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

T-pevtsy-R04-v1 — Turgenev, «Певцы» (The Singers), six loci

Source. Ivan Turgenev, «Певцы», from «Записки охотника» (first published Sovremennik XXIV, no. 11, 1850; text as carried by Russian Wikisource, whose stated copy-text is ilibrary.ru/text/1204). Public domain. Read in Russian (charter §4, A2). Full source at ../../../experiments/E-20260804c-peer-record/materials/source-ru-full.txt — 82 paragraphs, 5,365 words; the loci at materials/source-ru-loci.json.

Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source-only. Cost $0; lead translation is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Locus rule, fixed before translating and not adjusted afterwards: the five longest paragraphs of the Russian text, plus the story's longest continuous run of dialogue. That yields ¶68 (518 w), ¶2 (413), ¶72 (393), ¶16 (383), ¶49 (383) — the next longest is ¶47 at 357, so the five are unambiguous — and ¶26–43 (347 w) as one block. 2,437 Russian words, 45% of the story; 3,153 English words here.

Contamination: suspected, and it is MEASURED, asymmetric, and was measured before a single locus was chosen. A 315-word gate rendering of ¶4 (a paragraph deliberately outside the locus set) was written from the Russian alone and put through tools/dependence_check.py against both published renderings of the same story:

The Garnett run is "a house serf thick grey hair stood up in disorder above his" — twelve consecutive tokens, no proper name in it. Figures and inputs: materials/gate-result.json, materials/gate-lead.txt. The lead reproduces the canonical Victorian Turgenev and does not reproduce the non-canonical one. That is the boundary CLAUDE.md's standing rule draws — measured overlap, not the comparator's fame — falling on the famous side here, and it is why this artifact is a labelled subject in E-20260804c and not an independent third opinion of anything.

One prior exposure, declared. While locating the section boundary in the Hapgood scan, ~30 words of Hapgood's ¶0 were printed to the console. ¶0 is not a locus and was not translated.

Two transcription defects in the Wikisource copy-text, found while translating and corrected in the rendering, not in the stored source: ¶72 reads G обнаженной грудью for «С обнаженной грудью», and ¶29 reads до осьмуху на стойку for «да осьмуху на стойку». Both are single-character OCR slips with no live alternative reading.

The translation

L1 — ¶68

Yakov sings; the room breaks.

Yakov was silent a while, glanced around him, and covered his face with his hand. Everyone fastened their eyes upon him — the contractor above all, on whose face, through its usual self-assurance and the triumph of success, an involuntary flicker of unease had come out. He leaned back against the wall and again tucked both hands under him, but he had stopped swinging his legs. And when at last Yakov uncovered his face, it was pale as a dead man's; his eyes barely glimmered through their lowered lashes. He drew a deep breath and began to sing.

The first note of his voice was faint and uneven, and seemed not to come out of his chest at all but to be carried in from somewhere far off, as though it had strayed into the room by chance. That trembling, ringing note worked strangely upon all of us; we looked at one another, and Nikolai Ivanych's wife drew herself upright. After the first note came a second, firmer and more drawn out, but still visibly quivering, like a string that has rung out suddenly under a strong finger and then wavers in a last, quickly dying tremor; after the second, a third; and little by little, kindling and widening, the mournful song came pouring out. "More than one road ran through the open field," he sang, and something sweet and something fearful came over us all.

I confess I have seldom heard such a voice: it was a little broken, and rang as though cracked; at first there was even something ailing in it; but it held an unfeigned, deep passion, and youth, and strength, and sweetness, and a kind of captivatingly reckless, sorrowing grief. A Russian soul, truthful and ardent, sounded and breathed in it, and it caught you by the heart — caught you straight by its Russian strings. The song grew, and spread. A rapture was plainly taking hold of Yakov: he was no longer shy, he gave himself up wholly to his happiness; his voice no longer quavered — it trembled, but with that barely perceptible inward tremor of passion which drives like an arrow into the listener's soul, and it kept on gathering, hardening, widening.

