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

T-shinel-kapot-R06-v1 — Gogol, «Шинель» (1842), the two regions in which the coat is named and un-named

Regime R06 (lead single pass, source only, no return pass), v1.0. Translator: the lead agent, as a labeled subject (charter §3, A4). Cost $0; never ledgered.

Source. Nikolai Gogol, «Шинель» (1842), Wikisource ru from the Полное собрание сочинений (1937–1952) vol. 3 — the file stored whole as wiki/base/anchors/A-shinel-significant-person/shinel-gogol-1842-ru.txt. Two contiguous regions, frozen as workshop/experiments/E-20260811d-title-network/materials/ru_D.txt and ru_E.txt:

607 Russian words. The two regions carry 14 occurrences of шинел- and 4 of капот-.

Lineage. Second lead rendering from this work. The first is T-shinel-znachitelnoe-R06-v1 / -R04-v1 (S153, the portrait and the coda, 611 words), which shares no text with these regions.

Contamination: high, declared before the gate ran, with the priming named

Basis, in one line: «Шинель» is among the most translated Russian stories in existence, the lead's prior rendering of a different region of it measured DEPENDENT? against two published hands (S153), and — separately and worse — the lead saw four published renderings of this passage's crux before writing a word of it.

The priming is specific and is declared under R06 §1 rather than described in general terms. While locating these two regions inside the four stored hands, the lead read tool output that displayed:

• each hand's rendering of «капотом» at region D — Hapgood's cape, Field's cowl, Kassner's Kapuze, together with the surrounding clause in each;
• Garnett's rendering of «капота» at region E — dressing jacket — with its clause;
• Hapgood's and Field's clauses around «благородное имя шинели», and Hapgood's and Kassner's around «к Петровичу, портному».

That is priming on exactly the site this translation is most interesting at, and it is the reason contamination is high and not suspected. Nothing in the study limb rests on this translation being independent: the lead is not a hand in the census, as it was not at S153.

The measurement, run after this file was frozen at ed89623 and recorded here without touching the log below (E-20260811d-title-network/dependence.json, tabulated at that design's §7): tools/dependence_check.py returns DEPENDENT? against Garnett 1923 in both regions — region E at 47 shared 7-grams, 15 twelve-grams, 6 fifteen-grams, longest run 20 contiguous tokens ("he returned home in the happiest frame of mind took off the overcoat and hung it carefully on the wall"), region D at 12 / 1 / 0, longest run 12. This is the largest overlap this project has measured between a lead rendering and a published human translation. Against Hapgood and Field the same regions are clean (longest run ≤ 10).

Region D

The whole means of salvation lies in running as fast as you can, in some thin little overcoat, across five or six streets, and then stamping your feet thoroughly in the porter's lodge until all the faculties and talents for official business that froze on the way have thawed out again. For some time now Akaky Akakievich had begun to feel that he was being scorched somehow with particular force across the back and the shoulder, in spite of trying to run the legal distance as fast as he could. He wondered at last whether there might not be some sins in his overcoat. Examining it thoroughly at home, he discovered that in two or three places — on the back and the shoulders, precisely — it had gone to sheer gauze: the cloth had worn so thin that it let the light through, and the lining had come apart.

You must know that Akaky Akakievich's overcoat was also a standing object of ridicule to the clerks; they even stripped it of the honourable name of overcoat and called it a wrapper. And in fact it did have a strange construction of its own: its collar shrank a little more each year, since it was being used to patch the other parts. The patching showed no tailor's art and came out baggy and graceless, exactly so. Seeing how matters stood, Akaky Akakievich decided that the overcoat would have to be taken to Petrovich, a tailor who lived somewhere on the fourth floor up a back staircase, and who, in spite of his one blind eye and the pockmarks all over his face, did a fairly successful business mending clerks' trousers and dress-coats and all sorts of others — when, that is, he happened to be in a sober condition and was not nursing some other enterprise in his head. Of this tailor, naturally, there would be no need to say much; but since it is now the established thing that in a story the character of every person be completely designated, then there is no help for it, let us have Petrovich here too.

Region E

He did not notice the road at all, and found himself all at once at the department; in the porter's lodge he threw off the overcoat, looked it over all round, and committed it to the porter's particular care. It is not known how, but everyone in the department found out at once that Akaky Akakievich had a new overcoat and that the wrapper was no more. They all ran out that same minute into the porter's lodge to look at Akaky Akakievich's new overcoat. They began congratulating him, wishing him joy, so that at first he only smiled and then grew positively ashamed. And when they all came up to him and started saying that the new overcoat must be sprinkled, and that he must at the very least give them all an evening, Akaky Akakievich was thrown into utter confusion, and did not know what to do with himself, what to answer or how to get out of it. A few minutes later, blushing all over, he was beginning to assure them, quite guilelessly, that it was not a new overcoat at all, that it was nothing, that it was an old overcoat. At last one of the clerks, some assistant to a head clerk even, probably in order to show that he was not in the least proud and would consort even with those below him, said: "So be it, I will give the evening instead of Akaky Akakievich, and I invite you all to tea at my place today: as it happens, today is my name-day." The clerks, naturally, congratulated the assistant head clerk on the spot and accepted the offer with pleasure. Akaky Akakievich was beginning to excuse himself, but they all began saying that it was uncivil, that it was simply a shame and a disgrace, and there was no way at all he could refuse. Besides, he found it pleasant afterwards, when he remembered that he would have the chance through it to walk out in the new overcoat even in the evening. That whole day was for Akaky Akakievich exactly like the greatest and most solemn holiday. He returned home in the happiest frame of mind, took off the overcoat and hung it carefully on the wall, having admired the cloth and the lining once more, and then deliberately dragged out, for comparison, his former wrapper, which had fallen completely to pieces. He looked at it, and even laughed himself: such was the distance between them! And for a long time afterwards, at dinner, he kept smiling to himself whenever the condition the wrapper was in came into his mind. He dined cheerfully, and after dinner he wrote nothing at all, no papers of any kind, but played the sybarite a little on his bed until it grew dark. Then, without dragging the business out, he dressed, put the overcoat on his shoulders and went out into the street.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written, frozen with it, before any evaluation of it was designed (charter §3, A4; workshop/translations/README.md). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only, which the front matter asserts for the page.

