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

T-tini-polonyna-R06-v1 — Kotsiubynsky, «Тіні забутих предків», the polonyna movement

• Source. ../source-unit.txt, 717 Ukrainian words in three blocks. Provenance and copy-text on ../README.md. Public domain.
• Language pair. Ukrainian → English. The project's first translation from Ukrainian, and its eighteenth source language.
• Regime. R06 v1.0 — lead, source-only, single pass, no return pass. Written straight through. Where a choice was still open at the moment of writing, the option written is the one below and the alternative is in the log.
• Contamination: none — a reachability statement, not a measurement. See ../README.md §Contamination. No English rendering of this work is freely reachable; Carynnyk 1981 is in copyright and was not consulted.
• Cost. $0. Lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Lineage. The draft. T-tini-polonyna-R04-v1 is this text self-revised against the Ukrainian, and is the base every experimental arm is built from.
• Frozen before the revision began, per R04 §Procedure 2a.

The translation

BA

The polonyna! He was standing on it now, on that high meadow under its thick grass. A blue sea of heaped-up 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 breathing ran together into one with the breathing of the mountains, and pride took hold of 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 hole in its wall for the smoke showed as a cold dark 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 stock, nor us, the christened…"

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

BB

"Tomorrow they'll drive the stock 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 an ancient priest, 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 serpent'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 in the spring, when the 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, like 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 polonyna procession 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 stock, and the earth sighs gladly under its feet. He hears the far-off breathing of the flock, 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 roaring 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 stock. 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 stock on the dews, on the waters, on all the crossings, from every harm and beast and mishap. As God had helped to gather the stock 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

Written at translation time; frozen before any evaluation of this translation was designed (R04 §Procedure 3, charter §3 A4). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Where a sentence here is evaluative it is internal-judgment-only, as the front matter declares.

0. What I did not have

No dictionary of Hutsul dialect. The glosses below are read off the text's own context, off standard Ukrainian, and off the two authorial footnotes the copy-text carries (стая, путина), which I let myself know existed and did not otherwise use. Where I was guessing I say so. No English rendering of this work was consulted and none is reachable.

1. The class the passage is built on

Almost every hard decision in these 717 words is the same decision: what to do with the vocabulary of the polonyna as an institution. I count eighteen distinct items —

полонина · стая · ватаг · ватра · спузар · скалка · вівчар · вівчарка · маржина · худібка · отара · стоїще · загорода · трембіта · бербениця · путина · бартка · кулеша · царинка · (and живий вогонь, which is a phrase, not an item)

— and every one of them is a cultural-mediation fork of exactly the kind wiki/goodness-senses.md documents for Shaw, Garnett and Baudelaire.

What I actually did, recorded before I had any reason to want it to be one thing rather than another: I copied eleven and domesticated seven.

I did not notice the split as a split until the third block was written. The rule I was following, so far as I can reconstruct it, was: copy where English has no word for the thing, domesticate where it has one. That rule is defensible item by item and it produces a class that is handled two ways — which is the pattern S012, S013, S017 and S018 recorded in four other translators and which S097 measured in two published ones.

Two things in it are worth separating, because I think they are different faults if they are faults at all.

• Class-level non-uniformity: polonyna and pen sit in one paragraph. Each item is rendered the same way every time it occurs, but the class is not handled by one policy.
• Item-level non-uniformity: I do not believe I committed any. полонина is polonyna at all ten occurrences, ватаг is vatah at all seven. I checked this after the fact and it holds.

So this rendering is item-uniform and class-non-uniform, and if that distinction matters to anything it is not a distinction the census that named the problem has ever drawn.

