Repository path: workshop/translations/pevtsy/R15-crib-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«Певцы» (Turgenev, 1850) — six loci, regime R15-CRIB

Source. I. S. Turgenev, «Певцы», from Записки охотника. Public domain. Russian text as stored at workshop/experiments/E-20260804c-peer-record/materials/source-ru-full.txt, six loci as frozen in materials/loci.json at S103. 2,437 Russian words.

Purpose. R15-CRIB, frozen in E-20260804i/purposes.md before a word was rendered: a reader who has the Russian open beside the English and checks it phrase by phrase. Where this reads better and this shows what the Russian did conflict, the second wins.

Contamination: high, and measured, not asserted. Garnett 1895 and Hapgood 1903 both render this story, both are stored in this repo, and the lead has read both (S103). The S103 gate on a held-out paragraph of this same story measured the lead reproducing Garnett at 12 contiguous tokens with one shared 12-gram and Hapgood at 9 with none (E-20260804c/materials/gate-result.json). Per CLAUDE.md's standing rule this arm is therefore never used as an independent third opinion about the published pair; it is compared only with R15-ENGLISH, rendered by the same translator from the same source in the same session. The measurement is repeated on this arm as E-20260804i control FC3.

Rendered straight through, one pass, no comparator open. No published rendering was consulted while writing; the prohibition on priming (continue-prompt.md §5.2) is kept in the only sense still available to a translator who has read them before, which is that none was in front of me.

L1

Yakov was silent for a moment, looked round, and covered his face with his hand. Every one of us fastened our eyes on him, the rjadchik above all, on whose face, through the usual self-assurance and the triumph of success, there came out an involuntary, slight uneasiness. He leaned back against the wall and again put both hands under himself, but he no longer swung his legs. And when at last Yakov uncovered his face — it was pale as a dead man's; his eyes barely glimmered through the lowered lashes. He drew a deep breath and began to sing… The first sound of his voice was weak and uneven and seemed not to come out of his chest, but to be carried from somewhere far off, as though it had flown into the room by chance. Strangely did that trembling, ringing sound work upon all of us; we glanced at one another, and Nikolai Ivanych's wife drew herself straight up. Upon that first sound there followed another, firmer and more drawn out, but still visibly quivering, like a string when, having suddenly rung out under a strong finger, it sways with a last, quickly dying tremor; upon the second a third, and, little by little kindling and widening, there poured out a mournful song. "Not one path alone lay across the field," he sang, and to all of us it became sweet and it became dreadful. I confess I have rarely heard such a voice: it was slightly broken and rang as though cracked; at first it even answered with something sickly; but there was in it genuine deep passion too, and youth, and strength, and sweetness, and a kind of alluringly careless, sorrowful grief. A Russian, truthful, ardent soul sounded and breathed in it, and it caught you by the heart, caught you straight by your Russian strings. The song grew, spread wide. Yakov, plainly, was being mastered by rapture: he no longer felt shy, he gave himself up wholly to his happiness; his voice no longer trembled — it shook, but with that scarcely perceptible inward shaking of passion which drives like an arrow into the soul of the listener, and it strengthened, hardened and widened without ceasing. I remember I saw once, of an evening, at low tide, on the flat sandy shore of a sea that was roaring menacingly and heavily in the distance, a great white gull: it sat motionless, holding its silky breast up to the crimson glow of sunset, and only now and then spread its long wings slowly out to meet the familiar sea, to meet the low, purple sun: I remembered it as I listened to Yakov. He sang, having quite forgotten both his rival and all of us, but plainly lifted, as a stout swimmer is lifted by the waves, by our silent, passionate sympathy. He sang, and from every sound of his voice there breathed something native and immeasurably wide, as though the familiar steppe were opening out before you, going away into endless distance. In me, I felt, tears were boiling up in the heart and rising to the eyes; dull, restrained sobs suddenly struck me… I looked round — the publican's wife was weeping, her breast pressed against the window. Yakov threw her a quick glance and poured out more ringingly, more sweetly than before; Nikolai Ivanych looked down, Morgach turned away; Obalduy, all melted, stood with his mouth stupidly open; the grey little peasant was quietly whimpering in his corner, shaking his head with a bitter whisper; and down the iron face of the Wild Barin, from under brows drawn completely together, there rolled slowly a heavy tear; the rjadchik raised a clenched fist to his forehead and did not stir… I do not know how the general languor would have resolved itself if Yakov had not suddenly ended on a high, extraordinarily thin note — as though his voice had broken off. No one cried out, no one even moved; all 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 gaze round us all, and saw that the victory was his…

