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

T-patsyuk-R04-v1 — Gogol, «Ночь перед Рождеством» ¶¶93–104 (the Patsyuk episode), Russian → English

• Source. N. V. Gogol, «Ночь перед Рождеством», Вечера на хуторе близ Диканьки (1832), paragraphs 93–104 of the cleaned Wikisource text — Vakula's visit to the Zaporozhets Puzatyi Patsyuk. 962 Russian words. Stored at source-ru.txt with its provenance header. Public domain (author d. 1852).
• Regime. R04 (self-revised), v1. This translation was made under a written rule: C15, frozen at commit 0579229 before this source was opened. That is not the normal R04 condition and is the single most important thing about this artifact — see §Compliance below.
• Translated by. lead. No API call; cost $0.
• Comparator. George (Jurij) Tolstoy, "The Night of Christmas Eve", Cossack Tales (London: James Blackwood, 1860), Project Gutenberg #58409 — public domain, freely readable whole.
• Contamination: suspected, and the basis is stated in two parts rather than one. 1. Measured, and it is clean. Longest shared run with Tolstoy 1860 over the whole episode: 9 tokens, 0 shared 12-grams, verdict clean (contamination/result.json). The 9-token run is "at least eats with a spoon but this one" — dialogue of the near-forced kind, in a sentence whose Russian (тот по крайней мере ест ложкою) leaves an English translator very little room. Measured after the translation was frozen at 152e849 and against a comparator the translator had not opened. 2. Declared, and it is the part a number cannot reach. Before this locus was chosen, the session read ≈3,000 characters of Tolstoy's English of the story's opening (¶¶0–1) while establishing that a free comparator existed. The locus was then moved away from that stretch for exactly this reason, so no primed paragraph is translated here. But one term crossed: Tolstoy renders хата "cottage" in the opening, this translation renders it khata, and the choice was made in awareness of his. That is priming in the avoidance direction and it is declared rather than measured, because this project has no instrument that measures avoidance.
• Lineage. No R06 draft is frozen separately for this unit. The unit is not a regime comparison; it exists to generate a decision log under a written rule, and a second unruled pass would have made the log ambiguous about which text each decision belongs to.
• Evaluation. E-20260729d-decision-grain. The lead does not judge it (charter §5).

The translation

Vakula meanwhile, having run down several streets, stopped to catch his breath. "Where am I actually running to?" he thought. "As if everything were lost already. I'll try one thing more: I'll go to the Zaporozhets, Pot-bellied Patsyuk. They say he knows every devil there is and can do whatever he likes. I'll go — my soul is bound to be lost in any case!" At this the devil, who had lain a long while without stirring, gave a jump of joy inside the sack; but the smith, supposing that he had somehow caught at the sack with his own hand and set it moving himself, dealt it a blow with his brawny fist and, shrugging it up on his shoulders, set off for Pot-bellied Patsyuk's.

This Pot-bellied Patsyuk had indeed once been a Zaporozhets; but whether he had been driven out, or had run away from Zaporozhye of his own accord, nobody knew. He had been living in Dikanka a long time now — ten years, perhaps fifteen. At first he lived like a true Zaporozhets: did no work at all, slept three-quarters of the day, ate as much as six mowers, and drank off close on three gallons at a sitting; though there was room enough for it, for Patsyuk, in spite of his small stature, was of a considerable breadth. Besides, the sharovary he wore were so wide that however long a stride he took his legs were not to be seen at all, and it looked as though a distillery vat were moving along the street. Perhaps this was what gave occasion for calling him Pot-bellied. A few days had not passed after his arrival in the village before everyone knew that he was a znakhar. Was anyone taken ill with anything, Patsyuk was sent for at once; and Patsyuk had only to whisper a few words over him and the ailment was lifted away as though by a hand. Did it happen that some famished dvoryanin choked on a fish-bone, Patsyuk knew how to strike him between the shoulders so skilfully that the bone went where it ought to go without doing any damage to the dvoryanin's throat. Of late he had rarely been seen anywhere. The reason for this was perhaps laziness, and perhaps too that getting through a doorway was becoming harder for him with every year. So the parishioners had to go to him themselves, if they had need of him. Not without timidity the smith opened the door and saw Patsyuk sitting on the floor, Turkish-fashion, in front of a small tub with a bowl of halushky standing on it. The bowl stood, as if on purpose, exactly level with his mouth. Without stirring so much as a finger, he bent his head a little towards the bowl and sipped the broth, catching a halushka now and then between his teeth. "No," Vakula thought to himself, "this one is lazier still than Chub: he at least eats with a spoon, but this one won't so much as lift a hand!" Patsyuk must have been hard at work on the halushky, for he seemed not to have noticed the smith's coming at all, though the smith, hardly over the threshold, had made him a very low bow.

