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

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

Source. As R15-CRIB: the same six loci, the same 2,437 Russian words, the same translator, the same session, one pass straight through.

Purpose. R15-ENGLISH, frozen in E-20260804i/purposes.md before a word was rendered: a reader who will never see the Russian and does not know it exists, reading a nineteenth-century Russian story in an English collection, for pleasure, at one sitting. Where this shows what the Russian did and this reads as English conflict, the second wins.

Contamination: high — identical basis to R15-CRIB, and the same restriction applies: this arm is never an independent third opinion about Garnett or Hapgood. It is compared with R15-CRIB and with nothing else. FC3 measures it.

A hazard specific to this arm, declared before it was measured. A brief that says write English on a text whose canonical English is Garnett's, written by a translator measured Garnett-ward on this very story, is the arm most likely to drift into Garnett's actual wording. Three of the choices below (E1, E4) were made partly to keep off her solutions; whether that succeeded is FC3's to say and not mine.

L1

Yakov paused, glanced about him, and hid his face in his hand. Every eye in the room was fixed on him, and none more than the contractor's; under his usual self-confidence and his air of triumph there had risen a faint, unwilling anxiety. He leaned back against the wall, tucked his hands beneath him again, and this time his feet hung still. When Yakov at last took his hand away, his face was as white as a dead man's, and his eyes scarcely showed any light beneath their lowered lashes. He drew a long breath, and began.

The first note was faint and unsteady. It did not seem to come from his chest at all; it came from a great way off, as though it had strayed into the room by accident. That quivering, ringing thread of sound had a strange power over us: we looked at one another, and Nikolai Ivanitch's wife sat suddenly upright. After the first note came a second, stronger and longer, though it still shook, as a string shakes when a strong finger has set it ringing and it dies away in one last tremor; after the second a third; and then, gathering warmth and breadth as it went, the lament came pouring out. "There was more than one path across the field," he sang, and it was sweet to hear, and terrible.

I have seldom, I confess, heard such a voice. It was a little broken, and rang as though it were cracked; there was even something ailing in it at first; but it had true, deep passion in it, and youth and strength and sweetness, and a kind of reckless, beguiling sorrow. A Russian soul, honest and burning, sounded and breathed in it, and took you by the heart — took you by the Russian strings of it. The song grew and spread. Yakov was carried away; his shyness had gone, and he gave himself up wholly to his own happiness. His voice no longer faltered: it trembled, but with that scarcely perceptible inward tremor of passion which goes into the listener like an arrow, and it grew steadily fuller and firmer and wider.

I remember once, at evening, at low tide, on a flat sandy shore with the sea booming heavily and threateningly far out, I saw a great white gull. It sat quite still, its silky breast turned to the red of the sunset, and now and then it opened its long wings slowly towards the sea it knew and towards the low crimson sun. I thought of that gull as I listened to Yakov. He sang, forgetting his rival and forgetting all of us, and yet plainly buoyed up by our silent, passionate attention, as a strong swimmer is buoyed by the waves. He sang, and every note of him breathed of something homely and immeasurably wide, as though the familiar steppe were opening before you and running away into the distance without end.

I felt the tears rise in my heart and come up to my eyes; and then I was startled by a smothered, choking sound of weeping. I looked round: the publican's wife was crying with her breast against the window-frame. Yakov threw one quick look at her and sang out clearer and sweeter than before. Nikolai Ivanitch dropped his eyes; the Blinker turned away; the Gawk stood with his mouth foolishly open, melted quite soft; the little grey peasant snivelled quietly in his corner, shaking his head and muttering bitterly to himself; and down the iron face of the Wild Gentleman, from under brows drawn low, one heavy tear rolled slowly. The contractor put a clenched fist to his forehead and never stirred.

I do not know how that general ache would have found its ending if Yakov had not broken off suddenly on a high, extraordinarily thin note, as though his voice had snapped. No one called out; no one so much as moved. We seemed to be waiting to hear whether he would go on. But he opened his eyes as though our silence surprised him, looked round at us all with a question in his face, and saw that he had won.

