Repository path: workshop/translations/ruska/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-ruska-R06-v1 — Jan Neruda, «O měkkém srdci paní Rusky» S1–S7, CS→EN (draft)

This is the frozen draft required by R04 §Procedure step 2a. It is the straight-through pass, written before the revision, and it is committed separately so that the revision has something to be a revision of. It carries a caveat that disqualifies it as a clean R06 artifact — see §Standing on this draft.

• 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). Czech Wikisource transcription, fetched 2026-08-09, stored at ../source-cs-full.txt; the seven segments under translation at ../source-cs-segments.txt (630 Czech words, the story's opening five paragraphs, ¶1–¶5).
• Language pair: Czech → English. The project's first Czech, its first West Slavic source, and its eighteenth source language.
• Cost: $0. Lead translation is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Standing on this draft

R04 §2a exists so that every close rendering yields a single-pass artifact at no extra cost. This one may not be used as an R06 output in any comparison. The lead had already read all seven segments closely and worked through several lexical cruxes (krev a mlíko, funus, pětmecítma, ostrostřelec) while selecting the passage, so this draft is not a cold first pass and the draft↔revision gap here understates what a cold R06 would show. Declared here rather than discovered later.

The draft

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. His shop on the square, too, was packed the whole day long, as though it had been rammed full. 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 whoever he could not serve he greeted, nodded to, smiled at. Mr Velš was in fact smiling all the time, in the shop, in the street, in church, everywhere; the shopkeeper's 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 house while he lived, 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 does not stir this way or 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 set for four o'clock. 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 soot, 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 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, cream and roses. 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 of fifty, but a sturdy 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 pulled at her features, her lips began to tremble, abundant tears burst out. She sobbed heavily.

Draft notes (not the translator's log — the log is on the R04 artifact)

Cruxes carried into the revision unresolved: whether to keep the ledger-order name Velš Josef; whether English can hold the register split funus / pohřeb; what to do with the double prý; whether cream and roses is a substitution or a scaffold for krev a mlíko.