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

T-shinel-znachitelnoe-R04-v1 — Gogol, «Шинель», the person of consequence: his remorse, and the collar

• Source. ../source-unit.txt, 611 Russian words in two blocks. Block A — the significant person's remorse after Akaky's death, and his evening. Block B — the ghost at his collar and the flight home. Public domain; provenance and copy-text on ../README.md.
• Language pair. Russian → English. The project's first unit from this work; RU→EN is the shelf's most-worked pair and this is its first recurrence-network unit.
• Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead, source-only, draft then self-revision against the Russian in the same session. The draft is frozen and separately committed as ../R06-v1/ at 6d3e0f1, before this revision was begun (R04 §Procedure 2a).
• Cost. $0. Lead translation is never ledgered (charter §3, §6, A4).
• Contamination: high. Basis and measurement: ../README.md §Contamination. The declaration was written before the gate was run; the gate confirmed it. This artifact is a practice artifact and process evidence. It is not a hand in the census (R04 §Known limitations, and RS-20260810w §3).
• Evaluation pointers. None designed. This translation is the translation limb of ARM-recurrence step 1; the study limb measures four published hands and does not score this one.

Translation — Block A

But we have, however, quite deserted a certain person of consequence, who was in truth very nearly the cause of the fantastical turn taken by what is nevertheless a perfectly true story. First of all, the duty of justice requires it to be said that a certain person of consequence, soon after the departure of poor Akaky Akakievich, roasted to a frazzle, felt something like regret. Compassion was not foreign to him; his heart was open to a good many kind impulses, notwithstanding that his rank very often prevented them from showing themselves. As soon as his visiting friend had gone out of the study, he even fell to thinking about poor Akaky Akakievich. And from that time on, almost every day, there rose before him the pale Akaky Akakievich, who had not withstood an official roasting. The thought of him troubled him to such a degree that a week later he even resolved to send a clerk to him, to find out how he was and whether there might not really be some way of helping him; and when it was reported to him that Akaky Akakievich had died suddenly of a fever, he was even left stunned, heard the reproaches of his conscience, and was out of sorts all day. Wishing to distract himself a little and to forget the disagreeable impression, he set off for the evening to the house of one of his friends, where he found a respectable company and, best of all, everyone there was of almost one and the same rank, so that there was nothing whatever to constrain him. This had a wonderful effect on the disposition of his spirits. He expanded, became pleasant in conversation, amiable — in a word, he passed the evening very agreeably. At supper he drank a couple of glasses of champagne — a means which, as is well known, works not badly in the matter of gaiety. The champagne communicated to him a disposition toward various extraordinary measures, namely: he decided not to go home yet but to look in on a lady of his acquaintance, one Karolina Ivanovna, a lady, it seems, of German extraction, toward whom he felt relations of an entirely friendly kind. It must be said that the person of consequence was by now a man no longer young, a good husband, a respected father of a family. Two sons, one of whom was already serving in a department, and a comely sixteen-year-old daughter with a somewhat arched but pretty little nose, came every day to kiss his hand, saying: bonjour, papa. His wife, still a fresh woman and not in the least bad-looking, would first give him her hand to kiss and then, turning it over on the other side, would kiss his hand.

Translation — Block B

All at once the person of consequence felt someone seize him very firmly by the collar. Turning round, he made out a man of small stature in an old worn-out uniform coat, and not without horror recognized in him Akaky Akakievich. The clerk's face was pale as snow and looked a perfect corpse. But the horror of the person of consequence passed all bounds when he saw the dead man's mouth twist and, breathing horribly of the grave upon him, utter such speeches as these: "Ah! so here you are at last! at last I have — that is — got you by the collar! it is your cloak I want! you did not trouble yourself about mine, and you roasted me into the bargain — hand over your own now!" The poor person of consequence all but died. Firm of character as he was in the department and in general before his inferiors, and although at a single look at his manly bearing and his figure everyone said, "Ooh, what character!" — here he, like a great many men of heroic exterior, felt such terror that he even began, not without reason, to be apprehensive of some fit of illness. He himself flung his cloak off his shoulders as fast as he could and shouted to the coachman in a voice not his own: "Drive home, full speed!" The coachman, hearing the voice that is usually produced at decisive moments and is even accompanied by something a good deal more effectual, tucked his head down between his shoulders just in case, swung his whip and tore off like an arrow. In a little over six minutes the person of consequence was already at the entrance of his own house. Pale, terrified and without his cloak, instead of going to Karolina Ivanovna's he had come home, dragged himself somehow to his room, and passed the night in very great disorder, so that the next morning at tea his daughter said to him straight out: "You are quite pale today, papa." But papa said nothing, and not a word to anyone about what had happened to him, and where he had been, and where he had meant to go.

Translator's log

Written at translation time and frozen before any evaluation of this translation was designed (charter §3, A4). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Evaluative sentences carry internal-judgment-only, and the front matter carries it for the page.