L2

Nikolai Ivanitch — once a well-built, curly-haired, ruddy young fellow, and now an enormously fat man, grey already, with a puffy face, sly good-humoured little eyes, and a greasy forehead laced across with wrinkles as fine as thread — has lived in Kolotovka for over twenty years. Like most publicans, he is shrewd and quick. He has no particular charm of manner and is no great talker, and yet he has the knack of drawing people in and keeping them; there is something companionable in sitting at his bar under the placid, friendly, and very observant eye of its phlegmatic master. He has plenty of sense. He knows the life of the gentry, the life of the peasants and the life of the small townsfolk equally well, and in a difficulty he could give good advice; but he is a careful man who thinks of himself first, and prefers to keep out of it, dropping at most a distant hint, as though it had come into his head by accident, to set a customer — and then only a customer he likes — on the right road. He is a judge of everything a Russian finds important or amusing: horses and cattle, timber and brick, crockery, drapery, leather, singing and dancing. When there is nobody in the house he sits on the ground outside his door like a sack, with his thin legs folded under him, and passes a friendly word with everyone who goes by. He has seen a great deal in his day; he has outlived a good score of the small squires who used to drive over to him for a drop of the clear; he knows everything that happens for sixty miles round, and never lets anything out — never so much as lets it appear that he knows what the sharpest police inspector has never guessed at. He holds his tongue, and smiles to himself, and shifts the glasses about on the counter.

His neighbours respect him. General Shcherepetenko, the highest in rank of all the landowners in the district, gives him a gracious nod every time he drives past the house. Nikolai Ivanitch is a man of influence. He made a notorious horse-thief bring back a horse he had taken out of the yard of one of his acquaintances; he brought the peasants of the next village to reason when they refused to have a new bailiff put over them; and so on. It must not be supposed that he does these things out of love of justice or neighbourly feeling. Not at all: he simply heads off anything that might disturb his peace.

Nikolai Ivanitch is married and has children. His wife is a sharp-nosed, bright-eyed, bustling townswoman, who of late has grown rather heavy herself. He leaves everything to her, and she keeps the money under lock and key. Noisy drunkards are afraid of her, and she has no liking for them: little to be made out of them and a great deal of racket. She far prefers the silent, sulky sort. The children are still small. The first of them all died; those that are left take after their parents, and it does one good to look at the clever little faces of the sturdy things.

L3

I looked at Yakov once more and went out. I did not want to stay: I was afraid of spoiling the impression he had made on me. But the heat was as intolerable as ever. It seemed to lie in a thick, heavy layer just above the ground; small bright specks of fire seemed to be spinning in the dark blue of the sky behind an impalpable dust that was almost black. There was not a sound. There was something hopeless and downtrodden in that deep silence of a nature worn out. I got to the hayloft and lay down on grass that had been cut only that day and was already almost dry. It was long before I could doze; long before Yakov's voice would leave off sounding in my ears. In the end heat and weariness had their way, and I slept like the dead.

When I woke it was quite dark. The hay strewn about me had a strong smell and had grown a little damp; through the thin poles of the half-open roof a few pale stars were faintly winking. I went out. The afterglow had long gone, and the last of it hardly showed on the rim of the sky; but there was warmth still in the air that had been on fire all day, coming through the coolness of the night, and one's chest still longed for a cold breath of something. There was no wind and there were no clouds; the sky stood clear all round and darkly transparent, quietly glittering with stars past counting and scarcely to be seen. Lights moved here and there in the village; from the tavern near by, lit up bright, came a confused and disorderly uproar, in which I fancied I could make out Yakov's voice. Now and then a burst of wild laughter came up out of it.

I went to the window and put my face against the glass. What I saw was a dreary sight, for all its colour and its movement: everyone was drunk, beginning with Yakov himself. He sat on the bench with his shirt open on his chest, croaking out some street dance-tune in a hoarse voice and plucking idly at the strings of a guitar. His wet hair hung in locks over a face gone frightfully white. In the middle of the room the Gawk, quite unhinged and stripped of his coat, was hopping about in front of a peasant in a greyish smock; the peasant, for his part, was stamping and scraping with difficulty on legs that would hardly bear him, grinning vacantly through his tangled beard, and every now and then flapping a hand as much as to say, "Well, why not!" Nothing could have been funnier than his face. However hard he hoisted his eyebrows, his heavy lids would not come up, but lay there over a pair of dim, blissful little eyes that could scarcely be seen. He had reached that delightful stage of drunkenness at which any passer-by who looks into a man's face is bound to say, "Well done, my lad, well done." The Blinker, as red as a boiled lobster, with his nostrils spread wide, was sniggering spitefully in the corner; only Nikolai Ivanitch kept the unchanging coolness proper to a real publican. There were a good many new faces in the room; but the Wild Gentleman I did not see.