L2

Nikolai Ivanych — once a well-made, curly-headed, red-cheeked lad, and now an uncommonly stout man, already going grey, with a swollen face, slyly good-natured little eyes and a fat forehead drawn tight with wrinkles as though with threads — has been living in Kolotovka more than twenty years now. Nikolai Ivanych is a brisk and quick-witted man, like the greater part of tavern-keepers. Not distinguished by any particular amiability, nor by talkativeness, he possesses the gift of drawing guests to him and keeping them, who somehow find it cheerful to sit before his bar under the calm and friendly, though keen, gaze of their phlegmatic host. He has a great deal of common sense; he knows well the landowner's way of life, and the peasant's, and the townsman's; in difficult cases he could give no stupid advice, but, being a cautious man and an egoist, he prefers to stay to one side, and only by distant hints, uttered as though with no intention at all, does he set his visitors — and then only his favoured visitors — on the path of truth. He knows what is what in everything that is important or entertaining for a Russian: in horses and in cattle, in timber and in bricks, in crockery, in woollen goods and in leather, in songs and in dances. When he has no custom he usually sits like a sack on the ground before the door of his hut, his thin little legs tucked under him, and exchanges kindly little words with everyone who passes. He has seen much in his time, has outlived more than one score of petty gentry who used to drive over to him for "the purified," knows everything that is done for a hundred versts around, and never lets a word slip, never even lets it appear that he knows what the most penetrating police officer does not suspect. He just keeps quiet, and chuckles to himself, and moves his little glasses about. His neighbours respect him: the civil general Shcherepetenko, first in rank of the landowners in the district, bows to him condescendingly every time he drives past his little house. Nikolai Ivanych is a man of influence: he made a well-known horse-thief give back a horse that the man had led out of the yard of one of his acquaintances, he brought to their senses the peasants of a neighbouring village who would not accept a new steward, and so on. It must not be thought, however, that he does this out of a love of justice, out of zeal for his neighbours — no! He simply tries to forestall everything that might in any way disturb his tranquillity. Nikolai Ivanych is married and has children. His wife, a brisk, sharp-nosed and quick-eyed townswoman, has of late also grown somewhat heavy in body, like her husband. He relies on her in everything, and the money is under her key. The drunken shouters are afraid of her; she does not like them: there is little profit from them and much noise; the silent, sullen ones are rather more to her heart. Nikolai Ivanych's children are still small; the first ones all died, but those that are left have taken after their parents: it is a cheerful thing to look at the clever little faces of these healthy children.

L3

I glanced once more at Yakov and went out. I did not want to stay — I was afraid of spoiling my impression. But the heat was as unbearable as before. It seemed to hang over the very earth in a thick heavy layer; on the dark-blue sky there seemed to be whirling some small bright flames through the finest, almost black dust. Everything was silent; there was something hopeless, something crushed, in that deep silence of exhausted nature. I made my way to the hayloft and lay down on grass that had only just been mown but was already almost dry. For a long time I could not doze off; for a long time Yakov's irresistible voice sounded in my ears… At last, however, heat and weariness took their own, and I fell into a dead sleep. When I woke — everything had grown dark already; the scattered grass round me smelt strongly and had grown a little damp; through the thin poles of the half-open roof pale little stars blinked faintly. I went out. The sunset had long since died away, and the last trace of it barely showed white on the horizon; but in the lately scorching air, through the freshness of the night, there was still warmth to be felt, and the breast still thirsted for a cold breath. There was no wind, and there were no clouds; the sky stood all round clear and transparently dark, quietly glimmering with countless but barely visible stars. Little lights flickered about the village; from the brightly lit tavern near by there came an unruly, confused din, in the midst of which, it seemed to me, I made out Yakov's voice. Furious laughter rose from there at times in a burst. I went up to the little window and put my face to the glass. I saw a cheerless, though motley and lively, picture: everything was drunk — everything, beginning with Yakov. With his chest bared he sat on the bench and, singing in a hoarse voice some dance tune, some street song, lazily fingered and plucked at the strings of a guitar. His wet hair hung in tufts over his terribly pale face. In the middle of the tavern Obalduy, completely "unscrewed" and without his coat, was capering in leaps in front of a peasant in a greyish smock; the little peasant, for his part, was stamping and shuffling with difficulty on his weakened legs, and, smiling senselessly through his tousled beard, waved one hand now and then, as though he wished to say: "let it go where it will!" Nothing could be funnier than his face; however much he jerked his brows upward, his heavy eyelids would not rise, but lay there over his barely visible, bleared, but sweetest little eyes. He was in that charming state of a man who has finally drunk his fill, when every passer-by, looking into his face, is certain to say: "You're a good one, brother, a good one!" Morgach, all red as a lobster and with his nostrils widely flared, was chuckling caustically from a corner; only Nikolai Ivanych, as befits a true tavern-keeper, preserved his unvarying composure. Many new faces had gathered in the room; but the Wild Barin I did not see there.

