Repository path: workshop/translations/tini-budz/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-tini-budz-R06-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 and the elided song on ../README.md.
• Language pair. Ukrainian → English.
• Regime. R06 v1.0 — lead, source-only, one pass, no return. This draft is frozen as its own artifact before the R04 revision begins (R04 §2a, R06 §4).
• 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. The draft of T-tini-budz-R04-v1. Second unit of this work; the first is T-tini-polonyna-R04-v1, whose class-handling decisions this draft inherits deliberately (log §1).
• Evaluation. E-20260810t-drift-source-present. This log was written as the draft was written and is frozen with it; the translator knew a terminology-drift design would be built on the text, which is declared on ../README.md and in that design's §8.

The translation

BD

For the third day now a fine sifting drizzle has been coming down on the polonyna. The peaks smoked over, the sky wrapped itself away, 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 curses at every second word, and past him 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 gap 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 feet 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 spring in like things possessed, 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 bravely…

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 milked 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 vessels 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 his warm hand has rested on every bit of it.

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 works his charm. Everything has gone still, as if in dumb waiting: the berbenytsi have hidden their voice away inside them, the budzy have shrunk down 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, gathering 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 the cauldron the whey is dancing 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 draft

Written as the draft was written, one pass, no return (R06 §2). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Evaluative sentences carry internal-judgment-only.

1. The class policy is inherited, not decided again

This is the second unit from the same novella, and the first (T-tini-polonyna-R04-v1) already settled how eleven of these words are handled: polonyna, staya, vatah, vatra, spuzar, otara, kulesha, trembita, berbenytsi, putyna, marzhyna/khudibka kept in Ukrainian; вівчар → shepherd, загорода → pen, вівчарка → sheepdog, кошара → the one it had not met. A translator who has just rendered a passage does not re-litigate its vocabulary four pages later, and I did not: every item the first unit had met keeps the first unit's form here. That is a fact about how the two texts stand to each other, and it means the class handling in this unit is not an independent second decision.

The items the first unit did not contain, decided here for the first time:

2. What the passage does that the sentences have to do

• Рист! is a call, not a word, and it comes eight times. It is the metre of the milking. I kept it untranslated and unglossed at every occurrence, and let the paragraph's rhythm carry it — quotation marks on the spoken ones, bare on the four that fall inside the narration.
• The tense floor moves and I let it move. BD opens in the past («Закурились», «пропали», «ходили»), goes to the present at «Іван сидить» and stays there; BE opens past («Опустіли»), turns present at «Лиш в стаї тріщить»; BF is present throughout until «Ватаг легко зітхнув», one past verb in the middle of a present paragraph, which I kept as sighed.
• The birth metaphor in BF is the author's, not mine. «сирове тіло», «купається в білій купелі», «зелені родові води», «родився будз» — the cheese is delivered like a child. English wants to reach for curd and lose it. I wrote a round curd body, the white bath, the green birth-waters, a fine budz has been born, and I did not soften the last one into came out.
• «вікує тиша» — вікувати is to live out an age. The silence keeps its age is a coinage; the ordinary English is silence reigns, which is dead.

3. Two places where I wrote the option I had and left the alternative here

• «а ну скажеш в таку годину!» The superstition is that a curse spoken at the wrong hour takes effect. I wrote as if a man would say a thing like that at an hour like this! The alternative, not taken: and you cannot say a thing like that at such an hour, which states the rule instead of performing the flinch.
• «Мосійчук має штирнадцять дробєт, а му належить»… штирнадцять and му are both dialect (чотирнадцять, йому). I wrote standard English — Mosiychuk has fourteen drobyeta, and there is coming to him — so the dialect survives only in drobyeta. The alternative was to mark the reading aloud with something non-standard in the English; I could not find one that did not sound like stage Yorkshire.

4. Open at the freeze

• kozar beside shepherd. вівчар is shepherd because the first unit made it so; козар has no such precedent and I kept it foreign. So the goatherd is a foreign word and the shepherd is an English one, in the same sentence, twice. That is exactly the split handling of one class that this work's first unit also produced, and I noticed it here while writing rather than after. I did not go back and change it, because R06 forbids the return pass. (This sentence records a decision, not a quality claim.)
• сирове тіло. сировий is from сир, cheese; but the ear also hears сирий, raw. Curd body takes the cheese and drops the rawness.
• плохі вівці. плохий is meek, not bad. The meek sheep is right and reads, in English, like a Beatitude, which the Ukrainian does not.
• діти/начиння in BE. «Ватаг сидить серед свого начиння, як батько серед дітей» — начиння is the gear, the vessels and tools together. I wrote vessels, which narrows it, because gear and things both broke the father-and-children figure.