Repository path: workshop/translations/svidanie/R09-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Turgenev, «Свидание» (1850), ¶1–¶19 — R09, Futabatei's rule kept on purpose

Source. workshop/canon/svidanie/source-ru.txt ¶1–¶19, 1,074 Russian words, 73 sentence-final marks, 164 commas. Same passage as T-svidanie-R06-v1, same session, same translator.

Regime. R09 — Futabatei's form-preserving standard, executed. One sentence per source sentence (J1); the same number of commas inside it (J2); no mark dropped or added (J3); word count held down as far as English allows (J4); form not broken (J5); 詩想 the only override (J6); and no smoothing (J8). No API call, no cost, never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Order of the two limbs, and what it costs. T-svidanie-R06-v1 was written first, in one pass, with punctuation written as English wanted it, and committed at 828a8c1 before a word of this one existed. This limb was then written from the Russian, without reopening the R06 text. It cannot be independent of it — the same translator read the same passage an hour earlier — and the direction is toward similarity. Declared rather than claimed away.

Contamination: high, on the measurement inherited by T-svidanie-R06-v1 §Contamination, which applies unchanged. No English rendering of this sketch was opened during this session.

The translation

Dialogue keeps the Russian dash convention rather than English quotation marks, under J5 (do not break the form). Dashes are not counted by the statistic in any language, so this affects nothing measured; it is a J5 compliance, logged as B4.

¶1. I cannot say, how long I slept, but when I opened my eyes — the whole interior of the wood was filled with sun and in every direction, through the joyfully rustling leaves, the bright blue sky showed through and as it were sparkled; the clouds had gone, driven off by a wind that had sprung up; the weather had cleared, and in the air there was felt that particular, dry freshness, which, filling the heart with a kind of brisk sensation, almost always foretells a peaceful and clear evening after a day of foul weather. I was about to get up and try my luck again, when suddenly my eyes came to rest on a motionless human figure. I looked closely: it was a young peasant girl. She was sitting twenty paces from me, her head bent in thought and both hands fallen into her lap; on one of them, half open, lay a thick bunch of wild flowers and at each breath of hers it slid quietly down onto the checked skirt. A clean white smock, buttoned at the throat and the wrists, fell in short soft folds about her waist; large yellow beads in two rows came down from her neck onto her breast. She was very far from plain. Her thick fair hair of a beautiful ash colour parted into two carefully combed half-circles from under a narrow scarlet band, drawn down almost to her very brow, white, as ivory; the rest of her face was only faintly browned with that golden tan, which fine skin alone takes. I could not see her eyes — she did not raise them; but I saw clearly her fine, high eyebrows, her long lashes: they were wet, and on one of her cheeks there glistened in the sun the dried trace of a tear, halted at her very lips, slightly paled. Her whole small head was very charming; even her somewhat thick and round nose did not spoil it. I especially liked the expression of her face: so simple and gentle it was, so sad and so full of a childish bewilderment before her own sadness. She, evidently, was waiting for someone; in the wood something faintly cracked: she at once raised her head and looked round; in the transparent shade there flashed quickly before me her eyes, large, clear and startled, like a doe's. For several moments she listened, not taking her wide-open eyes from the place, where the faint sound had come, sighed, turned her head gently, bent lower still and set about slowly sorting the flowers. Her eyelids reddened, her lips moved bitterly, and a fresh tear rolled out from under the thick lashes, halting and glittering radiantly on her cheek. So a good deal of time went by; the poor girl did not stir, — only now and then she moved her hands wistfully and listened, listened still… Again something rustled through the wood, — she started up. The noise did not stop, grew more distinct, came nearer, at last there were heard firm, brisk steps. She straightened and seemed to take fright; her attentive gaze quivered, kindled with expectation. Through the thicket a man's figure flickered quickly. She looked, flushed suddenly, smiled joyfully and happily, was about to rise and at once drooped all over again, went pale, grew confused — and only then raised a trembling, almost pleading look to the man who had come, when he stopped beside her.

