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

T-smierc-R04-v1 — Reymont, «Śmierć», opening scene

Source. Władysław Stanisław Reymont, «Śmierć» (1893), 1923 Nowele text via Polish Wikisource; cleaned copy at workshop/experiments/E-20260731e-option-census/runs/smierc_pl_clean.txt, paragraphs 0–51. 904 Polish words → 1,132 English words. The project's first translation from Polish, its thirteenth source language.

Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source only, draft then self-revision. The draft is T-smierc-R06-v1, frozen in commit f1b07ab before this revision began (R04 §Procedure 2a).

Cost. $0. Lead translation is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Contamination: none, measured. tools/dependence_check.py unmodified, against Benecke & Busch, "Death", in Selected Polish Tales (Oxford 1921; Project Gutenberg 8378). Probe unit ¶0–9 (230 words), run before the span was fixed and before the rest was drafted: longest shared run 8 tokens, 0 shared 12-grams, 0 shared 15-grams, verdict clean. Whole-artifact figure below. The comparator was extracted to file programmatically and never read.

One priming event is declared and it is on the abandoned artifact, not this one. While establishing that a comparator existed for the first candidate work (Sienkiewicz's «Janko muzykant»), roughly the first quarter of Curtin's 1893 English was printed to the transcript. That work was then dropped when its gate fired at 18 tokens (workshop/translations/janko/R06-v1/unitA.md). No English rendering of any part of «Śmierć» has been read by the translator at any point.

Evaluation. None. No quality judgment about this translation is made or elicited by anyone in E-20260731e; the experiment consumes its option census and nothing else.

— Father! Father! get up, d'ye hear? come on now, get up a bit.

— Lord God! Mary! eh! — he groaned, as she shook him hard. Only his face showed out from under the sheepskin — a face fallen in, crumpled, ploughed over with furrows, grey as the same earth he had worked all those years, and grown over with grey hair like the stubble-breaking of late autumn. His eyes were clenched shut, and from between half-open lips, livid and cracked, his tongue hung out; he was gasping hard.

— Get up! come on! — his daughter was shouting.

— Grandad! — piped a small girl in nothing but a shift and an apron tied tight across her chest, climbing up to see into the sick man's face.

— Grandad! — and she had tears in her blue eyes and sorrow in her grubby little face.

— Grandad! — she called once more, tugging at the pillow.

— Get out of it! — cried her mother, and catching her by the scruff shoved her in behind the stove.

— Out, you bitch! — she screamed, tripping over an old, half-blind brute of a dog that was nosing round the bed. — Outside! will you not go, you! — and she kicked with her wooden clog so hard that the poor brute went over, but was at the shut door in a moment, whimpering. The little one snuffled by the stove, grinding at her nose and eyes with her fists.

— Father, get up now, while I'm asking you civil!

The sick man said nothing; his head had turned over to one side and the rattling came heavier and heavier. There was not much life left in him.

— Get up, what's this, is it here with me you're wanting to die like a dog? Not while I'm living. Off to Julina with you, you old cur! You signed the land over to her, so let her keep you… Come on now, while I'm still asking…

— O sweet Jesus! O Mary!…

A spasm dragged at his face, which was beaded with the sweat of his pain. All at once his daughter tore the featherbed off him, took him round the middle and threw him half onto the floor, so that only his head and shoulders were still on the bed — limp as a log, and like a log stiff and dried out.

— A priest! Father! — he whispered through the rattle.

— I'll give you your priest, I will! It's the pigsty for you to die in, you that wronged me, like a dog — and she took him hard under the arms; but that moment she let go and hastily flung the featherbed back over the whole of him, for a shadow had flickered past the window. Someone was coming to the cottage.

She had barely time to heave the old man's legs back onto the bed. She had gone livid with rage, and she beat out the featherbed furiously, straightening the bed over him.

Dyziakowa came in.

— Praised be Jesus Christ.