"I am come to your worship, Patsyuk!" said Vakula, bowing again. Fat Patsyuk raised his head and began sipping the halushky again.

"They say — no offence meant by it," said the smith, gathering his courage, "and I don't bring it up to do you any injury — that you are some slight kin to the devil."

Having got these words out, Vakula took fright, thinking he had put it too baldly after all and had softened the hard words too little; and expecting that Patsyuk would catch up the tub together with the bowl and send it straight at his head, he moved a little aside and covered himself with his sleeve, so that the hot broth off the halushky should not splash his face.

But Patsyuk glanced up and began sipping the halushky again.

Emboldened, the smith made up his mind to go on. "I am come to you, Patsyuk — God grant you everything, all good things in plenty, bread in due proportion!" The smith could sometimes work in a fashionable word; he had got the knack of it back in his Poltava days, when he was painting a sotnik's plank fence. "It is coming to my perdition, sinner that I am! Nothing in the world is any help! What will be will be — I must ask help of the devil himself. Well then, Patsyuk?" said the smith, seeing his unbroken silence. "What am I to do?"

"When it's the devil you want, then go to the devil!" answered Patsyuk, without raising his eyes to him and going on putting away the halushky.

"That is the very reason I have come to you," answered the smith, making a bow. "Apart from you, I think there is nobody in the world who knows the road to him."

Patsyuk not a word, and finished off the remaining halushky. "Do me the kindness, good man, don't refuse!" the smith pressed. "Whether it's pork, or sausage, or buckwheat flour, or, well, linen, millet, or whatever else is wanted … as is the usual way among good people … we shan't be stingy — only tell me, how, as one might say, a man gets onto the road to him?"

"He has no need to go far who has the devil behind his shoulders," said Patsyuk indifferently, without altering his position.

Vakula fixed his eyes on him as though the explanation of these words were written on his forehead. What is he saying? his face asked without a sound; and his half-open mouth was making ready to swallow the first word like a halushka. But Patsyuk was silent. Here Vakula noticed that neither halushky nor tub were in front of him any longer; instead there stood on the floor two wooden bowls, one filled with varenyky and the other with smetana. His thoughts and his eyes fastened on these dishes in spite of him. "Let us see," he said to himself, "how Patsyuk will eat varenyky. He certainly won't want to stoop and sip them the way he did the halushky, and it can't be done either: a varenyk has to be dipped in the smetana first." No sooner had he got as far as thinking it than Patsyuk opened his mouth wide, looked at the varenyky, and opened it wider still. At that moment a varenyk splashed up out of the bowl, flopped into the smetana, turned over on its other side, leapt up and went straight into his mouth. Patsyuk ate it and opened his mouth again, and a varenyk set off again in the same order. The only labour he took upon himself was the chewing and the swallowing. "There's a marvel for you!" thought the smith, his own mouth falling open with astonishment, and that same instant he noticed that a varenyk was climbing into his mouth too and had already smeared his lips with smetana. Pushing the varenyk away and wiping his lips, the smith began to reflect on what wonders there are in the world and to what cunning the unclean power brings a man — remarking to himself at the same time that Patsyuk alone could help him. "I'll bow to him once more, let him explain it properly … But what the devil! Today is the hungry kutya, and he is eating varenyky — varenyky that break the fast! What a fool I am, standing here and taking sin on myself! Back!" — and the God-fearing smith ran headlong out of the khata.

