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

T-tini-budz-R04-v1 — Kotsiubynsky, «Тіні забутих предків», the milking and the making of the budz

• Source. ../source-unit.txt, 769 Ukrainian words in three blocks. Public domain; provenance, the elided song and the editorial glosses on ../README.md.
• Language pair. Ukrainian → English. The project's second unit from this work.
• Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead, source-only, draft then self-revision against the Ukrainian in the same session. The draft is T-tini-budz-R06-v1, frozen at commit 255e902 before this revision began (R04 §Procedure 2a).
• Contamination: none — a reachability statement, not a measurement. ../README.md §Contamination.
• Cost. $0. Lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Lineage. Revision of T-tini-budz-R06-v1. This text is the base from which every arm of E-20260810t-drift-source-present is mechanically derived.
• Evaluation. E-20260810t-drift-source-present. The translator knew the shape of that design before translating — the limit that follows is stated on ../README.md and in design.md §8: MIXED is the lead's own class handling and carries no weight in any registered test.

The translation

BD

For the third day now a fine, misty rain has been sifting down over the polonyna. The peaks smoked over, the sky wrapped itself up, and the mountains were lost in a grey mist. The sheep could hardly walk, heavy, full of water like a sponge; the clothes on the shepherds had gone cold and stiff. The only rest to be had was under the little roof of the strunka, at milking.

Ivan sits with his shoulders braced against a board and grips the diynytsia between his feet. Beside him is the black shaggy kozar, who has a curse after every word, and further along, more shepherds. The impatient drobyeta, whose milk is coming in, shove out of the pen into the strunka to be milked the sooner. But wait now, you poor things, that is not how it goes… One at a time only…

"Ryst!" the honinnyk throws angrily from behind into the sheep's lament, and lashes with a wet switch. "Ryst! ryst!…" the shepherds urge, tilting their knees away from the hole where the sheep comes leaping into the strunka. "Ah, may you—" the kozar curses, and does not finish: as if a man would say a thing like that at an hour like this!

With a practised movement Ivan catches a sheep by the spine and draws her to him rump first over the wide diynytsia. Meekly the sheep stands, her legs splayed awkwardly, so stupid, and listens to the milk purling out of her into the diynytsia. "Ryst!" the honinnyk lashes from behind. "Ryst! ryst!" the shepherds call in their turn. The milked sheep, as though dazed, drop onto the stone in the pen, lay their heads on their little paws and twist their bare, old men's lips. Ryst! ryst!… Ivan's hands knead the warm sheep's udder without stopping, drawing down the teats, and the milk runs over his hands, smelling of tallow, and lifts a greasy sweet steam out of the diynytsia. Ryst! ryst! The sheep leap in half out of their wits, splay their legs over the diynytsi, and ten shepherds' hands are kneading the warm udder. The wet otara weeps piteously on this side of the strunka and on that, the spent sheep drop into the pen, and the thick milk purls ringing into the diynytsia and runs in a warm little stream right up inside his sleeve. Ryst! ryst!…

The kozar laughs with his eyes at his goats. They are not what the little sheep are; they have a sharp heart in them. They do not drop down dead, the way the meek sheep do, but stand hard on their thin legs. They have lifted their little horns inquisitively and look into the mist as though they saw something through it, and their thin little beards shake so briskly…

BE

The koshary have emptied. Silence and desolation. Perhaps somewhere down there, in the deep valleys where the mountains begin to grow, there are human laughter and voices sounding, but there is little believing it. Here on the polonyna, where the sky covers over empty spaces that live in their solitude only for themselves, the silence keeps its age.

Only in the staya does the unquenchable fire crackle and go on sending out its blue smoke to wander. The drawn milk rests heavily in the wooden vessel, and over it the vatah has bent. He has set it already. From the podra, where the great round loaves of budz are drying, the wind blows down on the vatah, but it cannot drive out of the staya the smell of charcoal, of cheese and of sheep's wool. For the vatah smells of the same. New berbenytsi and little kegs stand mute in the corner, though you have only to knock at them and the voice that lives in there will answer. Cold zhentytsia shines out of the konovka with a green eye. The vatah sits among his things like a father among his children. All of it — the black benches and walls, the vatra and the smoke, the budz, the berbenytsi and the zhentytsia — all of it is near to him and his own, and on all of it his warm hand has rested.