— For ever and ever! — she muttered, looking up from under her brows at the newcomer.

— Good day to you, how are you keeping? are you well?… — God reward you… middling…

And how's the old man? is he well?

And she stamped, knocking the snow off her clogs.

— Eh! not he. He's only just drawing breath.

Neighbour! neighbour! — she bent over the old man.

— A priest! — groaned the sick man.

— Would you look at that, good people! He didn't know me. The poor soul's wanting a priest…

There'll be a dying for the old man, for certain there will, no mistake of it, he's finished. O people, people… Well then, have you sent for the priest?

— And who have I got to send, then?

— You'd never leave a Christian soul without the holy comfort.

— I'll not leave him by himself and I'll not go running; and maybe he'll mend yet.

— Aye, to be sure! Do you not hear how it plays in the poor creature's chest? That's nothing, that is; that's only his innards squeaking, for certain, or his stomach's got the cramp. Why, last year, when my Walek was ailing…

— My dear soul, run for the parish priest, and be quick about it, for look you…

— True, true, the poor creature looks to be at his last; he must be fetched, he must — and she pulled her apron tighter about her head.

— God keep you.

— Go with God!

Dyziakowa went out, and Antkowa set about her cleaning: scraped the mud off the floor, swept, strewed ashes, and then started setting out the pots and washing them. Every moment she threw a hating look at the bed, spat, clenched her fists, or else with a groan caught at her head in a desperate helplessness.

— Fifteen morgs, the pigs, three head of cattle, the gear, the clothes — the half of it, no mistake, a good six thousand! Lord God!

And as if the thought of so great a sum had galled her the worse, she scoured till it thundered, and then banged the bowls up onto the shelf.

— May you—! may you—! — and she went on thinking out loud: — The hens, the geese, the calves, so much good stuff, so much good stuff! and he signed it all over to that slattern! May the wasting take you, may the worms eat you through under some fence, for the wrong you've done me, for my being left an orphan!

She sprang at the bed in a fury, with an enormous shout.

— Up! — and seeing that the sick man did not stir, she fell to shaking her fists over him and railing:

— To die — that's what you came to me for, is it? and maybe I'm to pay for the burial? buy a new sukmana? oh aye! Not while I'm living; you'll get what's coming. If Julina's so good, be off to her. Was it me that was to keep you in your old age? She's the better one, since you—

She did not finish, for a little bell rang and the priest came in with the sacrament.

Antkowa bowed down to his feet, wiping eyes that watered with rage, and having set out holy water and the sprinkler on a chipped plate, went out into the entry, where several people were already standing, having come in behind the priest.

— Praised be.

— For ever. — Well, how is it?

— Nothing at all; he came to the one he wronged to die, and he won't die. O poor me, poor me! — and she began to cry.

— True, true; it's rotting for him and living for you — they answered with one voice, nodding their heads.

— Is that what a father of one's own body does?… — she went on. — Didn't Antek and I toil and slave like a pair of oxen? I never sold one egg, nor a quarter-pound of butter; I kept slipping it to him, and what little milk there was I tore out from under my own girl's mouth and gave it to him, for he's old after all and a father — and he signed everything over to Tomek! Fifteen morgs, the cottage, the cows, the pigs, the calf, and the carts, and the gear — that's nothing! O unhappy me! there's no justice left in the world, there's none, oh! oh!

She leaned against the wall and cried aloud.

— Don't cry, neighbour, don't cry. The Lord God is merciful, but He's choosy too; He'll pay you back yet — said one of the women.

— You're a fool, you'd do better not to yap for nothing. A wrong's a wrong. The old man will get his dying done, and the want will stay — her husband answered.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-07-31, before E-20260731e's design was written. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. The full per-site option census — every rendering actually weighed at each of forty sites — is the separate machine-readable artifact workshop/experiments/E-20260731e-option-census/census.json, written under the instrument frozen at 8c12508 before the source span was chosen. What follows is the prose account of the same work.

