Repository path: workshop/regimes/R17-verse-free.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R17 — VERSE-FREE (v0.1)

The other pole of the pair frozen with R16. Same source, same session, same translator; the rhyme obligation removed and a lexical obligation put in its place.

Roles

Lead only. No panel role, no API cost.

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.
2. Produce fourteen lines of English, one per source line, in loose iambic pentameter.
3. No rhyme is required and none is sought. A rhyme that arrives unbidden is left alone; it is never worked for.
4. Where a choice arises, the more specific word wins — the technical, local, or material term the French uses is carried into English even when English has no idiomatic equivalent and a borrowing or a doublet is needed. Any metrical cost is accepted and logged.
5. Freeze the log before any evaluation is designed.

Outputs

The fourteen lines; a numbered list of the specific terms carried and how (cognate, borrowing, doublet, gloss-in-line), and of anything the rule could not save.

What the regime is for

See R16 §What the regime is for. R17 is not "a literal translation": it is a verse regime with the trade-off resolved the other way. It has a metre and a line count, and it refuses only the rhyme.