The milk is thickening already, but its hour has not come. Then the vatah draws out from behind his cheres a whole bundle of little wooden blocks and begins to read. Everything is notched there, in that wooden book: who has how many sheep and what is owing to whom. Care pushes his brows together, and he reads on stubbornly. "Mosiychuk has fourteen drobyeta, and there is coming to him"…

BF

The milk in the putyna yellows and thickens. The vatah has bent over it gathered into himself, stern even. He unbuttons his sleeves slowly and sinks his bare arms, overgrown with hair, into it to the very elbow. And so he goes still above the milk…

Now it must be quiet in the staya, the door shut, and even the spuzar does not dare cast an eye at the milk while something is being made in there, while the vatah is at his sorcery. Everything has gone still, as if in dumb waiting: the berbenytsi have hidden their voice away inside them, the budzy lie low on their shelves, the walls and the benches have fallen into a black sleep, the fire scarcely breathes, and even the smoke slips shamefacedly out of the window. Only by the slight moving of the veins on the vatah's arms can it be seen that something is going on down at the bottom of the vessel. The arms come to life little by little, rising higher, sinking lower, rounding at the elbows, patting something, folding it, smoothing it there inside; and suddenly out of the bottom of the vessel, from under the milk, there rises a round curd body that has been born by some miracle. It grows, it turns its flat sides, it bathes in the white bath, white itself and tender, and when the vatah lifts it out the green birth-waters run ringing back into the vessel…

The vatah sighed lightly. Now the spuzar too may look. A fine budz has been born, to the vatah's comfort and to people's profit…

The doors open wide, the wind blows in from the podra, the vatra licks the black cauldron for joy, and in it the whey dances kolomyikas, and among the smoke and the fire the spuzar's teeth are shining…

And when the sun goes down the vatah carries the trembita out of the staya and trumpets in triumph to all the empty mountains that the day has ended in peace, that the budz came out well for him, the kulesha is ready, and the strunky are waiting for new milk…

Translator's log — the revision

The draft's log at ../R06-v1/translation.md is the fuller record of the decisions; this one records only what the second pass against the Ukrainian changed, and why. Frozen before any evaluation of this translation is designed, with the qualification on the artifact head: the shape of the design was known. Evaluative sentences are internal-judgment-only.

1. What the revision did not do, and it is the finding

The class handling was re-examined and left split. вівчар is shepherd and козар is kozar, in the same sentence, twice; загорода is pen and кошара is koshary, both enclosures for the same sheep on the same mountain. The draft's log flagged both at §4 as noticed while writing. The revision looked at them again against the Ukrainian and changed neither, and the reason is worth recording exactly because it is the third time this project has watched a self-revision decline to close a split class (T-tini-polonyna-R04-v1 §1; RS-20260803d's census of seven published translators):

• shepherd for вівчар is fixed by the first unit and cannot be revisited without going back and re-rendering four pages of already-frozen text;
• kozar cannot become goatherd without making the goatherd the only domesticated member of a paragraph in which the pail, the gate, the driver and the sheep themselves are all foreign;
• so the split is not a lapse of attention. It is what each local decision, taken in the order the decisions arrive, produces. At no point did closing it present itself as a thing to do — the same sentence the first unit's log ended on, arrived at independently and for different reasons.

2. The substantive changes

3. Checked against the Ukrainian and deliberately left alone

• The tense floor. BD past → present at «Іван сидить»; BE past → present at «Лиш в стаї тріщить»; BF present with one past verb, «Ватаг легко зітхнув», in the middle. All four transitions verified against the source and kept where the author put them. The single sighed in BF looks like an error in English and is not one.
• Рист! — eight occurrences, none glossed, four inside quotation marks and four bare inside the narration, exactly as the Ukrainian sets them.
• «вікує тиша» → the silence keeps its age. A coinage, kept. Silence reigns is the English phrase and it is dead; вікувати is to live out an age and the sentence is about duration.
• The birth of the budz. сирове тіло / біла купіль / зелені родові води / родився будз kept as curd body / the white bath / the green birth-waters / has been born. The revision tested came out for the last of these against the Ukrainian and put it back: родився is the same verb the paragraph has been building to.
• «Мосійчук має штирнадцять дробєт, а му належить». The dialect of штирнадцять and му remains unrendered; the alternative considered in the draft's §3 was reconsidered and refused again. Nothing in English marks a Hutsul reading a tally-stick that does not sound like a different country.

4. Still open at the end of the revision

• kozar beside shepherd — §1. Not a residue: a result.
• сирове тіло. Curd takes the cheese and drops the сирий (raw) that the ear also hears. English has no word that is both.
• діти/начиння. Things is now right and flat. The Ukrainian начиння has a warmth that things does not, and the warmth is doing work three words later at як батько серед дітей.
• koshary against загорода → pen. Two Ukrainian enclosure-words, one English word and one transliteration. See §1.