962 Russian words → 1,295 English words.

Compliance — what is different about this translation, stated before the log

This is the first translation in this project made under a written prescriptive rule. C15 was frozen in git before the source was opened, and at every one of the census's 23 culture-bound item types the translator applied C15's four ordered tests and took what they returned, including where the result was not what the translator would otherwise have written. Three consequences, all of them declared here rather than discovered later:

1. The log's AGREES rate is not a measurement. A translator who complies with a rule agrees with it by construction. What is measurable on this log is the divergence count — the sites where the rule was not followable or was overridden — and that count is reported below with a reason at every entry.
2. The rule overrode the translator at three sites and could not be followed at three others. Both counts are small, and the second is the more interesting: it locates gaps in C15 that its author did not see when writing it.
3. The quality of the outcome is not assessed here and cannot be. Whether "drank off close on three gallons" is better or worse than a literal pailful is a jury question, and Tier D has not passed. The log records what was chosen and what was given up (charter §3, A4).

Divergence summary.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-07-29, before E-20260729d's design was written and before any reader saw either candidate. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only. Entry ids are D<n>, keyed to the census site number where one applies.

D0 — Target register. An unmarked literary English with a light nineteenth-century tilt: no contractions in the narration, contractions in speech, "come" for "have come" in Vakula's formal address, inversion retained in the "Was anyone taken ill … Did it happen that …" pair because Gogol's own construction there is a marked oral-narrative one (Бывал ли кто болен чем…, Случалось ли, что…). Rejected: a fully contemporary register, which loses the storyteller's buttonholing; and a heavier archaism, which would have made the peasant speech sound like Scott. Declared under purpose-fit.

D1 — запорожец → Zaporozhets, retained (census 1, 3 occurrences). C15 Test 1 fires: the source states what a Zaporozhets is, immediately after the first occurrence — "жил, как настоящий запорожец: ничего не работал, спал три четверти дня, ел за шестерых косарей". Retain the item, translate the source's own explanatory material, add no gloss. But the scaffold arrives one paragraph AFTER the first occurrence, and C15 says "already stated at the site". I read "at the site" as reaching an adjacent sentence in the same passage and applied it. This is the first place C15 is underspecified: it fixes no distance. Alternatives live: "Cossack", which loses the Zaporozhian/Sich distinction the story later needs; a gloss at first use, which C15 forbids where the source scaffolds.

D2 — Запорожье → Zaporozhye, copy-opaque (census 2). Test 1 does not fire — nothing states what the place is. Test 4: furniture, because the sentence uses it only as where he came from. So copy-opaque, no gloss. Rejected: "the Sich", which is a different opacity and imports a term the source did not use here.

D3 — Пузатый Пацюк → Pot-bellied Patsyuk, split (census 3). Test 1 fires on the epithet: the text stops to gloss it — "Может быть, это самое подало повод прозвать его Пузатым". But Test 1's instruction is "retain the item", and here retaining the FORM (Puzatyi) makes the source's own gloss carry nothing in English, while translating it (Pot-bellied) makes the gloss work. I translated the epithet and transliterated the surname, whose Ukrainian sense ("rat") the text never puts to work. This is a second underspecification, and it is at exactly the site C15's Test 1 was derived from: the Garnett precedent behind that test — Вьюн → "Eel", with Chekhov's own explanatory clause kept beside it — translated the name. So the anchored precedent and the rule's own wording disagree, and the rule's wording is the newer of the two.

D4 — за шестерых косарей → "as much as six mowers" (census 4). Test 3: harvest labour is shared practice, "mower" is exact. No fork. Rejected: "six farm-hands", which flattens the seasonal, piecework sense the comparison rests on.

D5 — ведро → "close on three gallons" — C15 OVERRODE ME (census 5). Test 2 fires cleanly: a quantity whose value, not its cultural identity, is what the sentence uses — the sentence is about how much he drank. Test 2 says convert. A vedro is c. 12.3 litres ≈ 2.7 imperial gallons, so "close on three gallons" is an upward approximation of the same kind as the Garnett precedent this test comes from (пуд → "forty-pound"). Unruled I would have written "a whole pailful", which keeps Gogol's own word-picture — the bucket — and lets the reader supply the size. The rule takes the picture away and gives back an arithmetic. Recorded as a divergence, not as a complaint.

D6 — шаровары → sharovary, retained (census 6). Test 1 fires and is the cleanest firing in the passage: the source states the only property that matters — "были так широки, что…" — and then builds the joke on it. Retain, no gloss; the source does the work. Rejected: "wide Cossack trousers", which is a gloss C15 forbids where the source already scaffolds, and which pre-empts the simile.