I remember once, of an evening, at low tide, on the flat sandy shore of a sea that boomed heavy and menacing in the distance, seeing a great white gull: it sat motionless, holding its silken breast up to the scarlet glow of the sunset, and only now and then spread its long wings slowly out towards the sea it knew, towards the low crimson sun. I thought of that gull, listening to Yakov. He sang, forgetting his rival altogether and all of us with him, but plainly buoyed up, as a strong swimmer is by the waves, on our silent, passionate sympathy. He sang, and from every note of his voice there breathed something of home and immeasurably wide, as though the familiar steppe were opening before you and running away into endless distance.

I felt the tears welling in my heart and rising to my eyes; then a muffled, choked-back sobbing suddenly startled me. I looked round: the publican's wife was weeping, her breast pressed to the window. Yakov threw her a quick glance and poured out his song more ringingly still, more sweetly than before; Nikolai Ivanych looked down, Morgach turned away; Obalduy, softened all through, stood with his mouth foolishly open; the little grey peasant was sniffling quietly in his corner, shaking his head and whispering something bitter; and down the iron face of the Wild Master, from under brows drawn wholly together, a heavy tear rolled slowly; the contractor had raised a clenched fist to his forehead and did not stir.

I do not know how the general anguish would have found its release, if Yakov had not broken off all at once on a high, extraordinarily thin note — as though his voice had snapped. No one cried out, no one so much as moved; everyone seemed to be waiting to see whether he would sing again; but he opened his eyes, as though surprised at our silence, ran a questioning look round us all, and saw that the victory was his.

L2 — ¶2

Nikolai Ivanych, the publican.

Nikolai Ivanych — once a slender, curly-headed, red-cheeked young fellow, and now an extraordinarily stout man, already going grey, with a puffy face, sly good-natured little eyes and a fat forehead drawn across with wrinkles like so many threads — has been living at Kolotovka more than twenty years. Nikolai Ivanych is a brisk, shrewd man, like the greater part of publicans. Without being especially obliging or especially talkative, he has the gift of drawing customers in and keeping them: there is somehow a cheerfulness in sitting before his counter, under the calm and friendly though sharp eye of its phlegmatic master. He has a great deal of common sense; he knows the life of the gentry, and of the peasants, and of the townspeople equally well; in a hard case he could give a sensible piece of advice, but, being a cautious man and a self-interested one, he prefers to stand aside, and only by distant hints, dropped as though with no intention whatever, will he set his customers — and then only his favourite customers — on the road to the truth. He is a judge of everything that matters to a Russian or entertains him: of horses and cattle, of timber and bricks, of crockery, of drapery and leather, of songs and dancing. When he has no company he generally sits like a sack on the ground before the door of his cottage, his thin little legs tucked under him, and trades kind words with everyone who passes. He has seen much in his time; he has outlived a good many dozen of the small gentry who used to call on him for a nip of the clear; he knows everything that goes on for a hundred versts around, and never lets it out — never so much as lets it appear that he knows what the shrewdest district officer does not suspect. He holds his tongue, and chuckles, and moves his little glasses about. His neighbours respect him: the civil general Shcherepetenko, the first landowner in the district by rank, gives him a condescending bow every time he drives past his cottage. Nikolai Ivanych is a man of influence: he made a well-known horse-thief give back a horse he had led out of the yard of one of his acquaintances; he brought the peasants of a neighbouring village to their senses when they would not accept a new steward; and so on. It is not to be supposed, however, that he does such things out of a love of justice or a zeal for his neighbours — nothing of the kind. He is simply trying to forestall whatever might in any way disturb his own quiet. Nikolai Ivanych is married and has children. His wife, a brisk, sharp-nosed, quick-eyed townswoman, has of late grown somewhat heavy in the body herself, like her husband. He relies on her in everything, and the money is under her key. The bawling drunkards are afraid of her; she has no liking for them — little profit from them and much noise; the silent, sullen ones are more to her heart. Nikolai Ivanych's children are still small; the first all died, but those that are left take after their parents: it is a pleasure to look at the clever little faces of these healthy children.

