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

T-tini-polonyna-R04-v1 — Kotsiubynsky, «Тіні забутих предків», the polonyna movement

• Source. ../source-unit.txt, 717 Ukrainian words in three blocks. Public domain; provenance on ../README.md.
• Language pair. Ukrainian → English. The project's first translation from Ukrainian, and its eighteenth source language.
• Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead, source-only, draft then self-revision against the Ukrainian in the same session. The draft is T-tini-polonyna-R06-v1, frozen at commit b007b18 before this revision began (R04 §Procedure 2a).
• Contamination: none — a reachability statement, not a measurement. ../README.md §Contamination gives the basis and says why no design built on this text turns on it.
• Cost. $0. Lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Lineage. Revision of T-tini-polonyna-R06-v1. This text is the base from which every arm of E-20260809i-terminology-drift is mechanically derived.
• Evaluation. E-20260809i-terminology-drift / RS-20260809i-terminology-drift. This log was frozen before that design existed.

The translation

BA

The polonyna! He was standing on it now, on that high meadow under its thick grass. A blue sea of roused mountains had closed round Ivan in a wide ring, and it seemed that those endless blue billows really were coming at him, ready to fall at his feet.

The wind, sharp as a whetted bartka, struck him in the chest, his breath flowed into one with the breath of the mountains, and pride embraced Ivan's soul. He wanted to shout with all his lungs, so that the echo would roll from peak to peak as far as the sky's edge, so as to rock that sea of summits; but all at once he felt that his voice would be lost in these spaces like the whine of a gnat…

He had to hurry.

Behind a hillock, in a little hollow where the wind did not bite so hard, he found the staya, black with smoke. The smoke-hole in its wall showed black, a cold opening. The pens for the sheep stood empty, and the shepherds were busy at them, so that there should be somewhere to spend the night beside the sheep. The vatah was taken up with the winning of living fire.

Two men had set the skalka between the doorposts and were drawing a strap back and forth, and the skalka spun and squealed.

"Glory to Jesus!" Ivan greeted them.

But nobody answered him.

The skalka whirred just the same, and the two men, gathered into themselves and stern, drew the strap with the same one motion. The skalka began to smoke, and soon a little flame leapt out of it and blazed up at both ends. The vatah lifted the fire devoutly and set it into the vatra that was laid ready by the door.

"Glory for ever!" he turned to Ivan. "Now we have living fire, and as long as it shall burn, neither beast nor unclean power will touch the marzhyna, nor us, the christened…"

And he led Ivan into the staya, where a smell of emptiness came off the empty berbenytsi and putyny and the bare benches.

BB

"Tomorrow they'll drive the khudibka up to us — God grant we give it all back to the people," said the vatah, and told Ivan what he was to do.

There was something calm, even lordly, in the speech and the movements of this master of the polonyna.

"Myko!…" he called through the door. "Lay the vatra in the staya, and quickly…"

Slender, curly-headed Mykola, with a full womanish face, carried fire into the staya.

"And who will you be, brother — a shepherd?" Ivan asked, curious.

"No, I'm the spuzar," said Mykola, showing his teeth. "I've to watch the vatra so it doesn't go out the whole summer through, for that would be a disaster!…" He even glanced round in dread. "And to go to the stream for water, and to the forest for wood…"

Meanwhile the vatra was burning up on the polonyna. With a movement full of gravity, like a priest of old, the vatah fed it dry spruce and fresh fir, and blue smoke lifted easily above it and then, flung by the wind, caught on the mountains, cut across the black band of the forests and spread out along the far blue summits.

The polonyna was beginning its life with a living, unquenchable fire that was to defend it from all evil. And, as though it knew this, the fire wound its adder's body proudly and breathed out ever new billows of smoke…

Four strong sheepdogs, laying their sheepskins down in the grass, gazed thoughtfully into the mountains, ready in a moment to spring to their feet, show their teeth and bristle.

The day was going out. The mountains were changing their blue clothing for vestments of rose and gold.

Mykola called them to supper.

