Repository path: workshop/translations/candia/R10c-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-candia-R10c-v1 — d'Annunzio, «La fine di Candia» ¶1–24, R10 against A-mchugh-presence

Provenance

• Source. As T-candia-R10p-v1: d'Annunzio, «La fine di Candia», San Pantaleone (1886), paragraphs 1–24 of 118, 800 words, frozen at workshop/experiments/E-20260731g-provenance/material/source-unit.txt.
• Regime. R10 v1.0. Target: A-mchugh-presence, propositions C01–C19, reused verbatim from E-20260731f/claims.json.
• Order. This arm was written SECOND, after T-candia-R10p-v1 was committed at 5bb9b68. E-20260731f wrote its centre arm first; the reversal is this session's control on the ordering confound and is declared in E-20260731g Amendment A1.2.
• Matched pair. T-candia-R10p-v1, same source unit, same regime, target A-mansfield-garden-party. Neither is a revision of the other; both are single passes.
• Contamination: none, MEASURED. The published English was not read before this text and its log were frozen; see ## Contamination.
• Human involvement. None.

Translation

Three days after the Easter dinner — always a big one at the Lamonica house, and crowded — Donna Cristina Lamonica was counting the table linen and the silver and putting it all away in order in the dressers and the chests, for the next time.

The two who always helped were there: Maria Bisaccia, the maid, and the washerwoman, Candida Marcanda, who everybody called Candia. The big baskets of good linen sat in a row on the floor. The silver and the rest of the table things were laid out shining on a cloth. They were heavy pieces, made a bit roughly by country silversmiths, shaped almost like church plate, the way that kind of silver always is when it comes down through a family in a provincial town. The room smelled of clean wash.

Candia took the towels and the tablecloths and the napkins out of the baskets. She held each piece up so the mistress could see the cloth was whole, then passed it to Maria, who filled the drawers, while the mistress dropped scent in between the layers and wrote the count in her book.

Candia was tall, bony, spare, fifty years old. Her back had a slight bend in it from the way she stood all day at her work, her arms were very long, and she had the head of a hawk on the neck of a turtle. Maria Bisaccia was from Ortona, a little heavy, milk-skinned, with pale eyes; she had a soft way of talking and slow careful hands, the hands of someone who spends her day in sweet dough and syrup and preserves and candied fruit. Donna Cristina was from Ortona too, convent-raised, small, her upper body tipped a little forward. Her hair was going red, her face was covered in freckles, her nose was long and thick, her teeth were bad, and her eyes were beautiful and modest. She looked like a young priest in women's clothes.

The three of them worked carefully at it, and it took most of the afternoon.

Then, at one point, as Candia was going out with the empty baskets, Donna Cristina counted the spoons and found one missing.

"Maria! Maria!" she said, and there was fear in it. "Count. There's a spoon missing.... You count them."

"That can't be, signó," Maria said. "Let's see."

She went through the silver, saying the numbers out loud. Donna Cristina watched and shook her head. The silver rang clear against itself.

"It's true," Maria said finally, and threw up her hands. "So what do we do now?"

Nobody was going to suspect her. She had fifteen years in that family, and she had proved herself. She had come from Ortona with Donna Cristina when Donna Cristina married, almost as part of the dowry, and by now she had a certain standing in the house, under the mistress's protection. She was full of religious superstition, loyal to her saint and her bell tower, and very shrewd. She and the mistress had a kind of hostile alliance going against everything in Pescara, and above all against the Pescara saint. Any chance she got she brought up the town she came from, how beautiful it was and how rich, the splendors of its basilica, the treasures of San Tommaso, the scale of the ceremonies — against poor San Cetteo, which owned one small silver arm.

Donna Cristina said:

"Look through there properly."

Maria left the room to go look. She went through every corner of the kitchen and the balcony. Nothing. She came back empty-handed.

"It isn't there. It isn't there."

So the two of them started thinking, guessing, going back over what they remembered. They went out on the balcony over the courtyard, and on the washhouse balcony, for a last look. They were talking loudly, and the women came to the windows of the houses around.

"What's happened, Donna Cristí? Tell us. Tell us."

Donna Cristina and Maria told them the whole thing, with a lot of words and a lot of gestures.

"Gesù! Gesù! So we've got thieves now?"

Inside a minute the noise of the theft was all over the neighborhood, all over Pescara. Men and women started in on it, working out who the thief could be. By the time the story got to the last houses in Sant'Agostino it had grown: it wasn't one spoon anymore, it was all the Lamonica silver.

The weather was good, the roses on the balcony were starting, two siskins were singing in a cage, and the women stayed at their windows for the pleasure of talking in the good weather and the soft heat. Their heads came up between the pots of basil. The noise of them seemed to please the cats along the gutters.