L3 — ¶72

The narrator leaves, sleeps, and looks back in through the window.

I looked at Yakov once more and went out. I did not want to stay — I was afraid of spoiling the impression. But the heat was as unbearable as before. It seemed to hang just above the earth in a thick, heavy layer; against the dark blue sky small bright sparks seemed to be whirling through the finest, almost black dust. Everything was silent; there was something hopeless and crushed in that deep silence of an exhausted nature. I made my way to a hayloft and lay down on grass just mown but already almost dry. For a long while I could not doze off; for a long while Yakov's irresistible voice went on sounding in my ears. At last the heat and my weariness had their way with me, and I fell into a dead sleep. When I woke, everything had grown dark; the scattered grass round me smelled strongly and had turned a little damp; through the thin poles of the half-open roof pale small stars blinked faintly. I went out. The sunset had long since died, and its last trace barely whitened on the horizon; but in air so lately scorching a warmth could still be felt through the freshness of the night, and one's chest still thirsted for a cold breath of wind. There was no wind, and there were no clouds; the sky stood all round clear and transparently dark, quietly glimmering with countless but scarcely visible stars. Small lights flickered about the village; out of the brightly lit tavern near by came a confused, discordant din, in which I fancied I could make out Yakov's voice. From time to time a burst of furious laughter went up from it. I went to the window and put my face to the pane.

I saw a cheerless picture, for all that it was lively and full of colour: everyone was drunk — everyone, beginning with Yakov. He sat on a bench with his chest bare, singing some street dance-tune in a hoarse voice and lazily plucking and pinching at the strings of a guitar. His wet hair hung in tufts over his terribly whitened face. In the middle of the tavern Obalduy, utterly unstrung and without his coat, was capering about in front of a peasant in a greyish smock; the peasant in his turn was stamping and shuffling with difficulty on his failing legs and, smiling senselessly through his tousled beard, now and then waved a hand as though to say, "and why not!" Nothing could have been funnier than his face; however he jerked his eyebrows up, his heavy lids would not rise, but lay where they were over his barely visible, bleary, but sweetest little eyes. He was in that endearing condition of the finally fuddled man, on looking into whose face any passer-by is bound to say, "You're a fine one, brother, a fine one!" Morgach, red as a lobster all over and with his nostrils flaring wide, was sniggering caustically in a corner; only Nikolai Ivanych, as a true publican should, kept his unvarying composure. Many new faces had gathered in the room; but the Wild Master I did not see among them.

L4 — ¶16

The room, and everyone in it.

