Repository path: workshop/translations/tini-polonyna/README.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«Тіні забутих предків» — the polonyna movement (chs. VIII–IX)

The project's first translation from Ukrainian, and its eighteenth source language.

The work

Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky (1864–1913), «Тіні забутих предків» (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors), written 1911, first published 1912. Hutsul highland novella. Public domain: the author died in 1913, so the work is out of copyright in every jurisdiction the project can be in.

The copy-text

Ukrainian Wikisource, Твори (Коцюбинський), Vol. II, New York: Книгоспілка, 1955, transcribed from the DjVu scan under the ProofreadPage extension. Pages 363–365 of that index, fetched 2026-08-09 as action=raw from the Сторінка: namespace, at pagequality level="4" (proofread). Wiki markup (<ref>, templates, internal links) was stripped mechanically; one end-of-page hyphenation was rejoined (перехо-\nдити → переходити). The source's own two footnotes — glossing стая as "a wooden shelter in which the shepherds live and make cheese (budz, bryndzia)" and путина as "a wooden vessel" — were not carried into the working text and were not consulted as translation aids beyond the fact of their existence being noted here.

No collation against a second edition was performed. This is a single-witness working text and nothing in the run turns on its constitution.

The unit

source-unit.txt — 717 Ukrainian words in three blocks, running continuously from the word «Полонина!» (Ivan's arrival on the high pasture) to «…як мати дитячу голівку…» (the end of the blessing of the flocks). The block boundaries fall at the author's own section breaks or at a paragraph opening a new scene; each block is self-contained enough to be read alone.

Why this unit. The passage is unusually dense in one coherent class of culture-bound items — the vocabulary of the polonyna, the Carpathian summer pasture as an institution — and, unlike most such passages, it repeats them: four to five distinct class items occur two or more times inside a single block. That is the property the unit was chosen for, and it was checked by counting before the passage was read closely.

Translations filed here

Contamination

none, and it is a reachability statement, not a measurement. The only professional English translation of this work is Marco Carynnyk's (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Ukrainian Academic Press, 1981), which is in copyright, is not freely reachable, and was not consulted. No English rendering of the work is in the public domain or otherwise obtainable by this project, so there is no comparator and tools/dependence_check.py could not be run. Per the standing rule (CLAUDE.md, 2026-07-26), a contamination: declaration without a measurement is a placeholder that can hide either end of the measured range, and this one is declared as such.

Why the run built on it does not turn on that. The constraint the rule imposes — the lead is never the independent third translator where a design's validity turns on independence from a published rendering — does not bite here. Every arm of E-20260809i is a variant of one lead rendering, and every comparison the design makes is within-run and within-translator. A remembered Carynnyk phrase, if any survives in the lead, would sit in all four arms alike and cannot produce the contrast under test.