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

«Злоумышленник» under R06 — lead single pass, no register rule

• Source: Anton Chekhov, «Злоумышленник» (1885), 1,074 Russian words, 57 paragraphs. Copy-text workshop/translations/zloumyshlennik/source.txt, stored in the repository at S165 for E-20260812i-footing-channel and unchanged since. Public domain.
• Regime: R06 v1.0 (lead single pass, source-only, no revision). No register rule of any kind. This is the floor arm.
• Translated by: the lead agent, as a labeled subject (charter §3, A4). Cost $0; not ledgered.
• Order of composition: written first of the three arms, before R26 and before R25 existed as text.
• Contamination: suspected, and measured — see §Contamination below. The lead read no published rendering of this story before freezing. Constance Garnett's 1921 "A Malefactor" is stored in this repository at workshop/experiments/E-20260812i-footing-channel/materials/hand_GAR_zl.txt from a previous session's run; it was not opened. The measurement was run by tools/dependence_check.py, which reads files without displaying them.
• Evaluation: workshop/experiments/E-20260815-register-room/design.md, wiki/findings/results/RS-20260815-register-room.md. The lead never judges its own translation (charter §5).

Translation

Before the examining magistrate stands a small, exceedingly scrawny little peasant in a homespun shirt and patched trousers. His hairy, pockmarked face and his eyes, barely visible under thick, overhanging brows, have an expression of sullen severity. On his head is a whole thatch of long-uncombed, tangled hair, which gives him a still greater, spiderish severity. He is barefoot.

"Denis Grigoryev!" the magistrate begins. "Come closer and answer my questions. On the seventh of this July the railway watchman Ivan Semyonov Akinfov, walking along the line in the morning at the 141st verst, found you unscrewing a nut, by which the rails are fastened to the sleepers. Here it is, this nut!.. With which nut he then detained you. Was that how it was?"

"Eh?"

"Was it all as Akinfov explains it?"

"Sure it was."

"Good; well, and what were you unscrewing the nut for?"

"Eh?"

"Drop that 'eh' of yours and answer the question! What were you unscrewing the nut for?"

"If it hadn't been needed, I wouldn't have unscrewed it," Denis rasps, squinting up at the ceiling.

"And what did you need this nut for?"

"The nut? We make sinkers out of nuts…"

"Who's 'we'?"

"Us, the people… the Klimovo peasants, that is."

"Listen, my man, don't play the idiot with me, talk sense. No lying to me about sinkers!"

"Never lied in my life, and now I'm lying…" Denis mutters, blinking. "But can you do without a sinker, your honour? If you put a live bait or a worm on the hook, will it go down without a sinker? Lying…" Denis grins. "What the devil's the good of a live bait if it swims on top! Perch, pike, burbot always go along the bottom, and if a bait swims on top only an asp will take it, and even that's seldom… There's no asp in our river… That fish likes room."

"What are you telling me about asp for?"

"Eh? Why, you're asking yourself! The gentry catch that way too with us. The lowest little boy wouldn't fish without a sinker. Of course, a man that doesn't understand, he'll go fishing without a sinker. There's no law written for a fool…"

"So you say you unscrewed this nut in order to make a sinker out of it?"

"What else? Not to play knucklebones with!"

"But for a sinker you could have taken lead, a bullet… some sort of nail…"

"You won't find lead lying in the road, you have to buy it, and a nail's no good. There's nothing better than a nut… It's heavy, and it's got a hole."

"What an idiot he's pretending to be! As if he was born yesterday or dropped out of the sky. Don't you understand, you stupid head, what this unscrewing leads to? If the watchman hadn't looked, the train might have gone off the rails, people would have been killed! You would have killed people!"

"God forbid, your honour! Why kill? Are we unchristened, or some sort of villains? Thanks be to God, kind sir, we've lived out our lives and never so much as killed, we never had such thoughts in our heads… Save us and have mercy, Queen of Heaven… What are you saying, sir!"

"And what do you suppose train wrecks happen from? Unscrew two or three nuts and there's your wreck!"

Denis grins and screws up his eyes at the magistrate incredulously.

"Well! We've been unscrewing nuts here the whole village for years now and the Lord's preserved us, and now — a wreck… killed people… If I'd carried off a rail, or, let's say, laid a log across her track, well, then maybe the train would have turned over, but this… pah! a nut!"

"But do understand, the rail is fastened to the sleepers with nuts!"

"We understand that… We don't unscrew them all… we leave some… We don't do it without sense… we understand…"

Denis yawns and crosses his mouth.

"Last year a train went off the rails here," says the magistrate. "Now it's clear why…"

"What's your pleasure?"

"Now, I say, it's clear why the train went off the rails last year… I understand!"

