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

T-ruska-R04-v1 — Jan Neruda, «O měkkém srdci paní Rusky» S1–S7, CS→EN (close)

• Source. Jan Neruda, «O měkkém srdci paní Rusky», in Povídky malostranské, 2nd edn (Praha: Ed. Valečka, 1885), pp. 107–112; first published 1875. Public domain (Neruda d. 1891). Single witness: the Czech Wikisource transcription of that edition, fetched 2026-08-09 and stored whole at ../source-cs-full.txt; no second free witness of this story was reachable and no collation was performed (Gutenberg has no Neruda; the Wikisource page's ONLINE field points to a Kramerius scan the project did not open). The seven segments under translation are at ../source-cs-segments.txt — 630 Czech words, the story's opening five paragraphs, all of it narration.
• Language pair: Czech → English. The project's first Czech, its first West Slavic source, its eighteenth source language.
• Regime: R04 v1.0 (lead close, source-only). Draft frozen first as T-ruska-R06-v1 at 32e06b3 per R04 §2a, with a caveat on that artifact that disqualifies it as a clean R06 output.
• Cost: $0 (charter §3, A4).
• Lineage: draft T-ruska-R06-v1 → this revision. Three further arms are derived from this text by declared operator tables and live with the experiment, not here: GENERIC, AWKWARD, WRONG (workshop/experiments/E-20260809c-generic-voice/materials/).

Contamination

suspected, and the basis is bibliographic, not measured. No published English translation of this story is freely reachable: the two English Povídky malostranské collections the project can identify — Edith Pargeter, Tales of the Little Quarter (1957), and Michael Henry Heim, Prague Tales (1993) — are both in copyright and neither is readable online, so tools/dependence_check.py has no comparator to run against and was not run. The standing rule (CLAUDE.md) is that a contamination: declaration without a measurement is a placeholder that can hide either end of the measured range, and this one is exactly that; it is declared as unmeasured rather than as low.

Both translations plausibly sit in the lead's training data, so suspected is the honest floor. Note (bhb)'s repository check was run before the passage was selected and returned zero: no page in this repository mentions Neruda, and workshop/translations/ holds no prior rendering of any Czech text.

What the experiment this artifact was made for does and does not need from that. Nothing in E-20260809c turns on this rendering's independence: all four arms are derived from this text by declared operator tables, so a remembered published phrasing would sit identically in every arm and cannot produce a difference between them. Where independence would matter — a claim that this is a good rendering, or a comparison against a published hand — no such claim is made.

The translation

S1. Velš Josef, grocer, was among the wealthiest tradesmen of the Malá Strana. I think he had in his shop simply everything that India and Africa bring forth, from liquorice root and burnt ivory for polish to gold dust. And his shop on the square was full the whole day long, as if it had been rammed tight. Mr Velš was in the shop all day, except on Sundays during high mass at St Vitus's, and except during certain great parades held by the Prague burgher corps, for Mr Velš was a sharpshooter — first company, first squad, third man always to the right of Lieutenant Nedoma.

S2. In the shop he would gladly have served every comer himself, though he had two assistants and two apprentices there, and anyone he could not serve, he greeted, nodded, smiled. Mr Velš was in fact smiling all the time, in the shop, in the street, in church, everywhere; the business smile had graven itself into his cheek muscles and could no longer get out of them. A dear little figure — not tall, fat, with a little head forever wagging, and with that smile. In the shop, a flat cap and a leather grocer's apron; in the street, a great long blue coat with gold buttons and a bulbous top hat.

S3. I had a certain trifling notion of Mr Velš. I was never in his household while he was alive, but whenever I imagined how he might look at home, the picture was always the same: Mr Velš sits without his cap but in his apron at the table, before him stands a plate of steaming soup, Mr Velš has his elbow propped on the table and his hand holds a filled spoon midway between the plate and his smiling mouth, and so he sits there as though carved, and the spoon stirs neither this way nor that. A silly notion, I know.

S4. But at the time when our tale begins — the third of May, 184-, at four in the afternoon — Mr Velš was no longer even alive. He lay above the shop on the first floor, in his best room and in a beautiful coffin. The lid was not yet on — Mr Velš went on smiling even after death and with his eyes pressed shut. The funeral was appointed for four. The hearse, the so-called "tasselled" one, was already standing on the square before the house. The company of burgher sharpshooters stood there too, band and all.