The whole-text policy, recorded here and deliberately NOT entered as a census site

Reymont writes the narrator in standard literary Polish and every peasant in a thick regional dialect — wstańta, słysta, mota, zdrowiśta, ksindza, prowda, esce, kce, wszyćko, gymby, jo, bidno. The dialect is not decoration: the story's whole subject is a woman who speaks a language in which turning your dying father out of doors can be said plainly.

Policy adopted before drafting: mark the speech as old, rural and non-standard without borrowing any identifiable English region. The devices are syntactic and lexical (d'ye hear, asking you civil, for certain it will, look you, the want will stay) rather than orthographic; no dropped g's, no eye-dialect. The narrator is left in plain modern English, matching the source's own split.

This is a whole-text policy, not a site choice, and it is recorded here rather than in the census precisely because note (bfg) says that class has been confused with a site three times in this project's own materials. It is not one of the forty sites and it is not one of the twenty-four primary items.

What the policy cost, and it is the honest entry: the revision found the draft's markers pulling in two directions — ee and oh aye are Northern English, look you is Welsh-marked in modern ears — and the R06→R04 change is largely the removal of the first kind. The policy is easier to state than to hold, and a reader who knows the register will find aye still sitting inside a sentence otherwise free of region.

Where the work actually was

The two-word institutions. Three loci carry a whole customary arrangement in one noun. Wycug (S34) is the maintenance a Polish peasant retains for life when he signs his holding to an heir — the entire premise of the story, since the old man signed to Tomek and is now being refused it by Antkowa, who owed him nothing. English has no word; every option was a paraphrase, and the chosen one (keep you in your old age) buys clarity by dissolving the legal fact into a sentiment. Morg (S28) was retained untranslated against acres, on the ground that Antkowa is reciting an inventory and an inventory in foreign units still reads as an inventory. Sukmana (S33) was retained for the same reason and with less confidence — it is the coat a man is buried in, and a new coat would have carried the whole of the sarcasm at the cost of the object.

The names. Dyziakowa and Antkowa (S19, C6) are wife-of forms: the suffix is the information. Retaining them makes two opaque names; Dyziak's wife makes a phrase where the source has a name. Retention was chosen and the loss is total — an English reader cannot know that Antkowa is being named as Antek's, which matters at the exact moment she says didn't Antek and I toil.

The greeting. Niech będzie pochwalony / Na wieki (S20, S21) is a fixed call-and-response, and the source elides it the second time to Pochwalony / Na wieki. The English follows the ellipsis (Praised be Jesus Christ → Praised be), which was the one place where the structure of the Polish decided the English without a real choice being available.

The animal verb. Zdychać (S11) is the verb for an animal dying, used of her father, four times. English has no verb that is both ordinary and class-marked in that way; croak and peg out are jocular, perish is elevated. The chosen die like a dog imports a simile the Polish does not have, and that is the largest single addition in the translation.

One genuine ambiguity, left ambiguous. Suka, na dwór! (S08) — suka is both the common noun bitch and a perfectly ordinary name for a farm dog, and the sentence is the first word of a paragraph, so capitalisation decides nothing. Rendering it as a name loses the abuse; rendering it as abuse loses the possibility that the dog is simply being called. Abuse was chosen because the kick follows.

And one thing found only in revision. Zamrze się starymu is impersonal-reflexive: not the old man will die but something nearer there will be a dying, for the old man, with nobody doing it. The draft flattened it to It'll come to dying for the old man; the revision took the construction seriously (There'll be a dying for the old man), which is more awkward English and closer to what the grammar does. The same construction returns as the story's last line here — starymu się zamrze, a bida ostanie — and the two are now rendered alike, which they were not in the draft.

What the census is and is not

The census records, at each of forty sites, every English rendering the translator would have been prepared to write. It records no judgment about any of them, and chosen records what happened rather than what was right. The lead never judges its own translation (charter §5), and nothing in E-20260731e asks anyone to.