D7 — винокуренная кадь → "a distillery vat" (census 7). Test 3: estate distilling is shared practice and "vat" is exact. Transparent calque and Test 3 coincide here.

D8 — знахарь → znakhar, retained (census 8). Test 1 fires: the next two sentences say exactly what a znakhar does — whispers a few words, and the ailment lifts. Retain, translate the source's explanation, add nothing. Rejected: "wise man", "folk-healer", "conjuror" — all Test-3 candidates, and none of them exact: the whispered charm is constitutive and none of the three carries it.

D9 — дворянин → dvoryanin, retained — C15 OVERRODE ME (census 9, 2 occurrences). Test 3 asks for an exact equivalent; "nobleman" and "gentleman" are not exact, because дворянство is a service estate with a legal definition English has no counterpart for. So Test 3 fails and Test 4 applies; the item is load-bearing, because the whole joke is an estate collision — a gentleman choking, a peasant sorcerer thumping him — so C15 says retain and scaffold. I complied and the result is the least English sentence in this translation. Two further things had to be settled that C15 does not settle: the second occurrence is the adjective дворянскому, which cannot be borrowed as an adjective, so I wrote "the dvoryanin's throat" — an adaptation the rule does not authorise; and the scaffold C15 demands never got built, because the sentence gives no room for one. Unruled I would have written "gentleman" both times. This is the site where I think C15 is most likely to be wrong, and the reason is that its Test 3 threshold — exact — is too strict and pushes ordinary near-equivalents into the retain-and-scaffold branch. internal-judgment-only.

D10 — миряне → "the parishioners" (census 10). Test 3: the Christian parish is shared and "parishioners" is exact for what the word does here (the villagers as against the man they consult). The lay/clergy contrast the word can carry is not active. No divergence.

D11 — по-турецки → "Turkish-fashion" (census 11). Test 3: English holds the same idiom, borrowed from the same third culture. Rejected: "cross-legged", which is accurate and deletes the fact that both languages route this posture through Turkey.

D12 — галушки → halushky, retained (census 12, 9 occurrences). Test 1 fires: the source states how they are eaten — bent head, sipped broth, caught between the teeth — and later contrasts them with varenyky, which must be dipped. Retain, no gloss. Singular/plural: I used halushka for the singular twice (D18's mouth-simile and the eating), which the rule does not mention and which Ukrainian morphology supplies.

D13 — к твоей милости / сделай милость → "to your worship" / "do me the kindness" (census 13). Test 3: English holds both formulae in the same register-band. The two are the same source lexeme doing two jobs, and I did not force one English word onto both — which is a small breach of C15's standing constraint, taken deliberately, because the constraint is about a class of items and this is one word in two constructions.

D14 — не во гнев будь сказано → "no offence meant by it" (census 14). Test 3. Placement moved: Gogol splits the sentence so that the accusation lands last (Ты, говорят, … приходишься немного сродни черту), and English needs the "that" clause anchored, so I added a second dash and "and I don't bring it up…" to hold the suspension. Cost: the English is one degree less broken than the Russian.

D15 — хлеба в пропорции → "bread in due proportion" (census 15). Test 1 fires, unusually: the source explains the item in the next sentence — "Кузнец иногда умел ввернуть модное слово" — so the incongruous chancery register is the thing to preserve and the source glosses it. Retain the oddity, add nothing. Rejected: "bread enough and to spare", which is the idiomatic blessing and destroys the joke.

D16 — сотник → sotnik, copy-opaque (census 16). Test 3 fails (no exact rank). Test 4: furniture — the rank is only whose fence it was. Copy-opaque, no gloss, per the furniture branch. Rejected: "captain", a Test-3 substitution that would import a Russian imperial military sense.

D17 — the payment-in-kind list → "pork, sausage, buckwheat flour, linen, millet" (census 17). Test 3 on every member. This is where C15's standing constraint broke down and I had to legislate for it. The constraint says one handling per class in the same text; if "culture-bound items" is the class, then retaining halushky obliges me to retain pshono, which is absurd. C15 never defines "class." I read it as the anchors use it — the class the source treats as one — so: named Ukrainian dishes are one class, estate and rank terms another, measures another, staples of the shared larder not a class at all. The rule did not supply that and could not be applied without it.

