prepare. That is an addition of connective tissue the source does not have, noted here because it was noticed and kept rather than not noticed.
4. «спешествовать» — the mock-Slavonic verb. An archaic, elevated, faintly clerical verb the narrator plants in a piece of spite. Options: to hasten thither (draft), to make the journey thither, to speed thither. Chosen "take the trouble to journey thither to him yourself": thither holds the archaism, and take the trouble holds the sarcasm that in Russian sits in the «Разве уж сам… потрудишься». The register split — vulgar sneer inside a churchy word — is the hardest single thing in the passage and I do not think it fully survives.
5. «труждающихся и обремененных» — a Church Slavonic quotation, and the one place English has a ready-made slot. This is Matthew 11:28 in the Slavonic, and English has the Authorised Version's "all ye that labour and are heavy laden" sitting in exactly the same relation to modern English as the Slavonic sits to Levitov's Russian. Chosen: "all them that labour and are heavy laden" (them for ye because the sentence is oblique, not vocative). This is the only device in the passage where the target language supplied a period-matched equivalent rather than a substitute, and it cost nothing.
6. «гибели» twice, «ruin» twice. Perdition was live for the first and would have chimed with the biblical clause; rejected because it narrows «гибель» to the theological sense, which the second occurrence does not want. The repetition is in the source and is kept.
7. Sentence division. Paragraph 1 is two sentences in Russian, the second running 90 words with three subordinate hinges. Kept as one sentence in English with em-dashes at the hinges. Paragraph 5 is a single 128-word Russian sentence built on «и так как… и так как… то я… говорю:» followed by three parallel refusals; kept as one sentence, with the draft's dashes changed to semicolons in revision so that the three refusals read as a list rather than as asides.
8. What was cut and why: paragraph 6. The source's next paragraph («Да! я не хочу ни того, ни другого, ни третьего…») was translated in the draft and then removed, together with its source sentence, when the four spans of this session were trimmed at sentence boundaries to a common English length (the length control described in the experiment's design §2). The cut is a boundary decision, not a translation decision, and the removed English is preserved in the draft artifact's history.