Donna Cristina said, with her hands together:

"Who would it have been?"

Donna Isabella Sertale, who they called the Ferret, and who had the fast furtive movements of a small predator, said in her thin voice:

"Who was in there with you, Donna Cristí? I think I saw Candia go back past...."

Translator's log

Frozen before any evaluation of this translation was designed (charter §3, A4; R10 §7). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Target codes A / X / N as in the period arm. Proposition ids are A-mchugh-presence C01–C19.

The correction recorded in the period arm's log applies here too: ‟Aaaah!” and la Pica fall in ¶25 of the story, outside this unit, so C19's only live violation site is ‟Gesù! Gesù!”.

1. ¶1, the word order. The Italian opens on the name and holds the verb to the end of a 47-word period. Live: keep the Italian order / put the time phrase first and the name after it. Took the second. C17 wants wide sentence-length variation with no pattern, and the way to get it is to let the opening sentence be a normal English one rather than a translated Italian one. A — C17, C18.
2. «la Faina». Live: keep "la Faina" / "the Weasel" / "the Ferret". Took "the Ferret", and "who they called" rather than "called". C12 forbids glossing, so the nickname has to work unglossed in English; ferret is the contemporary word for exactly this kind of person. A — C01, C12. (The period arm took "the Weasel". This is the pair's one place where a proper noun differs, and it is a register decision, not a semantic one.)
3. ¶1 «convito pasquale» / «conviti futuri». Live: "Easter banquet" / "Easter dinner", and for «conviti futuri» "for the next time" rather than "for the banquets to come". Banquet is period lexis. A — C02. Given up: the repetition the Italian makes on convito, which the period arm keeps.
4. ¶1 «canterani e forzieri». Live: "presses and coffers" (the period arm's) / "the dressers and the chests". Both source words name specific period furniture; C02 forbids period lexis and C12 forbids glossing, and there is no third option that keeps both the object and the register. A — C02, C12. This is the arm's largest single loss: two named pieces of provincial furniture become two ordinary words.
5. ¶2 «Erano presenti, per solito, alla bisogna, e porgevano aiuto». Live: the Italian's inverted order / "The two who always helped were there". Took the second. A — C01, C05.
6. ¶2 «una spasa». Took "laid out shining on a cloth", dissolving the noun into the clause, rather than the period arm's "a spread cloth". A — C02.
7. ¶2 «di forme quasi liturgiche». Live: "of almost liturgical shapes" / "shaped almost like church plate". Liturgical is display vocabulary. A — C05.
8. ¶2 «Una fresca fragranza di bucato spandevasi nella stanza». Live: "A fresh fragrance of washing spread through the room" / "The room smelled of clean wash." Took the second: subject first, plain verb, four words of predicate. A — C05, C13, C17.
9. ¶3, the 174-word paragraph — SPLIT INTO TWO. The Italian runs the linen work and the three portraits together. Broken after the counting, so the portraits start a new paragraph. C13 wants very short paragraphs used structurally. A — C13. This is the largest structural difference between the two arms: the period arm keeps the whole thing as one 174-word period.
10. ¶3, the portraits — the semicolon chains broken into sentences. Donna Cristina's portrait ends on a one-sentence unit, "She looked like a young priest in women's clothes." A — C13, C17.
11. ¶3 «una testa d'uccello rapace sopra un collo di testuggine». Live: "the head of a bird of prey on the neck of a tortoise" / "the head of a hawk on the neck of a turtle". Took the second. The Italian's figure is the unit's one sustained image and C10 forbids extending it, so it is kept and made concrete rather than elaborated. Tortoise is British; turtle is the contemporary American word and the anchor is an American novel. A — C01, C10.
12. ¶3 «come colei ch'era usa esercitar le mani». Live: "as one accustomed to exercise her hands" / "the hands of someone who spends her day in". A — C05.
13. ¶3 «somigliando un cherico». Live: "like a young clerk" (the period arm's) / "like a young priest". Clerk in the sense of cleric is archaic English. A — C01.
14. ¶6 «con una specie di spavento». Live: "with a sort of terror" / "and there was fear in it". Took the second, which puts the fear in the narration's own grammar rather than in an adverbial. A — C05, C06.
15. ¶6, attribution. «gridò» → "said", not "cried". Same at ¶9 «esclamò» → "said" and ¶24 «chiese con la voce stridula» → "said in her thin voice". C08 is explicit that dialogue is attributed almost entirely with say and that no ornamental attributing verbs are used, and this unit has five of them in twenty-four paragraphs. A — C08. Given up: the Italian distinguishes shouting, answering, exclaiming, saying and asking, and this arm distinguishes none of them. Four of the five attributions are flattened. (The period arm keeps all five.)