2. The individual forks, and what was live at each

• полонина. Kept. It is the word the whole chapter turns on, it is a proper institution and not merely a high field, and the paragraph before my unit has already defined it in the Ukrainian («на сій високій луці»). Alternatives live: the high pasture, the summer pasture, the mountain pasture. Lost by keeping it: the word's ordinariness — a Hutsul reader does not meet a foreign word here.
• полонинка (BC, opening). The diminutive is a folk-song form and I could not carry it. Written as that little polonyna, which reads as a size where the Ukrainian is an endearment. This is the one place I think the copy costs something specific.
• стая. Kept. The footnote in the copy-text tells me it is the wooden hut where the shepherds live and make cheese; English hut, lodge, shieling were live. Shieling is exactly the right institution and belongs to a different mountain range; I rejected it as importing Scotland.
• ватаг. Kept. Head shepherd, chief herdsman, master of the polonyna were live, and I in fact used the third as a gloss-in-passing at «полонинського газди», which is a different word (газда = householder). So the English says master of the polonyna once, for a word I elsewhere render vatah. I noticed this and let it stand because the Ukrainian is also using a second word there.
• ватра. Kept. It is not the fire: it is the laid, ritual, unextinguished fire, and «живий вогонь» — living fire — is a separate phrase in the same sentences which I did translate. Had I written fire for both, the sentence «підняв вогонь і встромив в ватру» would have had to read lifted the fire and set it into the fire.
• скалка. Kept, and this is the item I am least sure of. From context it is the spinning piece of the fire-drill — set between the doorposts, turned by a strap, it smokes and gives a flame. I wrote the skalka; the honest gloss is the fire-drill and I did not use it because I was not certain the word names the spindle rather than the whole apparatus.
• бартка. Kept. A Hutsul long-handled axe; hatchet loses the length and axe the fineness, and the simile «гострий як наточена бартка» needs the edge, which the Ukrainian word carries for its own reader and mine does not.
• вівчар / вівчарка. Domesticated to shepherd / sheepdog. English has both words exactly.
• маржина / худібка. Both domesticated to stock. These are two different Ukrainian words — маржина is the Hutsul word for livestock, худібка a diminutive of the standard худоба — and I have flattened them into one English word at all six occurrences. That is a real loss and it is a loss of the same kind Hapgood's русалка/водяной fault is, run the other way: two source words arriving as one. I chose it because stock is the only English word that covers cattle and sheep together and is not an obtrusive register (beasts, the herds, the livestock).
• отара. Flock. стоїще. Kept — it is the fenced standing-ground on the polonyna, and fold would have collided with the pens (загороди) three lines later. загорода. Pen.
• трембіта. Kept; the instrument has no English name. бербениця / путина. Kept as a pair because they are a pair of vessels in one phrase and translating one and copying the other would have been the worst of both. кулеша. Kept; maize porridge would be right and flat.
• царинка. Hayfield. The Hutsul царинка is the fenced meadow by the village, and I have given the fence away.

3. Things that are not the class

• The tense shift in BC. The Ukrainian opens in the present (обходить, кида, чує) and turns to the past (показалися, заблеяли, впав) at «А коли врешті». It is the passage's most marked formal feature and I kept it exactly, at the cost of an English sentence that changes tense mid-paragraph.
• «Слава Ісусу!» / «Навіки слава!» — the Galician greeting and its fixed answer. Glory to Jesus / Glory for ever. English has no fixed pair; a reader will not know these are formulae rather than the men's own words.
• «ирщених» (dialect for хрещених). The christened. The dialect spelling is gone; I had no way to mark it that did not read as an error.
• «доки ме він горіти» — dialect future. I wrote as long as it shall burn, using an archaic English future for a dialect one. Not the same marking, and the nearest thing I had.
• «браччіку» — dialect vocative diminutive of брат. Brother. The diminutive is gone.
• «кожухи» of the dogs. The Ukrainian calls the sheepdogs' coats кожухи, the sheepskin coat a Hutsul wears. I wrote sheepskins, which keeps the metaphor and loses that it is the same garment the men have on.
• «Бескид» — the Beskyd, personified and masculine. Kept as a proper name; a reader will take it for a mountain, which is right.
• «хід полонинський» — the spring procession of the flocks up to the polonyna. I wrote the polonyna procession, which is a compound English does not really have. Live alternative: the going-up.
• «наїжити шерсть» — bristle, one word for three.

4. What I would look at again in the revision

The BC sentence «Він чує хід полонинський не тільки вухом» and the compound in it; the polonynka diminutive; whether stock for two source words should become two English words; and the rhythm of the long blessing sentence, which in the Ukrainian is a single accumulating period and in my English has been broken by a full stop after heaven.