S5. The best room was nearly full, nothing but Malá Strana notables. It was known that the parish priest of St Nicholas's would come with his assistants a little later, as was the custom with every more respected neighbour, so that it should not be said he was being hurried out of the gate. The room was close. The afternoon sun beat in and broke in the great mirrors, the great wax candles round the catafalque burned yellow and smoked, the hot air was saturated with their smoke, with the smell of the freshly varnished black coffin and of the shavings under the corpse, perhaps already with the smell of the corpse itself. Silence reigned; people only whispered. There were no weepers, for Mr Velš had left behind no near relations, and the distant ones always say: "If only I could have my cry out — but I have no tears, not if it tore the heart out of me." — "Yes, yes, but that's all the worse."

S6. Now Mrs Ruska came into the room. Widow of the late Rus, innkeeper at the Gráf gardens, where the finest gunners' balls used to be held. Since it is really nobody's business, I shall merely remark here in passing what used to be told about how Mrs Ruska came to be widowed. In those days every artillery regiment had a special company of bombardiers, young lads, chubby, blood and milk. That company, they say, Mr Rus utterly detested, on account, they say, of his little wife somehow, and once they beat him terribly for it. But, as was said, it is nobody's business. Mrs Ruska had been eating her widow's bread these five-and-twenty years, lived childless in her own house on the Peasant Market, and if anyone had asked what she did with herself, the answer would have been: She goes to funerals.

S7. Mrs Ruska pushed her way through to the catafalque. A woman in her fifties, but a strapping one, of more than middling height. A black silk mantilla hung from her shoulders; a black bonnet trimmed with light green ribbons framed her round and candid face. Her brown eyes fixed themselves on the dead man's face. Something gave a twitch across her face, her lips began to tremble, copious tears sprang out. She sobbed heavily.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-09 before E-20260809c was designed. Decisions and alternatives; no quality claims. Where an evaluative sentence appears it is marked internal-judgment-only.

D1 — Velš Josef, the ledger order (S1). Czech puts the surname first in registers, on shop signs, and in the officialese Neruda is imitating in the story's first four words. English does not. Live options: Josef Velš (natural, loses the register joke), Velš, Josef (a list entry, too clerical), Velš Josef (kept). Kept. The rest of the passage calls him pan Velš / Mr Velš, so the inversion happens once and never again, which is what the Czech does too.

D2 — kupec (S1). Merchant, grocer, shopkeeper, colonial-goods dealer. His stock is liquorice, ivory black and gold dust, i.e. a Prague koloniál. grocer for the trade word and tradesmen for obchodníků in the same sentence, so the two Czech words stay two English words.

D3 — jak by nabil (S1). An idiom: as though it had been rammed/loaded full. The draft wrote packed … as though it had been rammed full, which says the image twice. Revised to full the whole day long, as if it had been rammed tight — one statement, one image.

D4 — the sharpshooter list (S1). první setnina, první tlupa, třetí muž vždy od pana lajtnanta Nedomy v pravo is asyndetic and absurdly precise, and the precision is the joke. Kept as an em-dashed appositive with no connectives added. lajtnant is lost: it is the Germanism (Leutnant) that marks the militia's Austrian furniture, and English Lieutenant is neutral. No option was found that did not either annotate or archaise; the loss is recorded, not repaired.

D5 — the three verbs (S2). pozdravil, zakýval, usmál se — only the first governs the relative koho. The draft supplied objects for all three (greeted, nodded to, smiled at), which regularises the Czech. Revised to he greeted, nodded, smiled, matching the Czech's dwindling syntax.

D6 — obchodní úsměv … vryl v lícní svaly a nemohl již z nich ven (S2). The figure is that the smile is stuck inside the man's face and cannot get out, and it is the best thing in the paragraph. Options for obchodní: shopkeeper's, tradesman's, business. Chose the business smile — the flattest of the three, because the sentence's comedy is in the verb, not the adjective, and a picturesque adjective competes with it. vryl kept as had graven itself, reflexive, over was engraved: the Czech reflexive makes the smile the agent of its own imprisonment.

D7 — the diminutives (S2, S6). figurka, hlavičkou, ženuška. English has no productive diminutive and the standard workarounds are little + noun or a pet form. Used A dear little figure, a little head forever wagging, his little wife. Three littles in a 630-word passage is more than the English norm carries comfortably and fewer than the Czech has; it is a compromise in both directions, taken deliberately.

D8 — the two verbless sentences (S2). Milá figurka, nevelký, tlustý… and V krámě v placaté čepici… have no verb at all. English tolerates this in description. Kept verbless, with a dash and a semicolon doing the work Czech does with case endings.

D9 — the present-tense soup (S3). The imagined scene switches to the present and stays there for sixty words. Kept in the present throughout, including sits there as though carved. The alternative — backshifting to would sit — reads more idiomatically and destroys the reason the sentence exists, which is that the narrator is looking at the picture while he describes it.