16. ¶6 «Manca 'na cucchiara». Left unmarked in English, as in the period arm — but here it is aimed: C04 forbids dialect spelling outright. A — C04.
17. ¶6 and ¶24 «signó» / «Donna Cristí». Kept both truncated vocatives. C12 forbids glossing and C03 forbids era-marking orthographic play; a truncated Italian vocative is neither — it is a named particular of the kind C11 says supplies the texture. A — C11, C12.
18. ¶8 «L'argentò tintinniva chiaramente». Live: "The silver chinked out clear" (the period arm's) / "The silver rang clear against itself." Chink is period. A — C02.
19. ¶9 «con un atto di disperazione». Live: "with a gesture of despair" / "and threw up her hands". Took the second: a named physical particular in place of an abstract noun phrase. A — C11.
20. ¶10 «Ella era sicura da ogni sospetto». Live: "She was safe from any suspicion" / "Nobody was going to suspect her." Took the second. This is the unit's one clear entry into a character's own judgment inside the narrator's grammar, and the flat future-in-the-past is how English does it without announcing it. A — C06. (The opportunity list called this the single C06 site and it is.)
21. ¶10 «astutissima». Live: "cunning beyond everything" (the period arm's) / "very shrewd." A — C05.
22. ¶10 «all'epoca delle nozze, quasi facendo parte dell'appannaggio matrimoniale». Appannaggio is an appanage. Live: "as part of the marriage-portion" / "almost as part of the dowry". Dowry is the word a contemporary reader has. A — C02.
23. ¶10, the San Cetteo close. Kept the dash and the final clause, as the period arm does, but shorter: "against poor San Cetteo, which owned one small silver arm." Dropped «e nulla più», which the Italian does not have and the period arm added. A — C05.
24. ¶13 «Rovistò tutti li angoli … inutilmente». Live: "and it was no use" / "Nothing." Took the one-word sentence. A — C13, C17.
25. ¶14 «Non c'è! Non c'è!» Kept the repetition — "It isn't there. It isn't there." — but with periods rather than exclamation marks. C19 bars typographic device beyond paragraphing, and two exclamation marks in a row is one. A — C19. (The period arm keeps both exclamation marks under M06.)
26. ¶18 «Gesù! Gesù!» Kept in Italian with both exclamation marks. This is the one place the centre arm accepts a typographic device: the alternative is to drop the exclamations from a line that is nothing but exclamation, or to translate the oath and lose the particular. X — C19, declared. A — C12 for keeping it unglossed.
27. ¶19 «Uomini e donne si misero a discutere». Live: "began discussing" / "started in on it". Colloquial phrasal verb; C03 bars era-marking slang and started in on is not era-marked. A — C01.
28. ¶20 «due lucherini in gabbia». Kept siskins unglossed — the same decision as the period arm, but here it is aimed: C11 and C12 want named particulars supplied without explanation. A — C11, C12.
29. ¶20 «il ciaramellío pareva dilettare i gatti in su le gronde». Live: "the clatter of them seemed to delight the cats" (the period arm's) / "The noise of them seemed to please the cats along the gutters." Delight and eaves are both period-tilted; please and gutters are not. A — C02.
30. ¶24 «Mi pare che ho visto ripassare Candia». Live: "Seems to me I saw Candia going by" / "I think I saw Candia go back past." Seems to me is period-tilted spoken idiom. Kept the four-dot ellipsis. A — C01.
31. Contractions throughout, in narration as well as speech — can't, isn't, wasn't, we've, Let's. C16 wants them everywhere. In the narration the sites are "it wasn't one spoon anymore" (¶19) and "It isn't there" in speech; the narration otherwise supplies almost no negation, which is the same limit the period arm hit from the other side. A — C16, and the site count is two.
32. C07, third person limited to one consciousness — NOT INSTALLED, and it could not be. The opportunity list records this as missing: the narration describes all three women from outside, and satisfying C07 would mean rewriting the story. Recorded here so it is not read as a failure to install. Missing, not X.

Codes: A 30 · X 1 · N 0 · missing 1. Thirty-two logged decisions over 800 source words.

Contamination

None, MEASURED. tools/dependence_check.py, unmodified, against the whole 3,426-word published English. Figures and controls in wiki/findings/results/RS-20260731g-provenance.md. The published translation was not read before this text and its log were frozen.

Declared priming. As the period arm, plus one more that the period arm did not have and that is the ordering confound in its concrete form: the translator had written and committed T-candia-R10p-v1 before beginning this text, and wrote this one in awareness of it. Twelve of the decisions above name the period arm's choice explicitly. This arm is not an independent draw and is not offered as one.