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

T-senilia-openings-R04-v1 — the openings of ten more prose poems from Turgenev's Senilia

Source. И. С. Тургенев, Стихотворения в прозе (Senilia, 1878–1882), the 1882 published set. Text: ru.wikisource «Senilia (Тургенев)», wikitext retrieved 2026-07-30, which reproduces the «Наука» 1982 PSS; cross-checked span by span against az.lib.ru/t/turgenew_i_s/text_0920.shtml. Public domain. The exact Russian translated is workshop/experiments/E-20260730f-recall-floor/materials/spans.final.json, entries G01–G10, committed with this file. 437 Russian words.

Regime. R04 (lead close translation, source-only), v1. Translator: the lead agent, as a labeled subject. Cost $0 — lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Why these ten, and why the selection rule was frozen first. These spans are the distractors in E-20260730f-recall-floor, the forced-choice recall control that ARM-forced-defence step 2 may not proceed without. Which spans they are was decided by a script committed before any span was seen (materials/select_spans.py, commit 9682fdb): poems in published order, skipping every poem the lead has already translated and every poem under 120 words, opening paragraphs until the span reaches 35 words. Openings on purpose — an opening is the most reproduced part of a short work, so it is where a model holding Garnett is most likely to hold her.

Priming: none, and this is the load-bearing claim on the page. Constance Garnett's 1897 Dream Tales and Prose Poems (Gutenberg #8935) was downloaded before this translation and not opened: only its byte count and SHA-256 prefix were printed. Nothing from Garnett appears above or below this line. The lead has translated fifteen other prose poems (T-senilia-R04-v1, T-senilia-clean-R04-v1, T-roza-R04-v1) and in S026 measured 11–21-token shared runs with Garnett on eight of them; none of those poems is among these ten, by construction of the selection rule.

Contamination: suspected at freeze, pending measurement. Garnett's Turgenev is public domain, canonical, and on Gutenberg; a declaration without a measurement is a placeholder (standing rule, ARM-overlap-dependence). The measurement is taken after this file and its log are frozen, in E-20260730f-recall-floor/materials/align.py, and is prospective in S045's sense: the number did not exist when the prose was written. This front matter is not revised by the measurement — the two-step is the record.

Two source repairs, both made before translating and both declared (materials/finalise_spans.py):

• G07 «Маша». Both reachable witnesses read «Проживая — мною лет тому назад — m Петербурге», which is not Russian. ru.wikisource names az.lib.ru as its own source, so they are one witness, not two; rvb.ru — the witness S026 used and found correct against az's eleven scanning errors — returns HTTP 403 through this environment's proxy. The reading is unambiguous from the syntax and is repaired to «много лет тому назад — в Петербурге». The repaired words are ordinary and any English comparator will have them, so the repair cannot manufacture agreement or disagreement.
• G10 «Чернорабочий и Белоручка». ru.wikisource strips the speaker attributions from this dialogue and az.lib.ru keeps them. Without them the passage cannot be translated at all, so the az form is the text of record for this one span.

Apart from these, the ten spans are identical in the two witnesses after typographic normalisation — which, given the shared provenance, is a transcription check and not two independent witnesses. Same limit as T-senilia-R04-v1 states about its own check.

The translation

G01 — Деревня

Последний день июня месяца; на тысячу верст кругом Россия — родной край. Ровной синевой залито всё небо; одно лишь облачко на нем — не то плывет, не то тает. Безветрие, теплынь… воздух — молоко парное!

The last day of the month of June; for a thousand versts round about, Russia — the country I was born in. The whole sky is flooded with an even blue; one small cloud upon it, and that half drifting, half melting away. No wind, warm weather… the air is new milk straight from the cow!

G02 — Разговор

Вершины Альп… Целая цепь крутых уступов… Самая сердцевина гор. Над горами бледно-зеленое, светлое, немое небо. Сильный, жесткий мороз; твердый, искристый снег; из-под снегу торчат суровые глыбы обледенелых, обветренных скал. Две громады, два великана вздымаются по обеим сторонам небосклона: Юнгфрау и Финстерааргорн.