¶2. I looked at him with curiosity from my hiding place. I confess, he did not make an agreeable impression on me. He was, by every sign, a spoiled valet of a young, wealthy gentleman. His clothes betrayed a claim to taste and a dandy's carelessness: on him was a short coat of bronze colour, probably, off his master's shoulders, buttoned to the top, a pink little cravat with lilac ends and a black velvet cap with gold braid, pulled down to his very eyebrows. The round collars of his white shirt propped up his ears without mercy and cut his cheeks, and his starched cuffs covered the whole hand right down to the red and crooked fingers, adorned with silver and gold rings with forget-me-nots of turquoise. His face, ruddy, fresh, insolent, belonged to the number of faces, which, as far as I could observe, almost always outrage men and, unfortunately, very often please women. He, evidently, tried to give his coarsish features an expression contemptuous and bored; he kept screwing up his already tiny milk-grey eyes, frowned, let the corners of his mouth droop, yawned with effort and with a careless, though not altogether deft ease now put a hand to his gingerish, rakishly curled side-locks, now pinched the yellow hairs, sticking out on his thick upper lip, — in a word, he gave himself intolerable airs. He began giving himself airs, as soon as he caught sight of the young peasant woman, waiting for him; slowly, with a rolling step he came up to her, stood a while, twitched his shoulders, thrust both hands into the pockets of his coat and, having scarcely honoured the poor girl with a fleeting and indifferent glance, let himself down onto the ground.

¶3. — Well now, — he began, continuing to look off somewhere to one side, swinging his leg and yawning, — have you been here long?

¶4. The girl could not answer him at once.

¶5. — A long time, Viktor Alexandrych, — she brought out at last in a barely audible voice.

¶6. — Ah! (He took off his cap, passed his hand majestically over his thick, tightly curled hair, beginning almost at his very eyebrows, and, having looked round with dignity, carefully covered his precious head again.) And I had quite forgotten. Besides, look, the rain! (He yawned again.) Work no end: you can't see to everything, and he scolds besides. We are leaving tomorrow…

¶7. — Tomorrow? — the girl said and fixed on him a frightened look.

¶8. — Tomorrow… Come, come, come, please, — he put in hurriedly and with vexation, seeing, that she had begun trembling all over and had quietly bowed her head, — please, Akulina, do not cry. You know, I cannot bear this. (And he wrinkled his blunt nose.) Or else I shall go this minute… What nonsense — snivelling!

¶9. — Well, I won't, I won't, — Akulina brought out hurriedly, swallowing her tears with an effort. — So you are going tomorrow? — she added after a short silence. — When will God bring us to meet again with you, Viktor Alexandrych?

¶10. — We shall meet, we shall meet. Not next year — then later. The master, it seems, wishes to enter the service in Petersburg, — he went on, pronouncing his words carelessly and somewhat through the nose, — and maybe, we shall go abroad too.

¶11. — You will forget me, Viktor Alexandrych, — Akulina said sadly.

¶12. — No, why should I? I shall not forget you: only be sensible, don't play the fool, obey your father… And I shall not forget you — no-o. (And he stretched calmly and yawned again.)

¶13. — Do not forget me, Viktor Alexandrych, — she went on in an imploring voice. — Why, it seems, how I loved you, everything, it seems, for you… You say, I am to obey my father, Viktor Alexandrych… But how am I to obey my father…

¶14. — And why? (He uttered these words as if out of his stomach, lying on his back and having put his hands under his head.)

¶15. — But how then, Viktor Alexandrych, — you know yourself…

¶16. She fell silent. Viktor played with the steel chain of his watch.

¶17. — You, Akulina, are no stupid girl, — he began at last, — so do not talk rubbish. I wish your own good, do you understand me? Of course, you are not stupid, not altogether a peasant girl, so to speak; and your mother too was not always a peasant woman. All the same you are without education, — therefore, you must obey, when you are told.

¶18. — But it is frightening, Viktor Alexandrych.

¶19. — E-eh, what nonsense, my dear: what have you found to fear! What is that you have, — he added, moving up closer to her, — flowers?

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-07-30, before 「あいびき」 was read and before any compliance figure was computed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only. Rule numbers are R09's.

B0 — How the pass was run. The Russian was split into sentences and each sentence's comma count taken before its English was written, so every sentence was written to a target number. That is the only way J2 is executable at all, and it is worth recording because it makes the regime a constrained-writing procedure rather than a translation procedure with a check at the end.