"That's what you're educated for, to understand, our benefactors… The Lord knew who to give understanding to… There, you've reasoned out the how and the what, and the watchman's a peasant like the rest, with no understanding at all, grabs you by the collar and hauls you off… Reason first, and then haul! It's a saying — a peasant, and a peasant's wit… Write down too, your honour, that he hit me twice in the teeth and in the chest."

"When they searched your place, they found another nut… Where did you unscrew that one, and when?"

"Is that the one that was lying under the little red chest?"

"I don't know where it was lying, only it was found. When did you unscrew it?"

"I didn't unscrew that one, Ignashka, the son of one-eyed Semyon, gave it me. That's the one under the chest; and the one in the sledge in the yard, that one Mitrofan and I unscrewed together."

"Which Mitrofan?"

"Mitrofan Petrov… Haven't you heard of him? He makes seines and sells them to the gentry. He needs a lot of these same nuts. Ten apiece for every seine, near enough…"

"Listen… Article 1081 of the code of punishments states that for any wilfully committed damage to a railway, when it may endanger the transport travelling on that railway and the guilty party knew that the consequence of it must be a disaster… you understand? knew! And you could not but have known what this unscrewing leads to… he is sentenced to penal servitude with exile."

"Of course, you know better… We're dark people… how would we understand?"

"You understand everything! You're lying, pretending!"

"Why lie? Ask in the village, if you don't believe… They catch nothing but bleak without a sinker, and what's worse than a gudgeon, but even a gudgeon won't come to you without a sinker."

"Tell me about the asp again!" the magistrate smiles.

"The asp doesn't live with us… We let the line out without a sinker on top of the water with a fly, the chub comes, and even that's seldom."

"Now, be quiet…"

A silence falls. Denis shifts from foot to foot, looks at the table with its green baize and blinks hard, as though it were not baize before him but the sun. The magistrate writes rapidly.

"Can I go?" Denis asks after some silence.

"No. I must take you into custody and send you to prison."

Denis stops blinking and, raising his thick brows, looks questioningly at the official.

"That is, how do you mean, to prison? Your honour! I've no time, I've got to go to the fair; I've three roubles to get from Yegor for the lard…"

"Be quiet, don't interrupt."

"To prison… If there was something to go for, I'd go, but as it is… for nothing at all… What for? I've not stolen, seems to me, and I've not fought… And if it's the arrears you're in doubt about, your honour, don't you believe the village elder… You ask the gentleman, the permanent member… There's no cross on him, on that elder…"

"Be quiet!"

"I am being quiet…" Denis mutters. "But that the elder lied about the accounts, that I'd swear to… There's three of us brothers: Kuzma Grigoryev, then, Yegor Grigoryev, and me, Denis Grigoryev…"

"You're interrupting me… Hey, Semyon!" the magistrate shouts. "Take him away!"

"There's three of us brothers," Denis mutters as two burly soldiers take him and lead him out of the chamber. "A brother's not answerable for a brother… Kuzma doesn't pay, and you, Denis, answer for it… Judges! The old master, the general, is dead, God rest him, or he'd have shown you judges… You have to judge knowing how, not just anyhow… Flog me, even, but let it be for a reason, in conscience…"

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written, frozen with it (R06 §Procedure 3–4). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. R06 has no rule set, so there are no coverage codes here — the whole point of the arm is that nothing governed the register choices except ordinary practice.

The situation the story is built out of. Two registers face each other across a table and neither is the narrator's. The magistrate speaks chancery Russian — «коей рельсы прикрепляются к шпалам», «с каковою гайкой», «1081 статья уложения о наказаниях» — and Denis speaks village Russian. The narration is neutral literary Russian and stands apart from both. That three-way arrangement is the first thing I noticed and it governed everything: I translated the narration plainly, the magistrate with a legal stiffening, and Denis colloquially, and none of that was a rule, it was what the source looked like.