The summits of the Alps… A whole chain of sheer ledges… The very core of the mountains. Above the mountains a pale-green sky, bright and dumb. A hard, cruel frost; firm, glittering snow; out of the snow jut the grim masses of ice-bound, weather-worn rock. Two vast bulks, two giants, rear themselves on either side of the sky-line: the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn.

G03 — Старуха

Я шел по широкому полю, один. И вдруг мне почудились легкие, осторожные шаги за моей спиною… Кто-то шел по моему следу. Я оглянулся — и увидал маленькую, сгорбленную старушку, всю закутанную в серые лохмотья. Лицо старушки одно виднелось из-под них: желтое, морщинистое, востроносое, беззубое лицо.

I was walking over a wide field, alone. And all at once I fancied I heard light, wary steps behind my back… Someone was coming along in my track. I looked round — and saw a little bent old woman, muffled all over in grey rags. Her face alone showed out from under them: a yellow, wrinkled, sharp-nosed, toothless face.

G04 — Нищий

Я проходил по улице… меня остановил нищий, дряхлый старик. Воспаленные, слезливые глаза, посинелые губы, шершавые лохмотья, нечистые раны… О, как безобразно обглодала бедность это несчастное существо! Он протягивал мне красную, опухшую, грязную руку… Он стонал, он мычал о помощи.

I was going along the street… a beggar stopped me, a decrepit old man. Inflamed, watering eyes, lips gone blue, rough rags, unclean sores… Oh, how hideously want had gnawed this luckless creature bare! He was holding out to me a red, swollen, dirty hand… He groaned, he lowed for help.

G05 — «Услышишь суд глупца…»

Ты всегда говорил правду, великий наш певец; ты сказал ее и на этот раз. «Суд глупца и смех толпы»… Кто не изведал и того и другого? Всё это можно — и должно переносить; а кто в силах — пусть презирает!

You always spoke truth, great singer of ours; and this time too you spoke it. «The fool's judgment and the laughter of the crowd»… Who has not tasted both the one and the other? All of it a man can bear — and ought to bear; and let him who has the strength for it despise it!

G06 — Конец света

Чудилось мне, что я нахожусь где-то в России, в глуши, в простом деревенском доме. Комната большая, низкая, в три окна; стены вымазаны белой краской; мебели нет. Перед домом голая равнина; постепенно понижаясь, уходит она вдаль; серое, одноцветное небо висит над нею как полог.

It seemed to me that I was somewhere in Russia, in the back of beyond, in a plain country house. A big low room with three windows; the walls daubed over with white paint; no furniture. In front of the house a bare plain; sinking by degrees, it goes off into the distance; a grey, one-coloured sky hangs above it like a bed-curtain.

G07 — Маша

Проживая — много лет тому назад — в Петербурге, я, всякий раз как мне случалось нанимать извозчика, вступал с ним в беседу. Особенно любил я беседовать с ночными извозчиками, бедными подгородными крестьянами, прибывавшими в столицу с окрашенными вохрой санишками и плохой клячонкой — в надежде и самим прокормиться и собрать на оброк господам.

Living — many years ago — in Petersburg, I used, every time I happened to hire a sledge-driver, to get into talk with him. I was particularly fond of talking with the night drivers, poor peasants from the villages outside the town, who came up to the capital with a little ochre-painted sledge and a wretched nag — in the hope of feeding themselves and of scraping together the quit-rent for their masters.

G08 — Дурак

Жил-был на свете дурак. Долгое время он жил припеваючи; но понемногу стали доходить до него слухи, что он всюду слывет за безмозглого пошлеца. Смутился дурак и начал печалиться о том, как бы прекратить те неприятные слухи?

There lived in the world a fool. For a long time he lived in clover; but little by little rumours began to reach him that he passed everywhere for a brainless vulgarian. The fool was put out, and began to fret over how those disagreeable rumours might be stopped.