Behind the counter, as one expects, filling almost the whole width of the opening, stood Nikolai Ivanych in a bright print shirt, and with a lazy smile on his plump cheeks was pouring out with his full white hand two glasses of wine for the friends who had just come in, Morgach and Obalduy; behind him, in the corner by the window, one could make out his sharp-eyed wife. In the middle of the room stood Yashka the Turk, a lean, well-made man of some three-and-twenty, dressed in a long-skirted nankeen coat of sky-blue. He had the look of a dashing factory hand, and could not, it seemed, boast of good health. His hollow cheeks, his large restless grey eyes, his straight nose with its fine mobile nostrils, his white sloping forehead with the light brown curls thrown back from it, his big but handsome, expressive lips — his whole face gave away a man of feeling and of passion. He was in great agitation: he kept blinking, his breathing was uneven, his hands shook as though in a fever — and a fever he did indeed have, that anxious, sudden fever so familiar to everyone who speaks or sings before an assembly. Beside him stood a man of about forty, broad-shouldered and broad-cheekboned, with a low forehead, narrow Tartar eyes, a short flat nose, a square chin and black glossy hair as stiff as bristles. The expression of his swarthy, lead-tinged face, and of his pale lips above all, might have been called almost savage, had it not been so calmly thoughtful. He scarcely moved at all, and only looked slowly about him, like a bullock under the yoke. He was dressed in a sort of worn frock coat with smooth brass buttons; an old black silk kerchief was wound about his enormous neck. His name was the Wild Master. Directly opposite him, on the bench beneath the icons, sat Yashka's rival — the contractor from Zhizdra. This was a thickset man of no great height, some thirty years old, pock-marked and curly-headed, with a blunt turned-up nose, lively brown eyes and a thin beard. He glanced smartly about him, his hands tucked under him, chattering carelessly and tapping with feet shod in showy boots with trimming. He wore a new thin coat of grey cloth with a plush collar, against which the edge of a scarlet shirt, buttoned close about the throat, stood out sharply. In the opposite corner, to the right of the door, a little peasant sat at a table in a narrow threadbare smock with an enormous hole at the shoulder. The sunlight streamed in a thin yellowish flood through the dusty panes of two small windows, and seemed unable to conquer the room's habitual darkness: everything was lit sparingly, in patches, as it were. Against that, it was almost cool in there, and the sense of closeness and heat fell from my shoulders like a burden the moment I crossed the threshold.

L5 — ¶49

The Wild Master.

The first impression the sight of this man made upon you was a feeling of some coarse, heavy, but irresistible strength. He was clumsily built — knocked together, as they say with us — but there breathed from him an indestructible health, and, strange to say, his bearish figure was not without a grace of its own, arising perhaps from a wholly calm confidence in his own power. It was hard at first sight to decide what class this Hercules belonged to; he was not like a house-serf, nor a shopkeeper, nor an impoverished clerk retired from the service, nor a small landowner run to ruin — a kennelman and a brawler: he was quite simply himself. No one knew where he had dropped upon our district from; there was talk that he came of the freeholder class and had once been in the service somewhere; but nothing positive was known of it — and from whom was it to be learned? Not from him: there was no more silent or sullen man alive. Neither could anyone say for certain what he lived on; he followed no trade, visited nobody, was hardly acquainted with a soul, and yet he had money — not much, it is true, but he had it. He behaved himself not modestly — there was nothing modest about him at all — but quietly; he lived as though he noticed nobody around him and had absolutely no need of anybody. The Wild Master (that was what they called him; his real name was Perevlesov) enjoyed an enormous influence throughout the district; he was obeyed at once and willingly, though he not only had no right whatever to give orders to anyone, but never so much as advanced the slightest claim to obedience from the people he happened to fall in with. He spoke — and they submitted; strength will always tell. He hardly drank wine at all, had nothing to do with women, and was passionately fond of singing. There was much in this man that was a riddle; some huge forces seemed to lie sullenly at rest in him, as though they knew that once they rose, once they broke loose, they must destroy both themselves and everything they touched; and I am gravely mistaken if some such explosion had not already happened in this man's life, and if he were not now, taught by experience and barely escaped from ruin, holding himself down without mercy in a grip of iron. What struck me most in him was a mixture of some inborn, natural ferocity and an equally inborn nobility — a mixture I have met with in no one else.

L6 — ¶26–43

Drawing lots for who sings first.

"And who's to begin?" he asked the Wild Master, his voice a little altered — the Wild Master still standing motionless in the middle of the room, his thick legs planted wide apart and his mighty hands thrust almost to the elbow into the pockets of his loose trousers.

"You, you, contractor," babbled Obalduy, "you, brother."

The Wild Master looked at him from under his brows. Obalduy squeaked faintly, faltered, glanced somewhere up at the ceiling, twitched his shoulders and said no more.

"Draw lots," the Wild Master pronounced deliberately, "and the eighth-measure on the counter."

Nikolai Ivanych bent down, got the eighth-measure up off the floor with a grunt, and set it on the table.

The Wild Master glanced at Yakov and said, "Now then!"