L4

Behind the bar, filling almost the whole width of the opening, as one would expect, stood Nikolai Ivanitch in a gaudy print shirt, pouring out with his plump white hand, and with a lazy smile on his fat cheeks, two glasses of spirits for the friends who had just come in, the Blinker and the Gawk; and behind him, in the corner by the window, one caught sight of his sharp-eyed wife. In the middle of the room stood Yashka the Turk, a slender, well-made fellow of three and twenty, in a long-skirted coat of pale blue nankeen. He had the look of a rakish young factory hand, and did not appear to have much health to spare. His hollow cheeks, his big restless grey eyes, his straight nose with its thin quivering nostrils, his white sloping forehead with the fair curls brushed back from it, his large but handsome and expressive mouth — his whole face was that of a man of feeling and of passion. He was in a state of great excitement: he kept blinking, his breath came unevenly, his hands shook as if he were in an ague — and indeed he was in an ague, the sudden nervous ague that everyone knows who has ever spoken or sung before a company.

Beside him stood a man of forty or so, broad in the shoulder and broad in the cheekbone, 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 dark face, with its leaden tinge, and of his pale lips especially, might almost have been called ferocious if it had not been so quiet and so thoughtful. He scarcely moved, and only looked slowly about him, like an ox under the yoke. He wore a shabby coat of some sort with smooth brass buttons, and an old black silk handkerchief was wound about his huge neck. They called him the Wild Gentleman.

Straight opposite him, on the bench under the holy pictures, sat Yashka's rival, the contractor from Zhizdra: a thickset man, not tall, about thirty, pock-marked and curly-headed, with a blunt turned-up nose, quick brown eyes, and a scanty beard. He looked briskly round him, sitting on his hands, swinging his legs without a care and rapping the floor with a pair of dandified boots trimmed at the top. He had on a new thin coat of grey cloth with a plush collar, against which the edge of a scarlet shirt, buttoned close about the throat, showed up sharply. In the far corner, to the right of the door, a little peasant sat at a table in a narrow threadbare smock with a great hole in the shoulder. The sunlight came in a thin yellow stream through the dusty panes of the two small windows, and could not, it seemed, get the better of the darkness the room was used to: everything was lit up grudgingly, in patches here and there. But it was almost cool inside, and the sense of heat and closeness dropped from my shoulders like a load the moment I crossed the threshold.

L5

The first impression the man made on you was of a rough, heavy, but irresistible strength. He was clumsily built — "knocked together anyhow," as we say — but he gave off an air of indestructible health, and, oddly enough, there was a kind of grace of its own about his bear-like frame, coming perhaps from the perfect calm of his confidence in his own power. It was hard to say at a first glance what class this Hercules belonged to. He was not like a house serf, nor a tradesman, nor a broken-down copying clerk out of a place, nor a ruined squireen of the huntsman-and-bully sort. He was, quite simply, himself. Nobody knew where he had dropped from into our district. Some said he came of yeoman stock and had been in service somewhere; but nothing certain was known, and there was nobody to learn it from — certainly not from him, for a more silent and sullen creature never lived. Nobody could say for certain what he lived on, either. He carried on no trade, he visited nobody, he knew hardly a soul, and yet he had money — not much, but he had it. His way of going on was not modest, for there was nothing modest about him anywhere, but it was quiet: he lived as though he never noticed a soul about him and had no need of one.

The Wild Gentleman — that was the name they had given him; his real name was Perevlyesov — had immense influence over the whole neighbourhood. He was obeyed at once and willingly, though he had no sort of right to give orders to anybody, and never made the smallest claim on the obedience of the people he happened to fall in with. He spoke, and men did as he said. Strength will always have its way. He hardly touched drink, he had nothing to do with women, and he loved singing passionately. There was a great deal in him that was past explaining. Great forces seemed to lie in him, sullen and at rest, as if they knew that once they rose, once they got loose, they must destroy him and everything they touched along with him; and I am much mistaken if some such explosion had not already happened in his life, and if he had not learnt from it, and, having barely come off with his life, held himself now in a grip of iron. What struck me most in him was the mixture of a natural, inborn savagery with a nobility just as inborn — a mixture I have never met with in anyone else.

L6

"And who's to begin?" he asked in a voice that had changed a little, addressing the Wild Gentleman, who went on standing stock-still in the middle of the room, his thick legs planted wide and his great hands buried almost to the elbow in the pockets of his loose trousers.

"You, you, contractor," the Gawk gabbled, "you, my dear fellow."

The Wild Gentleman gave him a look from under his brows. The Gawk let out a feeble squeak, faltered, cast his eyes up at the ceiling somewhere, gave a twitch of his shoulders, and said no more.

"Draw for it," the Wild Gentleman said, taking his time over it, "and a pint on the counter."