B1 — J3 costs grammaticality at exactly one construction, and it costs it four times. Russian requires a comma before a subordinator where English forbids one. Holding J3 produces: - "I cannot say, how long I slept" (¶1 s1, «Не могу сказать, сколько») - "from the place, where the faint sound had come" (¶1 s12, «с места, где») - "seeing, that she had begun trembling" (¶8 s2, «увидев, что») - "you must obey, when you are told" (¶17 s4, «когда тебе говорят»)

All four are ungrammatical English and all four are kept, under J8. Under R06 all four commas were absent. This is the clearest single thing the two limbs show and it is a property of the language pair, not of either translator's taste.

B2 — J2 was met by moving commas as often as by adding them. ¶1 s10: Russian «так оно было просто и кротко» has its comma after the colon-clause; English wanted "it was so simple and gentle" with no comma at all, so the clause was inverted to "so simple and gentle it was" to put the comma where the count needed it. The comma count is preserved and the word order is a J5 breach made in order to hold J2. Recorded as a conflict between two rules of the same regime, which R09 does not adjudicate — the first defect found in it by use.

B3 — J1 held everywhere and cost nothing, and that is the negative result. Not one source sentence had to be split or joined. Turgenev's sentence boundaries transfer to English intact across all 73 of them, including the four parenthetical sentences at ¶6, ¶8, ¶12 and ¶14 where a bracketed sentence sits inside a speech and carries its own full stop. J1 is therefore not a constraint in Russian→English at all, which is worth knowing before any comparison with Japanese is read.

B4 — Dialogue dashes kept (J5). Russian marks speech with an em dash at the line head and around the inquit; English uses quotation marks. R06 used quotation marks; this limb keeps the dashes. Neither convention is counted by the statistic, so the choice is invisible to the measurement and is logged only so that the two limbs' visible difference is not mistaken for a measured one.

B5 — J4 (word count) was not met and was not seriously pursued. English is longer than Russian here by roughly a third under both regimes; nothing short of omission would close it, and omission would breach J3. Recorded as a rule the regime states and the translator did not keep, which is the honest entry — Futabatei says the same of himself.

B6 — «белый, как слоновая кость» → "white, as ivory" (¶1 s7). The comma before as is required by J3 and is wrong in English, where "white as ivory" is a set simile. Kept. Alternative rejected: dropping the comma and adding one elsewhere in the sentence to keep the count, which would have satisfied J2 while breaking J3 — the two rules come apart here and R09 does not say which wins. Second defect found by use.

B7 — «Лицо его, румяное, свежее, нахальное» → "His face, ruddy, fresh, insolent" (¶2 s6). Four commas in nine words. English tolerates this as apposition, so no cost. Under R06 the same phrase became "His face — ruddy, fresh, insolent —", which is better English and has two commas instead of four. The R06 rendering would have failed J2 by two.

B8 — «принадлежало к числу лиц, которые» → "belonged to the number of faces, which" (¶2 s6). A comma before a restrictive which: wrong in English, required by J3. Kept, and it is a fifth instance of B1's construction that B1 does not list because the subordinator is a relative pronoun rather than a conjunction.

B9 — «Дела пропасть» → "Work no end" (¶6 s4). Verbless, as the Russian is. R06 had "No end of things to do", which is idiomatic and three words longer. J4 and J5 both favour the shorter, and here for once they agree with each other.

B10 — «Уж, кажется, я на что вас любила» → "Why, it seems, how I loved you" (¶13 s2). Five commas in twelve words, and the Russian is broken speech — Akulina cannot finish her sentences. The commas are the grief, which is the strongest case in the passage for J6 and J2 pointing the same way rather than against each other. Rejected: "I seem to have loved you so much" (R06's shape), which is fluent and has one comma.

B11 — «И-и» → "E-eh" (¶19 s1). Same arbitrary transliteration as R06's A18, carried over deliberately so the two limbs differ only where a rule made them differ.

B12 — What R09 did not reach. J6 (詩想) was invoked once in the whole passage, at B10, and even there it agreed with J2 rather than overriding it. A regime whose only override never fires is a regime with one rule, and the rule is the count. That is a finding about R09 and it is recorded here rather than on the result page because it is the translator's observation, not a measurement.