Then all the shepherds came together in the staya and sat down by the living fire to eat in peace their first kulesha of the polonyna…

BC

How merry is that little polonyna come spring, when the little sheep go up to it out of every village!…

The tall vatah, like the spirit of the polonyna, walks round the stoyishche with fire. His face is grave as a priest's, his feet tread firm and wide, and the smoke from his brand whirs after him like a winged serpent. At the gate of the stoyishche, where the sheep are to pass through, the vatah casts fire, and listens. He hears the going-up to the polonyna, and not with his ear alone. He hears with his heart how, out of the deep valleys where the rivers boil and tear at their banks, out of quiet homesteads and hayfields, there rolls upward, at the call of spring, a living wave of khudibka, and the earth sighs gladly under its feet. He hears the far-off breathing of the otara, the lowing of cows and the barely catchable voice of songs. And when at last the people came into sight and lifted up the long trembitas, gilded by the sun, to greet the polonyna among the blue summits, when the sheep bleated and flooded all the pens in a rushing stream, the vatah fell on his knees and lifted his hands to heaven. Behind him the shepherds bowed to the prayer, and the people who had driven up the marzhyna. They asked of God that the sheep might have a heart as hot as the hot fire it had stepped over, that the merciful Lord might shield the christened khudibka on the dews, on the waters, on all the crossings, from every harm and beast and mishap. As God had helped to gather the khudibka together, so might he help to give it all back to the people…

Graciously the sky listened to that simple-hearted prayer, good-naturedly the Beskyd knitted his brows, and the wind, flying on further, combed out the grasses on the polonyna carefully, as a mother combs a child's little head…

Translator's log — the revision

The draft's log is at ../R06-v1/translation.md and 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 was designed. Evaluative sentences are internal-judgment-only.

1. The one substantive reversal: маржина and худібка

The draft flattened two Ukrainian words into one English word — маржина (the Hutsul word for livestock) and худібка (an affectionate diminutive of standard худоба) both came out as stock, at all six occurrences. The draft's log flagged this as a real loss of the same kind as Hapgood's русалка/водяной, run the other way.

The revision undoes it, and does not undo it in the direction the draft expected. Instead of finding two English words, I found that I could not: stock, cattle, beasts, the herds are not two words with the difference these two carry, which is not denotational at all — маржина is regional and худібка is tender. So both are now kept in Ukrainian, marzhyna and khudibka, and the difference between them survives as the difference between two foreign strings a reader cannot construe. That is not the same as carrying it. It moves the loss rather than repairing it, and I record it as a move.

отара went with them, to otara, for a different and smaller reason: with khudibka two lines above it, flock was the only domestic word left in a sentence otherwise made of foreign ones, and it read as an accident rather than a choice.

The consequence for the class census, recounted item by item, and one correction to the draft's log. The class has twenty items. The draft's log §1 says "I copied eleven and domesticated seven" — eighteen — and both figures are wrong against its own table, which lists twelve copied strings: the prose miscounted its own column by one, and the enumeration above it had omitted кожух and вівчарка. The true figures are 12 copied and 8 domesticated in the draft, 15 copied and 5 domesticated in this revision. I am recording the error here rather than repairing the frozen draft, which is the record of what I actually wrote.

What survives the correction is the finding, and the correction sharpens it: the class is handled two ways in both versions, and self-revision made the split less even and did not close it. At no point in either pass did closing it present itself as a thing to do.

2. What was checked and left alone

• The blessing period in BC. The draft's log accused itself of breaking a single accumulating Ukrainian sentence with a full stop after heaven. Checked against the source: the full stop is the author's — «…підняв руки до неба. За ним схилились…». The draft was right and its log was wrong. Nothing changed.
• The tense shift in BC (present → past at «А коли врешті»). Kept exactly, as in the draft.
• ватра against живий вогонь. Kept apart. The revision confirmed the draft's reason: at «підняв вогонь і встромив в ватру» a single English word for both would produce lifted the fire and set it into the fire.

3. Smaller changes, all against the Ukrainian

4. Still open at the end of the revision

• жрець. A priest of old is a period, not a religion. The scene is a pagan fire-rite performed by men who greet each other with Glory to Jesus, and English priest takes the Christian reading first in both places. I could find nothing that did not either import Greece (hierophant) or explain the sentence.
• скалка. Still kept, still the item I am least sure of; I do not know whether the word names the spindle or the whole fire-drill, and the skalka lets me not decide.
• полонинка. That little polonyna still reads as a size where the Ukrainian is an endearment.
• бартка. The simile «гострий як наточена бартка» wants an edge the English reader has never seen. Kept foreign, so the simile now compares a wind to a word.