1. The decision the whole passage is built on: шинель and капот

Gogol's sentence «от нее отнимали даже благородное имя шинели и называли ее капотом» is a translator's instruction printed inside the text. It says that one word is the coat's name, that the name is a dignity, and that a second word is the insult. Everything else in these two regions depends on whether the two words stay two words.

шинель → overcoat, held at all 14 sites, without exception. A шинель is a military-cut greatcoat with a fall collar, the standard outer garment of a Petersburg clerk; greatcoat is closer on the cut and carries a martial colouring the passage does not want, and cloak (which suggests something without sleeves) is wrong on the object. The competing consideration was not lexical but rhythmic: overcoat is three syllables and appears nine times in region E, twice inside eleven words. A version that varied it would read better sentence by sentence and would delete the story's title from the paragraph in which the title's object arrives. The alternative that was live and was not taken: vary at the two sites where the referent is unmistakable from context (it, the new one).

шинелишке → some thin little overcoat. The diminutive is pejorative and applies to the generic poor clerk, not to Akaky's own coat. Thin little overcoat keeps the network stem at the cost of four words where Russian has one; the live alternatives were a thin little cloak (breaks the network) and a wretched thin coat (breaks it worse). Where Russian marks by suffix, English here pays in length or in the network — one or the other.

капот → wrapper, held at all 4 sites. A капот in 1840s Russian is a woman's loose housecoat, from French capote: the demotion is from a military greatcoat to a garment worn indoors by a woman. English of the period has a word for exactly that thing — wrapper — and it carries the domestic and faintly ridiculous colouring the joke needs. Live alternatives recorded at the moment of writing: dressing gown (right register, wrong period-flavour, and two words where one was wanted at the three later sites), bed-jacket (too specific, and wrong for the object Akaky drags out at the end), housecoat (anachronistic in feel).

The priming, stated at the site it bears on. Before writing, the lead had seen cape (Hapgood), cowl (Field), Kapuze (Kassner) and dressing jacket (Garnett) at this site. Wrapper is none of the four and the reasoning above is the reasoning that was written down; that is not a claim of independence, and none is made. contamination: high.

2. What the two networks cost in the two regions, site by site

18 of 18. The lead's rendering is maximally fixed on both networks and keeps them distinct. This is a fact about what was written, not a claim that it is right: holding a designation at every site is a choice with costs, and §1 records the cost it paid at D1 and in region E's rhythm.

3. Six other decisions, none of them about the networks

• серпянка → sheer gauze. Серпянка is a cheap open-weave cotton scrim used for interlining. Sackcloth is wrong (too coarse, and biblical); cheesecloth is right on the fabric and wrong on the century. The clause that follows — «сукно до того истерлось, что сквозило» — glosses it, so the word can afford to be approximate and the gloss carries the sense.
• пропекать → scorched. The verb is to bake through, and Gogol uses a heat word for cold. Kept as a heat word (scorched) rather than normalised to pierced or bitten; the inversion is the joke and English will take it.
• вспрыснуть новую шинель → the new overcoat must be sprinkled. The idiom is to wet a new possession's head. Christened was live and was rejected: it supplies a church that the Russian's bare sprinkle only glances at. Sprinkled keeps the strangeness and loses the transparency.
• помощник столоначальника → assistant to a head clerk, then the assistant head clerk. The two Russian forms are the same office; the second English form is shorter because the sentence is already carrying congratulated and accepted the offer with pleasure.
• посибаритствовал → played the sybarite. A single denominal verb from Sybarite. English has no verb; the periphrasis keeps the Greek and loses the compression. Lolled and lounged were live and would have deleted the classical allusion, which in a story about a copying clerk's one good day is doing work.
• точно twice, differently. «выходило точно мешковато и некрасиво» — came out baggy and graceless, exactly so; «был точно самый большой праздник» — was exactly like the greatest holiday. Same particle, two functions, and no English word covers both.

4. What R06 cost here, recorded because the regime exists to be measured

Two things were written and left standing that a return pass would have reopened, recorded now so the record is not reconstructed later:

• D, «And in fact it did have a strange construction of its own» — the did is emphatic where the Russian «В самом деле» is merely confirming, and the emphasis is the drafter's.
• E, «such was the distance between them!» — Russian «такая была далекая разница!» is such was the far-off difference, and distance silently resolves a Russian phrase that is slightly odd in Russian too.

Neither was changed, per R06 §2. There is no revision and no R04 output from this run.