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

Korolenko, «Сон Макара» I, opening (Russian → English)

Source. В. Г. Короленко, «Сон Макара» (1883; first published Русская мысль, 1885), §I opening, 270 words. Text: ru.wikisource Сон Макара (Короленко)/ПСС 1914 (ВТ:Ё) — the 1914 collected works in modernised orthography, retrieved 2026-07-26 via the MediaWiki API. Public domain (PD-old-70). The exact Russian translated is source-ru.txt in this directory, committed in the same commit as this file.

Regime. R04 (lead close translation, source-only), v0.1. Translator: the lead agent, as a labeled subject. Cost $0 — lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Why this work, and why this passage. ARM-tierD's design needs a lead-provenance reference translation (charter §5.1: references of both provenances, "so the result is not an artefact of one source"), and the arm page rules out every Turgenev and Chekhov text the project holds: the lead reproduces 11–21 consecutive words of Garnett from the Russian alone. What was wanted was therefore Russian prose — same source language as the held-out arm, so the two are not separated by a language confound — from a work whose English translations are not canonical. Korolenko qualifies on the second count in a way that is checkable rather than asserted: the only freely reachable English Makar's Dream is Marian Fell's 1916 collection, and no English Korolenko is anybody's default the way Garnett's Turgenev is.

Priming. None. Fell's English of this story was downloaded before the translation, extracted to a file, and not read — a deliberate blind, so that the contamination measurement below is a measurement and not a memory of something opened ten minutes earlier. Only its character count, word count and SHA-256 prefix were printed. Russian-side apparatus (the wikisource collation header, the story's own subtitle and section numbering) was read.

Contamination: suspected at freeze, pending measurement. Korolenko has been translated into English and those translations could sit in the lead's training data; that is the honest declaration to make before measuring, and the project's standing rule (2026-07-26, ARM-overlap-dependence) is that a declaration without a measurement is a placeholder. The measurement is a selection gate on the design, not a flag on this page: it is computed in E-20260726d-tierD-heldout/contamination/, after this file and its log are frozen, and the design uses this text only if the gate passes. This front matter is not revised by the measurement — the two-step is the record.

Translation

This dream was dreamed by poor Makar — the Makar who drove his calves off into far and sullen countries; the very Makar on whom, as everybody knows, all the bumps fall.

His birthplace, the out-of-the-way settlement of Chalgan, had got itself lost in the far Yakut taiga. Makar's fathers and grandfathers had won a scrap of frozen ground back off the taiga, and although the sullen thicket still stood all round them like a hostile wall, they did not lose heart. Fences ran out across the cleared ground; corn-stacks and hayricks went up; little smoky yurts spread and multiplied; and at last, like a banner of victory, from a knoll in the middle of the settlement a belfry shot up into the sky. Chalgan became a large village.

But while Makar's fathers and grandfathers were making war on the taiga, burning it with fire and cutting it with iron, they were themselves going wild without noticing it. Marrying Yakut women, they took over the Yakut language and Yakut ways. The characteristic features of the great Russian people were rubbed away and disappeared.

Be that as it may, my Makar still remembered firmly that he was a Chalgan peasant born and bred. He had been born here, he had lived here, and here he expected to die. He was very proud of his standing, and now and then abused the others as heathen Yakuts — though, to tell the truth, he himself differed from the Yakuts neither in his habits nor in his way of life. He spoke little Russian, and that badly; he dressed in animal skins; he wore torbasa on his feet; in the ordinary way he lived on one flat cake with an infusion of brick tea, and on feast days and other extraordinary occasions he would eat exactly as much melted butter as happened to be standing in front of him on the table. He rode oxen with great skill, and in case of illness he sent for a shaman, who would hurl himself at him in a frenzy, gnashing his teeth, trying to frighten the sickness that had settled in Makar and drive it out of him.

He worked frightfully hard, lived poorly, and put up with hunger and cold. Had he any thoughts at all, beyond the unceasing care of his cake and his tea?

Yes, he had.

Translator's log

Frozen with the translation, before any measurement of this translation existed and before the evaluation that will use it was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence here carries internal-judgment-only.

1. The first sentence is two proverbs at once, and English has neither. «загнал своих телят в далёкие, угрюмые страны» inverts куда Макар телят не гонял — "where Makar never drove his calves", i.e. the back of beyond, the standard Russian phrase for a place of exile. «на которого… валятся все шишки» is на бедного Макара все шишки валятся — every falling pine-cone lands on poor Makar, i.e. the unlucky man collects every misfortune. Korolenko's joke is that his Makar is the man in both sayings at once, and that the first has been turned inside out: this Makar did drive the calves there, because he lives there.