1. «мужичонко» — the pejorative-diminutive of мужик. English has no morpheme for it. Options: little peasant (taken), peasant fellow, scrap of a peasant, a bare peasant. Taken with small in front of it, which doubles the smallness; the Russian doubles it too («маленький, чрезвычайно тощий мужичонко»).
2. «пестрядинной рубахе» — pestryad is a coarse striped or checked homespun. homespun shirt taken; striped ticking shirt was live and rejected as a fabric an English reader would place in a mattress.
3. «паучью суровость» — spiderish severity. spidery was live; spiderish taken because spidery in English means thin and straggling (of handwriting, of legs), which is not the sense. This is the one place in the narration where I chose a slightly odd English word on purpose.
4. «Чаво?» — the substandard pronunciation of чего, three occurrences, and the pivot of the opening exchange, since the magistrate then quotes it back («Ты это своё «чаво» брось»). Options: Eh? (taken), Wha'?, Wot?, What's that?, Hey?. I took Eh? because it is the one English monosyllable that is unmistakably an uneducated request for repetition without being spelt wrong; the eye-dialect options put a specific English region in the room, and this story has no room in it but a Russian one. What is lost is that «чаво» is a mispronunciation and Eh? is not — an English reader hears a class, not an error.
5. «Знамо, было» — знамо is dialectal for конечно. Sure it was taken. Course it was and Aye, it was were live; aye is placed, course felt right and sure felt righter.
6. «хрипит Денис» — rasps. croaks, wheezes live. Rasps keeps the throat in it.
7. «не прикидывайся ты мне идиотом» — the ethical dative «мне» is the mark, and English cannot carry it in a pronoun. don't play the idiot with me puts it in with me, which is the nearest English has.
8. «братец» — the magistrate's condescending diminutive. my man taken; brother is wrong in English, my good fellow is a step up in politeness that the Russian does not have here.
9. «живца или выполозка» — a live minnow and a nightcrawler (a large earthworm brought up at night). a live bait or a worm taken; выполозок is precise and English has no unmarked word for it, so precision was traded for an ordinary sentence. A loss, recorded as one.
10. «шилишпер» — the asp (Aspius aspius), and the fish the whole comic exchange turns on. It is a regional form of жерех. asp taken as the true name. Chub is live and is what several English anglers would say, but the chub appears separately at the end («голавль») and I needed the two kept apart.
11. «Чёрт ли в нём» — literally what devil is in it. What the devil's the good of it taken.
12. «В нашей реке не живёт шилишпер… Эта рыба простор любит.» — the second sentence is Denis's one moment of something like lyricism. That fish likes room taken; likes open water was live and is more accurate about the fish and less like Denis.
13. «Не в бабки ж играть!» — бабки is knucklebones, the peasant children's game. Kept as knucklebones rather than domesticated to marbles or jacks: this is a realia decision and the project's own §7.6 says the three roads out are all costly, so I took the road that leaves the world Russian and makes the reader work.
14. «Дураку закон не писан» — a proverb, there is no law written for a fool. Kept close, since it is transparent in English. A fool is a law unto himself is the idiomatic English proverb and says something different (self-will, not exemption).
15. «Избави господи»… «Спаси и помилуй, царица небесная» — Denis's oaths are liturgical, not profane. God forbid and Save us and have mercy, Queen of Heaven taken. «Что вы-с!» ends the turn: the enclitic -s is the deference particle the project has censused elsewhere. I put it into What are you saying, sir! — the sir carries what the -s carries, in a free word.
16. «тьфу! гайка!» — pah! a nut!. pfui, bah live. The spat consonant is the point.
17. «бревно поперёк ейного пути» — «ейного» is substandard for «его». The mark is in the possessive and English has no substandard possessive that is not regional. I wrote her track, using the feminine for the train, which is an English colloquialism doing a different job in the same slot. Recorded as a substitution, not a carriage.
18. «Чего изволите?» — the servant's formula, what is your pleasure? Taken straight. It is the one line where Denis speaks up rather than down, and it is his second failure to hear.
19. «милостивцы наши» — our benefactors, plural-of-respect addressed to one man. Kept plural, which reads slightly strange in English and is strange in Russian too.
20. «Сказано — мужик, мужицкий и ум» — It's a saying — a peasant, and a peasant's wit.
21. «Креста на нём нет» — there's no cross on him, i.e. he has no conscience. Kept literal. He has no fear of God is the idiomatic English and loses the object.
22. «Мне идтить?» — идтить is the substandard infinitive of идти. Can I go? taken. The substandard form is not carried; the same loss as (4).
23. «здорово живёшь» — an idiom meaning for no reason at all. Taken as that.
24. «набрехал в учёте» — брехать is to lie, of dogs barking. lied about the accounts taken; the dog is lost.
25. «Помер покойник барин-генерал, царство небесное» — помер is the peasant word for died. is dead taken, which is neutral; passed on is a different class of English. A loss.
26. «Хоть и высеки, но чтоб за дело, по совести» — the last line and the story's point. Flog me, even, but let it be for a reason, in conscience. The imperative «высеки» is singular and familiar, addressed to a magistrate — Denis has stopped using the polite plural. I could not carry that; English you is one word. The largest single loss in the piece, and it falls on the last sentence.

Length. 1,074 Russian words → 1,396 English words, ratio 1.300, computed by workshop/translations/zloumyshlennik/counts.py over the frozen artifact. R06 sets no target and I set none; the figure is recorded because the sibling arms have rules about it. The same script records 49 contractions inside Denis's 26 turns, which is the quantity the sibling arm's N1 removes.

What I would have changed with a second pass, recorded because R06 forbids taking it: (10) the asp, where I am not sure an English reader gets a fish at all; and (17), where her track is doing something the Russian does not do.