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

Turgenev, «Роза» (1878) — the prose poem, complete

Source. Иван Сергеевич Тургенев, «Роза», dated April 1878, one of the Стихотворения в прозе (Senilia), first published in Вестник Европы (December 1882). Public domain (Turgenev d. 1883). Text as printed in Полное собрание сочинений и писем в тридцати томах, М.: Наука, 1982, т. 10, с. 144—145.

The unit is the whole poem — 21 paragraphs, 319 whitespace-separated Russian tokens. Not an excerpt: a complete work, which is rarer in this repository than a passage and is the reason this text was chosen over a longer story. Every comparator translates the same complete unit, so the extent rule of the study limb is satisfied by construction rather than by hand-alignment.

Text and provenance — two witnesses, checked token by token. Retrieved from ru.wikisource (Роза_(Тургенев), raw wikitext, fetched 2026-07-26) and from rvb.ru (rvb.ru/turgenev/01text/vol_10/02senilia/0234.htm, cp1251, fetched 2026-07-26), which reproduces the same PSS volume. After normalising the two typographic variants (rvb prints ... where Wikisource prints …; rvb carries inline page-number markers 144, 145) the two agree on every one of 319 tokens, similarity 1.0000 with a single opcode: rvb additionally carries the dateline «Апрель, 1878», which Wikisource omits and which is not part of the poem's body.

State the limit of that check honestly. The Wikisource page names rvb.ru as its own source link. This is therefore, like T-pripadok-R04-v1, a transcription check against the declared parent, not two independent witnesses. It catches the realistic failure mode — a Wikisource transcription slip — and nothing more. The dateline discrepancy is the only thing it found, and it is a formatting decision rather than a corruption.

Stored as source-ru.txt (body only, 319 tokens, 21 paragraphs), SHA-256 4f1395b877b08d4b1131af77714551549aee868d442b04e4205b158f1d976507.

Regime. R04 v0.1 — lead close translation, source only. No API call, no cost, never ledgered (charter §6, A4).

Contamination: suspected — and this label is a PLACEHOLDER, per note (jj). Turgenev's Poems in Prose have been in English since the 1890s and «Роза» is among the more reprinted of them, so published renderings plausibly sit in the lead's training data; but the sweep of 2026-07-25 established that the lead's own contamination labels are uninformative about rank, so this word carries no evidential weight. The measurement is what counts, and a scoreable point prediction for this cell was registered in workshop/experiments/E-20260726-period-control/design.md §5 (P0) before any English text of this poem was fetched.

Contamination, MEASURED 2026-07-26 (S027) — and measured against a distribution rather than a single denominator. RS-20260726-period-control. In the sweep-comparable three-text cell (lead, Garnett 1897, Hapgood 1904) CI(5) = 1.500 / 1.480 at the two parameter-free extremes, mid-range for the sweep's six cells, and the lead is the most central text at n = 4, 5 and 6 under both extremes. The stronger statement is the rank one: the lead's overlap with Garnett 1897 exceeds 41 of the 42 measured overlaps between Garnett and Hapgood across the whole of Senilia — at every n, under both extremes. It is close to symmetric between the two Victorians (41/42 and 41/42 under none; 41/42 and 38/42 under frozen), which is the centroid signature and not the memory signature. The registered self-estimate (P0, CI(5) < 2.0) failed on the cell as designed. contamination: suspected is left in the front matter as the conservative label; the measurement is the informative statement.

Freeze order, which is the point. This file, its log, source-ru.txt and the study limb's frozen design are committed before any English rendering of «Роза» is opened, fetched or extracted. It is verifiable in git: the commit that adds this file adds no English text of the poem and creates no runs/ directory. Note (f), load-bearing for the eighth session running.

PRIMING — DECLARED, and it is not nil this time. R04 §1 requires that priming be declared on the artifact. While establishing (from page metadata, deliberately, without opening the page body) that a 21st-century translation of this poem exists on Wikisource, the MediaWiki revision-history API returned the page-creation edit summary, which by MediaWiki convention quotes the first characters of the created text. Those characters were:

Created page with "'''ROSE''' by I. Turgenief Last days of August ... autumn i

So eight words of one of the three comparators — its title line and its rendering of the poem's first sentence, truncated mid-word — were seen before translating. Nothing else of any comparator was seen: no other sentence, no incipit of Garnett or Hapgood, no excerpt. The exposure is bounded to paragraph 1 of 21 (7 of 319 source tokens, 2.2%), and the study limb carries a pre-registered sensitivity analysis (P6) that recomputes every headline with paragraph 1 removed from all four texts. This is recorded here rather than in the study limb because the artifact is where R04 §1 puts it.

The translation

The last days of August… Autumn was already coming on.

