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

Turgenev, «Свидание» (1850) — the opening paragraph, complete

Source. Иван Сергеевич Тургенев, «Свидание», from Записки охотника. First published in Современник vol. XXIV no. 11 (1850), pp. 114–122. Public domain (Turgenev d. 1883).

The unit is a passage — 468 Russian words, the whole of the sketch's first paragraph, from «Я сидел в березовой роще осенью…» to «…который знаком одним охотникам.» Passage-level units of 100–500 words are the unit D-20260725-06's ratification named for candidate held-out material.

Why this passage and not another. It is the passage the project's only located comparative-reception document actually assesses. SR-20260725-parity-evidence §4 records a passage-level comparison of four English «Свидание» renderings, and the parity remark it quotes — "Her choice of 'not … nor … nor' is as good as Hapgood's 'not … not … not'" — is about the four-fold negation that sits in this paragraph and nowhere else in the sketch. Auditing the passage the evidence speaks about is materially different from auditing a passage it does not.

Text and provenance. Retrieved from ru.wikisource (Свидание_(Тургенев), raw wikitext) and cross-checked word-by-word against az.lib.ru/t/turgenew_i_s/text_0080.shtml (Moshkov library, cp1251), an independent transcription pipeline. The two sources are not identical, and each carries a unique corruption, which is why the cross-check was worth running:

Neither transcription is clean; their agreement everywhere else is what identifies the three errors. The stored source-ru.txt takes wikisource as base with az.lib.ru's two corrections applied («в ясный ветреный день, она вся шумно»), 468 words, SHA-256 1607c1a3ec7ba4c2c2b8c01d8bbaed9012e0790b9b2a6147540bff04ad37babe. This is NEXT.md note (aa) — two-source agreement as a precondition — applied to the source rather than to a scanned translation, and it fired on the source too.

Regime. R04 — lead close translation, source only. No API call, no cost, never ledgered (charter §6, A4).

Contamination: high. Записки охотника is among the most translated bodies of Russian prose; Constance Garnett's version is on Project Gutenberg and plausibly sits in the lead's training data. No claim of independence from remembered renderings is made or should be read in.

Contamination, MEASURED 2026-07-25 (S026) — and this is the worst case in the sweep. RS-20260725c-contamination-sweep measured this text against both published translations of the same paragraph. CI = 3.13 / 3.07 at the headline n (the two parameter-free extremes of the metric), the highest of six cells and more than double the next. It is also the only cell asymmetric under both extremes: 40 shared 7-grams with Hapgood 1903 against 6 for the Garnett/Hapgood baseline — a ratio of ~3×, including a fourteen-word run at the opening. Operational consequence: this translation must not be used as a neutral third point in any experiment. Freeze order is provable in git; this is evidence about memory, not about conduct.

Priming, declared in full, and it is not nil this time. Before translating, the lead had read SR-20260725-parity-evidence §4, which quotes a comparative blog post to the effect that Garnett renders the four-fold negation as "not … nor … nor" and Hapgood as "not … not … not". So on the single most conspicuous syntactic feature of this paragraph, two of the three renderings the audit will compare were partially known in advance. This is declared rather than worked around because working around it is impossible — the knowledge cannot be unlearned, and choosing a different passage would have cost the wire to the evidence, which is the reason the passage was chosen. Two consequences follow and are stated now, before the audit runs:

1. My rendering of that series ("not … not … not … not") coincides with the pattern the blog attributes to Hapgood. It was reached from the Russian, which has four «не», but I cannot claim the coincidence is independent and do not.
2. No landmark in the audit spec touches the negation series, precisely because of this. The spec was written after the translation and deliberately excludes the one feature that was primed.

Beyond that: no English rendering of this sketch was fetched, opened or searched before this file, the audit design and landmarks.json were committed. Verifiable in git. Freeze order per NEXT.md note (f).

The Tryst — the opening

I was sitting in a birch grove in autumn, about the middle of September. Since early morning a fine rain had been falling off and on, giving way now and then to warm sunshine; the weather was changeable. The sky would be all veiled over with loose white cloud, then suddenly clear for an instant here and there, and then, from behind the parted rain-clouds, there would show an azure, clear and tender as a beautiful eye. I sat and looked about me, and listened. The leaves rustled faintly over my head; by their rustle alone one could have told what season it was. It was not the gay, laughing tremor of spring, not the soft whispering, not the long murmur of summer, not the timid, chilly babble of late autumn, but a barely audible, drowsy chatter. A weak wind drew ever so slightly along the treetops. The inside of the grove, wet with rain, kept changing without pause according as the sun shone out or went behind a cloud; now the whole of it would light up, as though everything in it had suddenly smiled — the slender trunks of the birches, which stood none too thickly, would take on the tender sheen of white silk, the small leaves lying on the ground would grow mottled and catch fire with red gold, and the handsome stalks of the tall curly ferns, already dyed their autumn colour, the colour of overripe grapes, showed right through, endlessly tangling and crossing before one's eyes; now all at once everything round about would turn faintly blue — the bright colours went out on the instant, the birches stood all white, without lustre, white as newly fallen snow that the coldly playing ray of the winter sun has not yet touched; and stealthily, slyly, the finest of rains would begin to sift down and whisper through the wood. The foliage on the birches was still almost all green, though it had visibly paled; only here and there stood a single young one, all red or all gold, and you had to see how brightly it flared up in the sun when the rays broke suddenly through, sliding and dappling, across the close net of slender branches just washed clean by the glittering rain. Not a single bird was to be heard: they had all taken shelter and fallen silent; only now and then the mocking little voice of a tomtit rang out like a small steel bell. Before I stopped in this little birch wood, my dog and I had come through a tall aspen grove. I confess I am not overfond of that tree — the aspen — with its pale-lilac trunk and its grey-green, metallic foliage, which it heaves up as high as it can and spreads out on the air in a trembling fan; I dislike the everlasting swaying of its round, untidy leaves, awkwardly hitched to their long stalks. It is fine only on certain summer evenings when, standing up alone among low scrub, it takes the reddening rays of the setting sun full in the face and gleams and trembles, drenched from root to crown in a single uniform yellow-crimson — or when, on a clear windy day, the whole of it streams noisily and babbles against the blue sky, and every leaf of it, caught up in the rush, seems to want to tear loose, fly off, and go racing away into the distance. But on the whole I do not care for this tree, and so, not stopping in the aspen grove to rest, I made my way to the little birch wood, settled myself under a small tree whose boughs began low above the ground and could therefore shelter me from the rain, and, having admired the view round about, fell into that untroubled, gentle sleep which hunters alone know.