L4

Behind the counter, as is the custom, taking up almost the whole width of the opening, stood Nikolai Ivanych, in a motley cotton-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 come in, Morgach and Obalduy; and behind him, in the corner, near the window, his sharp-eyed wife could be made out. In the middle of the room stood Yashka the Turk, a thin and well-made man of some twenty-three years, dressed in a long-skirted nankeen coat of a light blue colour. He looked a dashing factory lad and, it seemed, could not boast of excellent health. His sunken cheeks, his large restless grey eyes, his straight nose with thin mobile nostrils, his white sloping forehead with light-brown curls thrown back from it, his large but handsome, expressive lips — his whole face betrayed a man impressionable and passionate. He was in great agitation: he blinked, he breathed unevenly, his hands shook as though in a fever — and indeed he had a fever, that anxious, sudden fever which is so familiar to everyone who speaks or sings before an assembly. Beside him stood a man of about forty, broad-shouldered, broad-cheekboned, with a low forehead, narrow Tartar eyes, a short and flat nose, a four-cornered chin and black shining hair, coarse as bristles. The expression of his swarthy face with its leaden cast, and especially of his pale lips, might have been called almost savage if it had not been so calmly thoughtful. He hardly stirred, and only looked slowly round him, like an ox from under the yoke. He was dressed in some sort of worn frock-coat with smooth brass buttons; an old black silk kerchief was wrapped about his enormous neck. They called him the Wild Barin. Directly opposite him, on the bench under the icons, sat Yashka's rival — the rjadchik from Zhizdra. This was a thickset man of no great height, of some thirty years, pock-marked and curly-headed, with a blunt turned-up nose, lively brown eyes and a thin little beard. He looked briskly about him, his hands tucked under him, chattered carelessly and tapped with his feet, which were shod in smart boots with a border. He had on a new thin smock of grey cloth with a plush collar, from which the edge of a scarlet shirt, buttoned tight round the throat, stood out sharply. In the opposite corner, to the right of the door, there sat at a table a little peasant in a narrow worn-out coat with an enormous hole at the shoulder. The sunlight streamed in a thin yellowish flood through the dusty panes of the two small windows and, it seemed, could not conquer the habitual darkness of the room: all objects were sparingly lit, as though in patches. On the other hand it was almost cool in there, and the feeling of stuffiness and heat, like a burden, fell from my shoulders the moment I stepped over the threshold.

L5

The first impression which the sight of this man produced upon you was a feeling of some coarse, heavy, but irresistible strength. He was built clumsily, "knocked together," as they say with us, but there breathed from him an indestructible health, and — a strange thing — his bear-like figure was not without a peculiar grace of its own, arising, perhaps, from a perfectly calm confidence in his own might. It was difficult to decide at first sight to what estate this Hercules belonged; he resembled neither a house serf, nor a townsman, nor an impoverished clerk retired from the courts, nor a petty landowner gone to ruin — a keeper of hounds and a brawler: he was really and truly his own man. No one knew from where he had dropped down upon our district; there was talk that he came of the odnodvortsy and had formerly been in the service somewhere; but nothing positive was known of it; and from whom, indeed, was one to find out — not from himself, surely: there was no man more silent and more sullen. Neither could anyone say positively what he lived on; he followed no trade, drove to see no one, was acquainted with almost nobody, and yet money was to be had of him; not much, it is true, but it was there. He conducted himself not exactly modestly — there was nothing modest in him at all — but quietly; he lived as though he noticed no one about him and had absolutely no need of anyone. The Wild Barin (so they had nicknamed him; his real name was Perevlesov) enjoyed an enormous influence throughout the whole district; he was obeyed at once and willingly, though he not only had no right whatever to give orders to anyone, but did not himself put forward the slightest claim to the obedience of the people he chanced to fall in with. He spoke — they submitted to him; strength always takes its own. He hardly drank wine, had nothing to do with women, and passionately loved singing. There was much that was enigmatic in this man; it seemed as though some enormous forces lay sullenly at rest in him, as though knowing that once risen, once broken loose, they must destroy both themselves and everything they touched; and I am cruelly mistaken if some such explosion had not already occurred in this man's life, if he, taught by experience and barely saved from ruin, did not now hold himself relentlessly in an iron grip. What especially struck me in him was the mixture of a kind of inborn, natural ferocity and an equally inborn nobility — a mixture I have met with in no one else.

L6

"And who is to begin?" he asked in a slightly altered voice of the Wild Barin, who still went on 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 wide trousers.

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

The Wild Barin looked at him from under his brows. Obalduy squeaked feebly, faltered, glanced somewhere at the ceiling, twitched his shoulders, and fell silent.

"Cast lots," the Wild Barin pronounced with deliberation, "and an eighth on the counter."

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

The Wild Barin glanced at Yakov and said: "Well!"