The sun was going down. A sudden gusty downpour, without thunder and without lightning, had just swept across our wide plain.

The garden in front of the house burned and smoked, all of it flooded with the fire of the sunset and the deluge of the rain.

She was sitting at the table in the drawing-room and gazing out into the garden through the half-open door with a stubborn pensiveness.

I knew what was coming to pass just then in her soul; I knew that after a short, though agonizing, struggle she was at that very moment giving herself up to a feeling she could no longer get the better of.

Suddenly she rose, went briskly out into the garden, and disappeared.

An hour struck… another struck; she did not come back.

Then I got up and, leaving the house, set off along the avenue down which — I had no doubt of it — she too had gone.

Everything around had grown dark; night had already closed in. But on the damp sand of the path, glowing scarlet even through the gloom that had spilled over everything, a roundish object could be made out.

I bent down… It was a young rose, barely opened. Two hours before I had seen that very rose on her breast.

I carefully picked up the flower that had fallen in the mud and, going back into the drawing-room, laid it on the table in front of her armchair.

And here she was, back at last — and, crossing the whole room with light steps, she sat down at the table.

Her face had both grown pale and come alive; quickly, with a merry confusion, her lowered eyes, as though made smaller, ran about from side to side.

She caught sight of the rose, snatched it up, glanced at its crumpled, dirtied petals, glanced at me — and her eyes, coming suddenly to a stop, shone out with tears.

"What are you crying about?" I asked.

"Why, about this rose. Look what has become of it."

Here I took it into my head to make a display of profundity.

"Your tears will wash away this dirt," I pronounced with a weighty expression.

"Tears do not wash, tears burn," she answered, and turning to the fireplace she threw the flower into the dying flame.

"Fire will burn better still than tears," she cried, not without a kind of dash — and her beautiful eyes, still glittering with tears, laughed insolently and happily.

I understood that she too had been burned.

Translator's log

Written at translation time, frozen with the translation and before any evaluation of it was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

1. The -лит- echo, which is the poem's one piece of sound-architecture. Turgenev writes «весь залитый пожаром зари и потопом дождя» in paragraph 3 and «сквозь разлитую мглу» in paragraph 9 — the same root (лить, to pour) at the two ends of the poem's descriptive arc, first for light and water together, then for darkness. English has no single verb that will do both jobs; pour is wrong for the garden and thin for the dusk. Live options were (a) ignore the echo and translate each for sense — "bathed in", "diffused"; (b) force one word through both — "flooded ... flooded", which reads as a slip rather than a figure; (c) keep the liquid family and let the echo be a family resemblance instead of a repetition. Chosen: (c) — "all of it flooded with the fire of the sunset and the deluge of the rain" / "through the gloom that had spilled over everything". What is lost: in Russian it is audibly the same root twice; in English it is only the same kind of word twice.

That paragraph also carries the poem's central collision — «залитый пожаром» is literally doused with a conflagration, and «залить» is the ordinary Russian verb for putting a fire out. The sentence extinguishes and ignites the garden in one breath, and then pairs the fire with «потопом», a flood. "Flooded with the fire" keeps the contradiction on the surface where Turgenev put it; "bathed in the blaze" would smooth it away.

2. «горел и дымился». Burned and smoked — not "steamed", which is what is physically happening (a rain-soaked garden under a red sky). "Steamed" explains the image and thereby cancels it. The whole sentence depends on the reader taking the fire literally for a beat.

3. «с упорной задумчивостью». Упорный is stubborn, unyielding, persisting against resistance; задумчивость is inwardness — being lost in thought. English has no adjective that puts obstinacy inside reverie. Options: "with a fixed abstraction" (loses the effort), "with obstinate thoughtfulness" (schoolroom), "brooding" (imports gloom the Russian does not have). Chosen "with a stubborn pensiveness", which is faintly odd in English — deliberately, because the collocation is faintly odd in Russian too.

4. «Я знал, что́ свершалось тогда в ее душе». Свершаться is the high register of происходить: not "was happening" but something nearer was being accomplished, the verb used of destinies and rites. "I knew what was going on in her soul" is the natural English and is a register-flattening. "I knew what was being accomplished" is accurate and unspeakable. Chosen "I knew what was coming to pass just then in her soul" — a biblical-register English idiom for a high-register Russian verb, at the cost of a slight archaism the Russian does not carry.

5. «мучительной» and «сладить». Мучительный is torturing, from мучить; "agonizing" chosen over "painful" (too mild) and "tormenting" (too gothic in a subordinate clause). Сладить с is colloquial — to manage, to cope with, to get the upper hand of — and the colloquialism matters because it lands at the end of a very literary sentence. "Master" is the smooth choice; "get the better of" was chosen to keep the drop in register.