Nikolai Ivanitch stooped, grunted, picked a pint bottle up off the floor and stood it on the table.

The Wild Gentleman glanced at Yakov and said, "Now, then."

Yakov rummaged in his pockets, brought out a halfpenny and made a mark on it with his teeth. The contractor drew a new leather purse from under the skirt of his coat, unknotted the string without hurrying, shook out a handful of small change and picked out a bright new halfpenny. The Gawk held out his battered cap with the peak cracked and hanging loose; Yakov dropped his coin in, and the contractor his.

"You do the drawing," said the Wild Gentleman, turning to the Blinker.

The Blinker smirked, took the cap in both hands, and began to shake it.

In an instant there was a deep silence; you could hear the two coins chinking faintly against one another. I looked round me: every face was strained with expectation; even the Wild Gentleman had half closed his eyes; even my neighbour, the little peasant in the torn smock, craned his neck to see.

The Blinker put his hand in and drew out the contractor's coin. Everybody let out a breath. Yakov flushed, and the contractor smoothed his hair with his hand.

"Didn't I tell you it would be you?" cried the Gawk. "Didn't I say so?"

"That'll do, that'll do; don't chatter," said the Wild Gentleman scornfully. "Begin," he added, with a jerk of his head towards the contractor.

"What song am I to sing?" asked the contractor, beginning to be nervous.

"Whichever you like," said the Blinker. "Sing whatever comes to you."

"Whichever you like, to be sure," Nikolai Ivanitch put in, slowly folding his arms across his chest. "Nobody's laying down the law to you. Sing what you please; only sing it well, and we'll give our verdict afterwards, honestly."

"Honestly, of course," said the Gawk, and licked the rim of his empty glass.

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

"Now then, don't hang about — begin!" the Wild Gentleman ruled, and dropped his eyes.

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.

• E1 — the names are Englished, and deliberately not Englished the way Garnett did it. рядчик → the contractor; Морга́ч → the Blinker; Обалду́й → the Gawk; Дикий-Барин → the Wild Gentleman. A reader who never sees the Russian has to be able to hear that two of these are nicknames and one is a title of estate, and transliteration hides that completely. Garnett's solutions are the Blinkard, the Gabbler and the Wild Master, and I have kept off all three on purpose, which is a declared and deliberate departure from a translator's ordinary freedom: the choices here are constrained by a contamination hazard, not only by the brief.
• E2 — the coin and the measure are domesticated. «осьмуха» → a pint, «грош» → a halfpenny. Both are wrong as quantities and right as reading experience: the sentence needs a small coin and a small bottle, instantly, with nothing to work out.
• E3 — repetition broken where English would break it. «долго… долго…» becomes It was long before I could doze; long before Yakov's voice would leave off, which keeps one repetition and drops the parallel verb; the two «он пел» openings in L1 are kept, because there English will bear them and they are doing rhetorical work.
• E4 — the paragraphing is mine and the Russian has none of it. L1, L2, L3, L4, L5 and L6 arrive as single blocks in the copy-text; I have broken L1 into five paragraphs, L2 into three, L3 into three, L4 into three and L5 into two. This is the largest single departure in the arm and it is not a sentence-level choice at all: an English reader at one sitting needs the air. It also means the two arms differ in a structural property that has nothing to do with the sentence-level trade the design is about — recorded here so the run's analysis can flatten it, as E-20260804c had to flatten Hapgood's paragraphing.
• E5 — «сбитнем» dropped, the idiom kept. "Knocked together anyhow," as we say — the drink goes, the local-idiom flag stays, and no note is possible.
• E6 — «однодворцы» → yeoman stock. Legally wrong and instantly readable; C6 in the other arm says why the other choice was available.
• E7 — «окончательно подгулявшего человека» → that delightful stage of drunkenness. The affectionate participle has no English single word, so the affection is moved into delightful and the state named flatly. R15-CRIB's C7 records that I could not solve this under the other brief either; this brief lets me name the thing and lose the tone of the naming.
• E8 — «милом» and «сладчайших». Delightful and blissful. «сладчайший» is a superlative of sweet applied to a drunkard's eyes; sweetest little eyes is available and, on this brief, reads as a mistake rather than as Turgenev's joke.
• E9 — what this regime cost. Three places I know are less faithful for being better English: the coin and the measure (E2), the loss of the diminutive layer almost entirely (L2's «ножки», «словцами» and L3's «огоньки», «звездочки» are all rendered without a diminutive marker), and «наливал своей полной и белой рукой» → with his plump white hand, where plump is the English observation and «полной» is the Russian one.