D10 — Hloupá představa, to vím (S3). A silly notion, I know. The to vím is a shrug. Options: I know it is silly, A silly notion, I know, Silly, of course. Kept the middle one; it is the only one that keeps představa in both sentences of the pair (trifling notion … silly notion), which the Czech does with představu … představa.

D11 — funus (S4, S6). Czech has pohřeb (neutral) and funus (colloquial, slightly rough). Neruda uses funus throughout, and the story's last joke depends on its ordinariness. English has one word. The register split is lost and nothing was invented to replace it; burying was considered for the final sentence and rejected as a local dialect effect the Czech does not have.

D12 — Na čtvrtou hodinou určen byl funus (S4). Czech fronts the time and inverts. English fronting (For four o'clock the funeral was appointed) would be marked in a way the Czech is not. Kept the unmarked order and kept the slightly formal appointed for určen, which is where the officialese actually sits.

D13 — čadily / čadem (S5). The candles smoke and the air is saturated with that same smoke; the Czech repeats the root. The draft broke the repetition (smoked … soot). Revised to burned yellow and smoked, the hot air was saturated with their smoke, restoring it.

D14 — nezůstavilť (S5). An archaic perfective with the emphatic -ť clitic — the narrator briefly sounding like a chronicle. Rendered for Mr Velš had left behind no near relations: the for and the pluperfect carry a little of it. The clitic is unrenderable and is gone.

D15 — the tense shift in the same sentence (S5). nezůstavil (past) → vzdálenější říkají vždy (present) → two quoted lines that belong to no one in the room. Kept exactly: and the distant ones always say. This is the narrator stepping out of 184- into a general truth about mourners and back again, and regularising the tense would remove one of the passage's clearest signs that somebody particular is telling this.

D16 — krev a mlíko (S6). Literally blood and milk; the Czech idiom for a fresh, high-coloured complexion. English has milk and roses, cream and roses, a picture of health. The draft wrote cream and roses. Revised to the literal blood and milk on the reasoning already in ES-20260724-fluency-and-foreignness: substituting the English idiom buys fluency by assimilation, whereas the literal is scaffolded here by mladí, buclatí hoši standing immediately before it, so the reader can get there. This is the one place in the passage where the draft and the revision disagree about the kind of English wanted, and it is recorded as such.

D17 — the double prý (S6). prý pan Rus naprosto nenáviděl, prý nějak kvůli své ženušce. The particle disclaims twice inside one clause, which is the joke: the narrator is repeating gossip while pretending not to. Kept both — they say, Mr Rus utterly detested, on account, they say, of his little wife somehow — at the cost of two commas English would rather not have.

D18 — Poněvadž do toho vlastně nikomu nic není, podotknu zde jen mimochodem (S6). The narrator announces that a thing is nobody's business and then tells it, and closes the digression by saying so again. Both halves kept verbatim in structure (Since it is really nobody's business, I shall merely remark here in passing … But, as was said, it is nobody's business). The jen mimochodem is the load-bearing word and became merely … in passing.

D19 — pětmecítma (S6). Archaic Czech for twenty-five (five-and-twenty, same formation). five-and-twenty is the one place where English has the identical archaism available, so it was taken.

D20 — Padesátnice (S7). One noun meaning a woman of fifty. English has no such noun. A woman in her fifties — the draft's A woman of fifty is closer to the Czech's precision but reads as a stated age rather than as a type. statná went from sturdy to strapping.

D21 — Zatrhlo jí to obličejem (S7). Impersonal, with to as a dummy subject: it gave a twitch through her face. Options: Her face twitched (natural, loses the impersonal), Something pulled at her features (the draft), Something gave a twitch across her face (kept). The Czech's point is that the thing is not hers and is not named.

D22 — place names (S1, S5, S6). Malá Strana kept in Czech (it is the collection's title and the story's subject); chrám sv. Víta → St Vitus's; mikulášský pan farář → the parish priest of St Nicholas's; Selský trh → the Peasant Market, translated rather than kept, because it is a descriptive market name and not a proper landmark in the way the other two are. zahrada Gráfovská → the Gráf gardens, keeping the surname.

D23 — what this passage would cost a translator with a rule against strangeness. internal-judgment-only. The features that make the narrator this narrator — the once-only inverted name, the asyndetic parade rank, the smile that cannot get out of the cheeks, the three diminutives, the two verbless sentences, the sixty words of present-tense soup, the double prý, blood and milk — are, without exception, features a fluency rule would have grounds to remove, and none of them is propositional. The passage was selected for the experiment before this was written down and this sentence is not evidence of anything; it is the reason the passage looked usable.