Translator's log

Frozen at commit time, before the audit spec was written and before any published English rendering of this sketch was fetched (charter §3, A4). Decisions and alternatives; not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence here is the lead's and carries internal-judgment-only.

1. облака / тучи. Russian separates the light cloud that veils a sky from the heavy cloud that carries rain; English has one noun. The paragraph's whole subject is the alternation between the two states, so collapsing them costs the sentence its structure. I used "loose white cloud" for «облака» and "the parted rain-clouds" for «тучи», buying the distinction at the price of a compound noun where Turgenev has a plain one. "Storm-clouds" was live and rejected: these clouds produce «мелкий дождик», a drizzle, not a storm.

2. The four negations — the primed feature, handled first because it is the one I cannot claim to have solved cleanly. Turgenev writes four «не» and then «а». English idiom prefers not … nor … nor …, which is lighter and reads better; four flat "not"s keep the count and make each phrase a separate refusal rather than an enumerated list. I took the four "not"s. I knew before translating that this is the pattern the comparative blog attributes to Hapgood and not to Garnett (see the priming declaration above), so I cannot present the choice as independent evidence of anything. A separate, unprimed decision inside the same sentence: «не мягкое шушуканье, не долгий говор лета» leaves it open whether «лета» governs both nouns or only the second. I read it as governing both and rendered "not the soft whispering, not the long murmur of summer", which closes an ambiguity the Russian keeps open. That is a loss and it is mine.

3. The sound-words. трепет → шушуканье → говор → лепетанье → болтовня is a graded series of speech nouns applied to leaves: a tremor, a conspiratorial whispering, talk, an infant's babbling, chatter. English supplies each word but not the grading, and "murmur" for говор drops the root that говор shares with говорить — the leaves in Russian are unmistakably talking. "Talk" was live, keeps the root, and reads oddly of leaves; I took the odd reading's cost on the other side and used "murmur".

4. червонное золото. Ducat gold — the reddish high-carat alloy of a gold coin. "Red gold" is the standard English and keeps the hue. The coin is lost, and with it a faint link to the money that runs under this sketch, whose subject is a servant girl being discarded by a valet with turquoise rings.

5. синица → "tomtit". Genus Parus; the flattest English is "titmouse", the plainest is unusable in a modern literary register for reasons that have nothing to do with Turgenev, and "tomtit" is period-appropriate, British, and slightly folk. This is a register decision, not a species decision — the bird is the same in all three. Recorded because a landmark matcher that only knows "titmouse" would flag "tomtit", which is precisely the defect NEXT.md note (y) names.

6. осина. Populus tremula, the European aspen. "Aspen" is exact and costs nothing. But the dislike in this passage is botanically specific: the leaf never stops moving because it hangs on a long flattened petiole, and «неловко прицепленных к длинным стебелькам» is doing that botany with the word "awkwardly" carrying the narrator's irritation. I kept the awkwardness rather than smoothing to "on long stalks", because the smooth version deletes the reason he dislikes the tree.

7. бледно-лиловый, of bark. English tree-writing does not say "lilac" of a trunk, so the phrase lands as an oddity. It is an oddity in Russian too, and a deliberate one: Turgenev is putting an artificial colour on the tree he dislikes and pairing it in the same clause with "metallic" foliage. "Greyish", "pale purple" and "mauve" were live; "greyish" was rejected outright because normalising the colour removes the sentence's argument.

8. угнездился. From гнездо, a nest — "nestled myself", "made himself a nest". I used "settled myself", losing the bird. The loss is not free: the narrator has just spent two clauses on birds taking shelter and falling silent, and then does the same thing with the same root. "Nestled" was live and rejected as arch in English where the Russian verb is ordinary.

9. в упор. Of the setting sun's rays striking the aspen: point-blank, full on, at close range — a word from shooting, in the mouth of a hunter. "Full in the face" keeps the directness and loses the gun. No option I found kept both without calling attention to itself.