Yakov burrowed in his pockets, got out a grosh and marked it with his tooth. The rjadchik pulled a new leather purse out from under the skirt of his coat, unhurriedly untangled the string and, having poured a quantity of small change onto his hand, picked out a brand-new grosh. Obalduy held out his shabby cap with its peak broken and coming away; Yakov threw his grosh into it, and the rjadchik his.

"Yours to choose," said the Wild Barin, turning to Morgach.

Morgach smiled with self-satisfaction, took the cap in both hands and began to shake it.

Instantly a deep hush reigned: the groshes clinked faintly, striking against one another. I looked attentively round me: every face expressed a strained expectation; the Wild Barin himself narrowed his eyes; my neighbour, the little peasant in the torn coat, even he craned his neck with curiosity.

Morgach thrust his hand into the cap and brought out the rjadchik's grosh; everyone let out a breath. Yakov reddened, and the rjadchik passed a hand over his hair.

"There, didn't I say it was you," exclaimed Obalduy, "didn't I say so."

"Now, now, don't chirp!" the Wild Barin remarked contemptuously. "Begin," he went on, with a nod of his head towards the rjadchik.

"And what song am I to sing?" asked the rjadchik, coming into agitation.

"Whichever you like," answered Morgach. "Whichever comes into your head, sing that."

"Of course, whichever you like," added Nikolai Ivanych, slowly folding his arms on his breast. "There is no ordering you in that. Sing whichever you like; only sing well; and we will decide afterwards in conscience."

"In conscience, of course," put in Obalduy, and he licked the rim of his empty glass.

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

"Now, now, don't dawdle — begin!" the Wild Barin decided, and looked down.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-04, before any dispatch of E-20260804i and before any grading of this arm. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence here is internal-judgment-only.

• C1 — the proper names are the regime's clearest instrument, and I chose them so. рядчик stays rjadchik (a labour contractor who hires out a gang; there is no English noun for the thing, and contractor imports a modern commercial sense the Russian has not got). Морга́ч and Обалду́й stay Morgach and Obalduy — they are nicknames built on to blink and to be stupefied, and translating them makes the reader a party to a joke the brief says to show rather than supply. Дикий-Барин becomes the Wild Barin, keeping barin because the whole point of the nickname is the estate word, and because L5's business is that nobody can place his estate.
• C2 — «осьмуха» and «грош» kept as an eighth and a grosh. The eighth is an eighth of a vedro of spirits; any English measure I put there (pint, half-pint) is a different quantity in a different system. Grosh is a half-kopeck coin; farthing and halfpenny are the natural English equivalents and are both wrong by the brief.
• C3 — repetition kept where English would drop it. «хватала вас за сердце, хватала прямо за его русские струны» → caught you by the heart, caught you straight by your Russian strings; «долго я не мог задремать; долго звучал…» → for a long time… for a long time…; «он пел, и…» twice in L1. English prose would vary the second member; the Russian does not, and the brief says repeat.
• C4 — the L1 syntax inversion. «Странно подействовал этот… звук на всех нас» is rendered Strangely did that trembling, ringing sound work upon all of us, keeping the fronted adverb and the inversion. Alternative: That trembling, ringing sound had a strange effect on all of us. The alternative is the better English sentence and loses the shape of the Russian one.
• C5 — the diminutive layer. «огоньки», «звездочки», «глазки», «ножки», «личики», «словцами» are carried with little (little lights, little stars, little eyes, little legs, little faces, little words). Six littles in six loci is more than English tolerates; the brief accepts the cost. There is no other lexical resource in English for a productive diminutive suffix.
• C6 — «однодворцы» kept as odnodvortsy. A legal estate with no English counterpart: smallholders of gentry descent who held land without serfs. Yeoman is the usual solution and imports the wrong legal system.
• C7 — the one place I could not obey the brief. «Он находился в том милом состоянии окончательно подгулявшего человека» — подгулявший is a mild, affectionate participle for a man pleasantly drunk, and the perfective prefix plus «окончательно» puts him at the end of the process. I have a man who has finally drunk his fill, which is not the same: it supplies an object (his fill) the Russian does not state, and loses the affection in the participle. Live alternatives were a man who has finally got there (vaguer) and a thoroughly mellow man (an adjective for a participle, and domesticating). None of the three shows what the Russian did.
• C8 — «сбитнем» in L5. The comparison is to sbiten, a thick hot drink; the idiom means compactly and roughly put together. I have "knocked together," as they say with us, keeping the quotation marks and the as they say with us that flags it as a local idiom, and losing the drink. A footnote would fix this and the brief forbids notes.
• C9 — what this regime cost, generally. Three places where I know the English is worse for obeying the brief: the fronted inversion in C4, the little count in C5, and «наливал своей полной и белой рукой» → was pouring out with his full white hand, where full for «полной» is the Russian's own word doing awkward duty against plump, which is what an English writer would put and is a different observation about the hand.