D18 — вареники → varenyky, retained; сметана → smetana, retained (census 18, 19). Varenyky: Test 1 fires, the source states how they are eaten and contrasts them with the halushky. Smetana: Test 3 fails on exactness (English "sour cream" is a thinner, differently cultured thing), Test 4 makes it furniture, so copy-opaque. Both land inside the same class as D12 and the standing constraint holds across all three — which is the one place in this passage where the constraint visibly did work rather than causing trouble. Singular varenyk used where the source is singular.

D19 — нечистая сила → "the unclean power" — C15 COULD NOT BE FOLLOWED (census 22). The item is load-bearing: it is the passage's own name for what Vakula is dealing with, and its whole point is that the name is avoided. Test 4 therefore says retain and scaffold — which would give "nechistaya sila", unreadable. What the site wants is a transparent calque, and none of C15's four tests can return one. That is a hole in the rule and not a hard case: CL-20260726-handling-set names eight handlings, and C15's tests reach only five of them — retain, scaffold, measure conversion, established borrowing, omit. Calque, gloss and substitute are unreachable from any branch. I calqued, outside the rule, and record it as the rule's failure rather than mine.

D20 — голодная кутья → "the hungry kutya", retained and scaffolded (census 20). Test 4, load-bearing, and it is the only site in the passage where the load is the plot's: the whole episode ends because Vakula remembers what day it is. Retain and manufacture the sense from context — which the following clause does, since varenyky that break the fast tells an English reader that a kutya is a fast. Half the scaffold is Gogol's and half is mine, which is the borderline between C15's Test 1 and its Test 4 and shows that the two are not disjoint.

D21 — скоромные → "that break the fast" — C15 COULD NOT BE FOLLOWED (census 21). Same class as D20 by any reading, so the standing constraint demands the same handling — retention. There is no borrowable English form: skoromny is an adjective, and "skoromny varenyky" leaves an English reader with nothing at the sentence that has to land the joke. I glossed. The standing constraint is unstatable for an item whose target-side retention is morphologically impossible, and C15 says nothing about it.

D22 — хата → khata, copy-opaque — C15 OVERRODE ME (census 23). Test 3 fails on exactness ("cottage" is not a khata), Test 4 makes it furniture, so copy-opaque. Unruled I would have written "cottage", and I am not a neutral party here, because I had read Tolstoy 1860 rendering it "cottage" in the story's opening before this locus was chosen. So this divergence is doubly declared: the rule pushed one way and the priming pushed the same way. See §Contamination.

D23 — отвесил пренизкой поклон → "made him a very low bow"; кланяясь снова → "bowing again". Not a census site — the gesture is not culture-bound — but recorded because I considered making it one and decided the low bow is legible in English without mediation.

D24 — Aspect and the iterative frame. Gogol's Бывал ли кто болен… Случалось ли, что… is an iterative-conditional built on imperfective past; English has no such frame, so I used inversion ("Was anyone taken ill with anything… Did it happen that…") to buy the marked oral rhythm with syntax instead of morphology. This is the C5 phenomenon exactly — grammar-borne meaning transcoded into another resource and losing systematicity — and it is worth noting that C15 has nothing to say about it, because C15 is about culture-bound items and this is not one.

D25 — Пацюк ни слова → "Patsyuk not a word". Verbless. English tolerates it in narration at this speed and the alternative ("Patsyuk said nothing") adds a verb Gogol withheld.

D26 — убирать галушки → "putting away the halushky". The Russian verb is colloquial for eating fast and in quantity; "putting away" is the English colloquial with the same shape. Rejected: "polishing off", too modern; "devouring", too grand.

D27 — на себя только принимал он труд жевать и проглатывать → "The only labour he took upon himself was the chewing and the swallowing". Nominalised the two verbs to keep the mock-official weight of принимал труд. Cost: one degree more formal than the Russian.

D28 — и набожный кузнец опрометью выбежал → "and the God-fearing smith ran headlong out". набожный is the sentence's whole irony — the man who came to hire the devil runs out because of a fast rule. "Pious" was the alternative and is flatter in English; "God-fearing" keeps the fear.