G09 — Два четверостишия

Существовал некогда город, жители которого до того страстно любили поэзию, что если проходило несколько недель и не появлялось новых прекрасных стихов, — они считали такой поэтический неурожай общественным бедствием. Они надевали тогда свои худшие одежды, посыпали пеплом головы — и, собираясь толпами на площадях, проливали слезы, горько роптали на музу, покинувшую их.

There existed once a city whose inhabitants so passionately loved poetry that if several weeks went by and no beautiful new verses appeared, they accounted such a failure of the poetic harvest a public calamity. They would put on their worst clothes then, and strew ashes on their heads — and, gathering in crowds in the squares, they shed tears and murmured bitterly against the muse who had abandoned them.

G10 — Чернорабочий и Белоручка

Чернорабочий. Что ты к нам лезешь? Чего тебе надо? Ты не наш… Ступай прочь! Белоручка. Я ваш, братцы! Чернорабочий. Как бы не так! Наш! Что выдумал! Посмотри хоть на мои руки. Видишь, какие они грязные? И навозом от них несет и дегтем — а твои вон руки белые. И чем от них пахнет?

THE LABOURER. What are you pushing in among us for? What do you want? You're not one of ours… Take yourself off! THE MAN WITH WHITE HANDS. I am one of yours, brothers! THE LABOURER. Not a bit of it! One of ours! The idea! Just look at my hands. Do you see how dirty they are? They reek of dung and of tar — and yours there are white hands. And what do they smell of?

Translator's log

Frozen with the translation, before any comparator was opened and before the evaluation that uses it was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence here carries internal-judgment-only.

The constraint this translation has and the other lead translations do not

These renderings will stand next to Garnett's, and a reader will be asked which is published. That does not license writing them differently from how they would otherwise be written — a distractor deliberately made worse would be a rigged control, and a distractor deliberately made Garnett-like would be an invented agreement. The rule adopted before starting, and kept: translate each span exactly as R04 would have it translated if there were no experiment, in the register Turgenev's prose asks for, and let the comparison fall where it falls. Every decision below was taken on the Russian.

The one thing the design does impose is register: nineteenth-century Russian literary prose is rendered in the English that period asks for, not in 2026 English. That is R04's normal setting, not a concession to the experiment; but if it were not, the experiment would be measuring period style rather than memory, so it is stated.

Decisions

1. «молоко парное» (G01) is the hardest three words in the ten spans. It is milk still warm from the cow, and Russian has a single adjective for it. English has the noun phrase "new milk" (period) and nothing else; "warm milk" is a different thing, "fresh milk" is a supermarket. Taken as "new milk straight from the cow", which spends six words on one and is the only way found to keep both the warmth and the immediacy. What is lost is that Turgenev's word is ordinary and this English is a gloss.

2. «родной край» (G01) — "the country I was born in". Родной is the adjective of birth, family and belonging at once; "native land" is the standard English and is a degree more official than the Russian, which in this poem is domestic. The first-person turn ("I was born in") makes explicit what the Russian leaves in the adjective, and is the cost of not having the adjective.

3. «немое небо» (G02) — "dumb sky", kept literal. "Silent" is the natural English and is weaker: немой is the word for a person who cannot speak, and the whole poem is two mountains talking over a landscape that cannot. "Dumb" is the word that keeps the poem's premise audible, and it is period-plausible English in this sense.

4. «мычал» (G04) — "lowed". Стонал is groaned; мычал is the noise of an ox, and is used of a person who cannot form words. The idiomatic English is "mumbled", which loses the animal entirely and makes the beggar merely indistinct rather than reduced below speech. "He groaned, he lowed for help" keeps the animal and is the stranger English of the two; the strangeness is Turgenev's.