1. The decision this unit exists for: a fixed English phrase, seven times

Gogol's designation for the general is «значительное лицо» — literally a significant face/person — and in these two blocks he uses it seven times and never once names the man. Across the whole story the root значительн- occurs 35 times, 23 of them in the bigram значительн* лиц*.

Decision, taken in the draft and not revisited in the revision: one English phrase, held at all seven sites — person of consequence. The live alternatives were important personage, prominent personage, significant person, personage of consequence, and the option of varying the phrase for English's sake (the general, the great man, he) at the sites where a repetition falls heavily. I did not take the last one anywhere.

Two things pushed the decision, and only the first is about English:

• The designation is doing the work a name would do. It is the only handle the reader has on this character, and it is a formula: Gogol sets it in разрядка (spaced type) at several of its occurrences, which is a typographical marking that this is a quoted label rather than a description. A label that changes is not a label.
• I know that Person of Consequence is a published English solution. I did not open any English rendering of these two blocks before freezing the draft (R04 §1), but I could not unknow the phrase, and I am not going to claim I chose it independently. contamination: high.

What it cost, in the one place I can name. «одно значительное лицо» is indefinite every time — a certain person of consequence — even after the man has been introduced and even in the middle of his own scene, which is part of the joke. The draft wrote this certain person of consequence at occurrence 2, which quietly makes him definite. The revision put it back to a certain person of consequence. That is the only network site the revision touched, and it moved toward the source's own repetition rather than away from it.

2. Two smaller recurrences, and the revision closed one of them

• распек- (to roast, of a superior scolding an inferior). Gogol uses it three times across these blocks: «распеченного в-пух», «должностного распеканья», «да еще и распек». The draft held the English root at all three — roasted to a cinder / an official roasting / you roasted me into the bargain. The revision changed only the first, to roasted to a frazzle, because «в пух» is utterly, to shreds and a cinder is the wrong end of the fire. The root held 3 of 3 in both draft and revision. I record it because it is the same decision as §1 taken without the source pressing a formula on me.
• «расположение». «Это имело удивительное действие на душевное его расположение» … «Шампанское сообщило ему расположение к разным экстренностям». The draft split this: the disposition of his spirits … inclined him toward. The revision closed it: communicated to him a disposition toward. This is the recurrence the draft did not see and the revision did — the opposite of the pattern the project has recorded three times, where a self-revision looks at a split class and leaves it split (S152 and its predecessors). One instance is one instance.

3. What English could not carry, named before anyone scores anything

• The gender joke. «лицо» is neuter and Gogol attaches masculine agreement to it throughout: «одно значительное лицо, который… сделался… был… почувствовал… чуть не умер». The construction is ungrammatical and stays ungrammatical for thirty-five occurrences. English person takes no gender, so there is nothing for the mismatch to sit on. Not carried, anywhere, by any device. I considered and rejected it for the pronoun: it would have made a different joke.
• «лицо» = face. Immediately after «ужас значительного лица», Gogol writes «Лицо чиновника было бледно, как снег» — the same noun, in its literal sense, on the other man. The epithet's dead metaphor stands up and becomes a face at exactly the moment the clerk's face appears. Person of consequence / the clerk's face keeps neither half. Not carried. No English phrase I could find makes person mean face, and I did not try to buy it by moving the pun elsewhere.
• «того». Akaky's hesitation particle in «я тебя того, поймал за воротник». The draft used so to speak, which is a phrase; the revision used — that is —, which is a stall. того is neither: it is the character's tic, and it appears in his living speech too. Nearest available, not equivalent.

4. Additions I refused, and one I nearly made

• «пошел во весь дух домой» — the draft wrote "Home, and drive like the devil!". The revision cut the devil. «во весь дух» is at full spirit, an ordinary intensifier; in a story whose whole third act is a walking corpse, putting a devil into a general's mouth is an unlicensed addition of exactly the kind accuracy names. "Drive home, full speed!".
• «такие речи» is mock-elevated for what is about to be a threat from a corpse. Draft these words; revision such speeches as these, which keeps the register step up.
• «целовала его руку» — the draft ended the sentence would kiss his. and dropped the second «руку». Gogol writes the noun twice in the sentence — she gives him her hand to kiss, turns it over, kisses his hand — and the ellipsis is a thing English does and Russian here does not. Restored in the revision. English elegance was what deleted it, which is the same force that deletes a recurrence network. (The draft of this log said three times; the count script caught it, which is what the script is for.)

5. Register and one flat loss

«приговаривая: bonjour, papa» — the children recite the French at him daily; «приговаривая» is the verb for saying something formulaically over and over. Saying is flat and I kept it, having tried intoning (too grand) and reciting (explains the joke). Recorded as a loss, not as a solution — internal-judgment-only.

6. Counts, computed by script

analysis/log_counts.py in this directory parses this log and ../source-unit.txt and asserts every number in §1–§2 (the seven network sites, the 3-of-3 распек- root, the two расположение sites, the single revision change inside the network). Per workshop/translations/README.md, a tally over a log is computed and the script is committed with it.