6. The formal вы — the same problem as «Припадок», from the other side. The narrator and the woman address each other with вы, the formal pronoun, throughout the only dialogue in the poem — two people who have just, by the poem's own account, passed the point of no return in a love affair, still on formal terms. This is not decorative: it is most of what the poem knows about them. English has no way to show it. In T-pripadok-R04-v1 §3 the reverse case («мужчины говорят им ты») could be handled by glossing the pronoun, because there the pronoun was the sentence's subject matter. Here it is the medium, not the subject, and glossing would be an intrusion — "'What are you crying about?' I asked, using the formal pronoun" is a footnote wearing a sentence's clothes. Nothing was done, and the loss is total. Recording it because the project's typology should have a case where the honest choice was to lose the thing entirely.

7. «Тут я вздумал выказать глубокомыслие». The hinge of the poem, and the only sentence in which the narrator sees himself. Вздумать is to take it into one's head — an impulse, faintly foolish. Выказать is to display, to show off. Глубокомыслие is "profundity" and is very often ironic. The English must be self-mocking without becoming a joke, because the woman's answer has to land as a rebuke and not a punchline. Live options: "Here I thought I would say something profound" (too casual, loses выказать), "At this I bethought me to display profundity" (archaic pastiche), "Here I took it into my head to make a display of profundity" — chosen: took it into my head for вздумал, make a display of for выказать, and the abstract noun left standing where Turgenev left it.

8. «Слезы не моют, слезы жгут». Five words, two clauses, one syllable of difference between the verbs. The narrator has just said «смоют» (wash off, perfective, with an object); she answers with the bare imperfective «моют» — she strips his verb of its prefix and its object and turns it into a general truth. Keeping that requires the English verb to be bare too: "Tears do not wash, tears burn." "Tears don't wash things clean, tears burn" would explain it and kill it. The contraction was also rejected — "don't" is quicker and lighter than the Russian, which is flat and final.

9. «не без удали». Удаль is a specifically Russian value-word: reckless dash, the bravado of someone who throws away something they mind about. "Not without bravado" imports swagger; "not without spirit" is too mild; "not without recklessness" turns it into a fault. Chosen "not without a kind of dash", the indefinite article doing the work of the litotes.

10. «засмеялись дерзостно и счастливо». The eyes, not the woman, do the laughing — kept, because the displacement is the point and English tolerates it here. Дерзостно is the high-register form of дерзко: insolent, audacious, defiant. "Insolently" chosen over "boldly" (loses the offence) and "impudently" (too small). The pairing with «счастливо» is what makes the line, and both adverbs were kept in that order, adverb-adverb, against the English temptation to make one of them an adjective.

11. «Я понял, что и она была сожжена». Eight words, and everything depends on not adding to them. И она — she too, the rose having been burned two sentences earlier. Сожжена is the perfective passive: burned up, consumed. Options were "burnt up" (finishes the metaphor for the reader), "burnt out" (imports exhaustion, a modern idiom), "consumed" (elegant, and it names the feeling the poem refuses to name). Chosen "I understood that she too had been burned" — the plainest available past passive, holding both readings (burned like the rose; burned by what she has given herself up to) exactly as long as the Russian holds them. Понял is "understood", not "realised": the narrator, who a moment ago was making a display of profundity, is now genuinely late to something.

12. «виднелся кругловатый предмет». Кругловатый — "roundish", the -оватый suffix of approximation — and предмет, "object", the flattest available noun. Turgenev withholds the rose for one sentence by refusing to describe it, and the temptation in English is to write "something round" or "a small round shape", both of which are more natural and both of which restore a narrator who is looking rather than one who is merely registering. "A roundish object could be made out" was kept deliberately drab.

13. «ярко алея». Алеть is an intransitive verb meaning to show scarlet — English has no verb for it, only redden, which means to become red. Rendered as "glowing scarlet", a participle plus adjective for a single word, which lengthens the clause; the alternative, "showing bright scarlet", was rejected as flatter.

14. Dialogue punctuation. Turgenev uses the Russian dash convention. Quotation marks were used instead, on the ground that the dash convention in English signals foreign text rather than speech and would be the only foreignising move in an otherwise close-but-idiomatic rendering. The choice is invisible to the study limb's metric, which discards all punctuation before counting — recorded here so that it is not later mistaken for a measurement-driven decision.

15. «аллея» → "avenue". A tree-lined walk in a Russian country garden, not a city avenue and not a mere path — the poem later needs a separate word for «дорожка» ("the path"), so the two must stay distinct in English. "Alley" is a false friend; "walk" was live and would have been period-appropriate, but loses the trees, which are why it is dark under them.