5. «обглодала… это несчастное существо» (G04) — "had gnawed this luckless creature bare". Обглодать is to gnaw a bone clean, and the same verb governs the S026 «Последнее свидание» span («словно обглоданную руку»), where it was taken as "gnawed bare". Kept consistent, deliberately: the poems are one book and one translator.

6. The quotation marks in G05 are Turgenev's and are kept as guillemets. He is quoting Pushkin's sonnet «Поэту» — «Услышишь суд глупца и смех толпы холодной» — and the poem's whole gesture is that the quotation is a quotation. T-senilia-R04-v1's standing typographic rule (guillemets where the Russian has guillemets, dash for spoken dialogue) governs and is followed. No English rendering of Pushkin was consulted; the line is rendered from the Russian in Turgenev's text.

7. «полог» (G06) — "bed-curtain". A полог is the curtain hung round a peasant bed, not a canopy of state. "Canopy" is the obvious English and raises the register exactly where Turgenev lowers it: the end of the world arrives in a room with no furniture. "Bed-curtain" is homelier and slightly odd, which is the trade taken.

8. «извозчик» (G07) — "sledge-driver", not "cabman". The Russian is the general word for a hired driver, and Garnett-era English would say "sledge-driver" or "cabman" according to the vehicle. Turgenev's next sentence supplies санишки — a contemptuous diminutive of сани, sledge — so the vehicle is settled by the text and "cabman" would contradict it two lines later. Санишки itself became "a little ochre-painted sledge": the diminutive's contempt is carried by "little" and by "wretched nag" in the same clause, which is redistribution rather than addition.

9. «оброк» (G07) — "quit-rent". The obligation a serf or ex-serf owed his landlord in money rather than labour. "Quit-rent" is the established English term and is obscure; "rent" and "dues" are both clearer and both wrong, since the whole point is that the money is owed to a person, not for a thing. Kept obscure and recorded here.

10. «безмозглого пошлеца» (G08) — "a brainless vulgarian". Пошлец is the agent noun of пошлость, the untranslatable Russian vice of complacent triviality. "Vulgarian" is the closest English noun and is narrower — it means socially coarse rather than spiritually second-hand. Rejected: "philistine" (imports Arnold), "cad" (imports class), "trivial fool" (paraphrase).

11. «жил припеваючи» (G08) — "lived in clover". Literally lived singing to himself. English has no verbal adverb of that shape; "in clover" is an idiom of the right period and register and loses the singing. Considered and rejected: "lived merrily enough", which keeps the tone and drops the idiom.

12. «поэтический неурожай» (G09) — "a failure of the poetic harvest". Неурожай is the crop failure of a bad agricultural year, and the joke is that the city treats verse as a harvest. "Dearth of poetry" is shorter and kills the joke by naturalising it. The longer phrase keeps the agricultural noun exposed.

13. G10's two speakers had to be named, and there is no good English for either. Чернорабочий is an unskilled manual labourer — "navvy" is too specific, "workman" too general; "THE LABOURER" taken. Белоручка is a person with white hands, i.e. one who has never done manual work, and is a single Russian noun of contempt. English has no noun at all: "gentleman" imports rank, "shirker" imports laziness, "idler" is wrong because the man has been six years in irons for the peasants' sake. Taken as "THE MAN WITH WHITE HANDS", a phrase where the Russian has a word, and the contempt has to come from the labourer's own lines rather than from the name. This is the largest single loss in the ten spans, and it is structural rather than local: the poem's title is the two nouns side by side.

14. Second person throughout G05 and G10 is «ты», and English has only "you". In G05 the singer is addressed with the intimacy owed to Pushkin; in G10 the labourer's «ты» to a stranger is an insult. Nothing carries either. In G10 the rudeness was pushed into the verbs and the interjections — "Take yourself off", "Not a bit of it", "The idea!" — which is compensation, and compensation in a different place is a change of where the poem is rude.

What was consulted

The Russian, the two Russian witnesses named above, and nothing else. No English rendering of any of these ten poems, or of the Pushkin line quoted in G05, was opened before this file was frozen.

R04-v1