Three options were live. (a) Substitute English proverbs — loses the name Makar, which both sayings turn on, and the name is the story's title character. (b) Translate the images literally and footnote them — the project does not footnote translations under R04. (c) Translate the images literally and let them stand as slightly strange English, on the bet that "drove his calves off into far and sullen countries" reads as a saying even to a reader who does not know which one. (c) was chosen.

шишки was the harder half. The word is both pine-cone and bump / lump raised by a blow, and the proverb runs on exactly that. "All the pine-cones fall on him" keeps the image and loses the sense; "all the knocks come his way" keeps the sense and loses the image. "all the bumps fall" was chosen because English bump also carries both — the thing that falls and the swelling it leaves — so the pun survives in a different pair of meanings. What is lost either way is that a Russian reader hears a fixed phrase and an English reader hears an invention.

2. слободка → "settlement", then "village". A слобода is a specific historical thing (a settlement exempt from certain dues), and the diminutive слободка is affectionate-dismissive. No English word carries either. "Settlement" was used for the first mention, where the sense is a place hacked out of the taiga, and "village" for «Стал Чалган большою слободой», where the sense is it grew. Using one word twice would have been more consistent and less accurate; the repetition in Russian is of a word whose meaning shifts under it.

3. землицы and юртёнки are diminutives and the English has no way to be one. "A scrap of frozen ground" carries землица's smallness but not its tenderness. юртёнки — little wretched yurts — became "little smoky yurts", where "smoky" is doing work the diminutive does in Russian. дымные is in the original, so this is redistribution, not addition.

4. дичали — "going wild". The verb is what happens to a domesticated plant or animal left untended, and Korolenko applies it to colonists. "Growing savage" was rejected as too strong and too moralised; "going wild" keeps the horticultural sense available. "Without noticing it" renders незаметно, which is ambiguous between imperceptibly (to an observer) and without their noticing (to themselves); the second was chosen because the paragraph is about them.

5. племени → "people", not "tribe". «великого русского племени» is literally the great Russian tribe. племя in this register is closer to stock / race / people than to English tribe, and "tribe" in an English sentence a few lines away from Yakuts would put the irony in the wrong place — it would read as the narrator ranking peoples, which is what the sentence is quietly declining to do. "People" was chosen and the flattening is real: the Russian word is doing something colder.

6. погаными якутами → "heathen Yakuts". поганый descends from paganus and means unclean/vile with a heathen undertone that is exactly live here, since the belfry three paragraphs up is the marker of the difference Makar is claiming. "Filthy Yakuts" was the alternative and is the more usual modern sense; it was rejected because it makes Makar's insult about hygiene, where the sentence's point is that he is asserting a religious-national distinction he no longer embodies.

7. торбаса kept, italicised, unglossed. Yakut soft reindeer-skin boots. Fur-lined "high boots" would have domesticated the sentence whose whole content is that a Russian peasant has become indistinguishable from a Yakut one. Kept as the one foreign word left standing; лепёшка was not kept, because "flat cake" is transparent and two untranslated words in one sentence would tip the passage into travelogue.

8. «именно столько, сколько стояло перед ним на столе» — the deadpan is the whole joke, and it survives only if the sentence stays long and flat: "exactly as much melted butter as happened to be standing in front of him on the table". "As much as was put in front of him" is shorter and kills it; the Russian says stood, and the butter standing there of its own accord is the comedy.

9. засевшую хворь — "the sickness that had settled in Makar". засесть is to lodge, to dig in, as a splinter or a besieging force does; хворь is a homely, slightly old word for an ailment. Rendering it as "the lodged sickness" was tried and read as a medical term. The chosen phrase is longer than the Russian, which is a real cost in a sentence already carrying three participles.

10. Работал он страшно — "worked frightfully hard". The Russian is an adverb of terror used as an intensifier, and it is doing double duty: he worked terribly and his work was a terror. English "frightfully" is the closest available double, though it has an idle drawing-room register in British English that the Russian does not have. No better option was found.

11. Paragraphing and punctuation follow the source exactly — six paragraphs, and the one-line paragraph «Да, были.» kept as a one-line paragraph, because the pause before it is the passage's turn. Semicolons were introduced in the second and fourth paragraphs where Russian uses commas in a list of clauses; that is a change to the punctuation and it makes the English list read as a list rather than as a run-on.

12. What was not consulted. No English rendering of this story, or of any Korolenko, was read at any point before this file was written. No parallel translation into any other language. Russian dictionaries and the wikisource collation header were used.