Yakov rummaged in his pockets, brought out a copper and marked it with his tooth. The contractor drew a new leather purse from under the skirt of his coat, unhurriedly untangled the string, and, pouring a quantity of small change into his hand, picked out a brand-new copper. Obalduy held out his shabby cap with its broken, half-detached peak; Yakov dropped his copper into it, and the contractor his.

"You choose," said the Wild Master, turning to Morgach.

Morgach smirked complacently, took the cap in both hands and began to shake it.

In an instant a deep silence reigned: the coppers clinked faintly, striking one against another. I looked attentively round: every face expressed a strained expectancy; the Wild Master himself had narrowed his eyes; even my neighbour, the little peasant in the torn smock, had craned his neck with curiosity. Morgach thrust his hand into the cap and drew out the contractor's copper; everyone breathed out. Yakov reddened, and the contractor passed a hand over his hair.

"There, didn't I say it would be you," cried Obalduy, "didn't I say so."

"Come, come, don't chirp!" the Wild Master remarked contemptuously. "Begin," he went on, with a jerk of his head at the contractor.

"And what song am I to sing?" asked the contractor, growing agitated.

"Whichever you like," answered Morgach. "Sing whatever comes into your head."

"Of course, whichever you like," added Nikolai Ivanych, slowly folding his arms across his chest. "There's no laying down the law to you there. Sing what you like; only sing it well; and we shall decide afterwards, in conscience."

"In conscience, to be sure," Obalduy chimed in, and licked the rim of his empty glass.

"Let me clear my throat a little, lads," said the contractor, running his fingers along the collar of his coat.

"Come, come, don't dawdle — begin!" the Wild Master decided, and looked down.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-04, before E-20260804c's design was written and before any English rendering of any locus was read. The freeze is provable in git: this file is committed before design.md exists. Decisions and alternatives only; the one evaluative sentence below is flagged.

Cross-cutting

• D1 — Register. Unmarked / literary-contemporary English, not Victorian pastiche. The alternative — writing towards 1895 so as to sit level with the comparators — was rejected because the lead is measurably Garnett-dependent (see the gate above) and deliberate period imitation would make that worse in a way no measurement could then separate. Declared consequence: any naturalness scoring that names the period-idiomatic register anchor structurally disadvantages this arm. That is a property of the design, not a defect of the prose, and it is written here rather than in the design so that it cannot be added afterwards.
• D2 — Paragraphing of L1. The Russian ¶68 is one 518-word paragraph. I broke it into six English paragraphs. This is the largest formal liberty in the artifact. Reason: Russian tolerates a much longer paragraph as a unit of breath, and the passage is a single crescendo whose stages (the silence, the first note, the voice described, the gull, the room weeping, the break) are the crescendo's own joints. Kept whole in English it reads as a wall. Registered as a loss under style-correspondence, which is not among this artifact's declared senses.
• D3 — Quotation marks on Russian colloquialisms. Turgenev puts «сбитнем», «развинченный», «циркай», «очищенное» in quotation marks, marking them as other people's words. I kept every metaphor and dropped every set of marks: English scare-quotes read as apology or irony, which the Russian marks do not do here. Four instances, treated identically.
• D4 — ты throughout L6. The whole lot-drawing exchange is in the familiar second person, and English cannot mark it. Recorded as an inescapable baseline specification under the compelled-determinacy rule (accuracy, where penalising baseline determinacy is prohibited) — not as a choice I made. Noted here for a reason that will matter later: this is precisely the site at which the 1904 Nation attacks Hapgood, for solving it with "thou". I am recording that I could see no way to mark it, before reading how she did.

Per locus

What was hardest. L1, and not at the level of any word: the Russian crescendo is carried by an accumulating chain of и-coordination and near-repetition (он пел… он пел…), and English punishes both. Every choice in L1 was a choice about how much of that chain to keep.

What I expect to have got wrong. D20 and D16 — the idiom and the garments — are where a translator with more Russian would do better. internal-judgment-only.