Repository path: workshop/regimes/R16-verse-bound.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R16 — VERSE-BOUND (v0.1)

The first verse regime in this project. Every regime before it was written for prose, and R07/R08 (fluency / resistancy) name a stance, not a form. A verse original imposes a constraint no prose regime models: two lines must end on the same sound, and the words that must end them are already chosen — by the poet, in another language.

Roles

Lead only. No panel role. Lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Procedure

1. Read the source in French. No published rendering of the same poem may be consulted before the translation and its log are frozen (continue-prompt.md §5.2).
2. Produce fourteen lines of English (for a sonnet), in loose iambic pentameter.
3. Keep a rhyme scheme. The sestet takes the original's tercet scheme exactly. The octave takes the original's scheme if the English lexicon supplies it, and ABBA CDDC if it does not; which was used is recorded.
4. Only perfect rhymes are admitted — identical from the stressed vowel onward, in the translator's own accent, stated on the artifact. An imperfect rhyme is a regime violation, not a licence. This is the constraint Taylor 1897 breaks and the 1897 Nation reviewer names.
5. Where a rhyme cannot be got without abandoning a lexical item of the French, the rhyme wins, and the abandonment is written into the log as a numbered loss, with the alternative that was refused.
6. Freeze the log before any evaluation of the translation is designed.

Outputs

The fourteen lines; the scheme actually used; a numbered loss list, each entry naming the French word, the English substitute, and the rhyme that forced it.

What the regime is for

R16 and R17 are a matched pair on one axis: what the translator does when the rhyme and the word cannot both be kept. R16 resolves it toward the rhyme, R17 toward the word. They exist so that the two halves of the 1897 dimension-split verdict — Taylor is faulty in rhyme, Egan refines away the flavour — can be stated as one trade-off with two resolutions rather than two unrelated complaints.

Standing caution (regimes README, S082): both arms of an R16/R17 pair produced by one continuous agent in one session are not independent renderings, and any contrast measured on them is an upper bound on what the regime change buys.