Repository path: workshop/translations/candia/R10p-v2/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-candia-R10p-v2 — d'Annunzio, «La fine di Candia» ¶1–24, under R10 v1.0 against A-mansfield-garden-party

What this is and why it exists. A second, independent R10p rendering of the 800-word Italian unit that T-candia-R10p-v1 renders. It is the X′ of pair C in E-20260801e-lead-carryover.

Blindness: intact for this pair. Neither T-candia-R10p-v1 nor T-candia-R10c-v1 was opened — not the translations, not the logs — and neither was candia-english-collier1907.txt or any other English of d'Annunzio. The candia directory holds no computed gate file, so the max_run_text leak that breached pair K (design §13 A6) has no counterpart here. The only things read were the source unit, R10, and the M01–M11 proposition file.

Frozen opportunity list (R10 §6) — which of M01–M11 this source can bear on at all

Four of eleven propositions have no opportunity here (M02, M03, M07, M10), and the reason differs in kind between them: M02, M03 and M07 name devices the source does not contain, so satisfying them means adding; M10 names a property of the whole passage's voice, which this source contradicts. Recorded before translating, as R10 §6 requires.

The translation

Three days after the Easter dinner — which at the Lamonica house was by tradition a great one, magnificent, and crowded with guests — Donna Cristina Lamonica was counting the table linen and the silver, and putting everything away in perfect order in the chests of drawers and the coffers, against the dinners to come.

As usual there to help with the business were Maria Bisaccia the maid and Candida Marcanda the washerwoman, whom everybody called Candia. The big baskets, heaped with fine cloth, stood in a row on the floor. The silver dishes and the other table things shone on a spread cloth — heavy, worked a little roughly by country silversmiths, almost liturgical in shape, as all such plate is that passes from generation to generation in rich provincial families. A cool smell of washing spread through the room.

Candia took the cloths out of the baskets — table covers, tablecloths, napkins — and had the mistress look the linen over to see it was whole; and she handed each piece on to Maria, who filled the drawers, while the mistress scattered a scent between the folds and set the number down in her book. Candia was a tall woman, bony and lean, fifty years old; her back was a little bent from the habitual attitude of her trade, her arms were very long, and she had the head of a bird of prey on the neck of a tortoise. Maria Bisaccia was from Ortona, rather plump, milky-skinned, with very light eyes; her speech was soft and her gestures slow and delicate, as a woman's are who is used to keeping her hands nearly always in sweet pastry, in syrups, in preserves and candied fruit. Donna Cristina, an Ortona woman too, brought up in the Benedictine convent, was short, with her body drooping a little forward; her hair was going red, her face was scattered with freckles, her nose was long and thick, her teeth were bad, and her eyes were beautiful and modest — she was like a young priest dressed in women's clothes.

The three women went about the work very carefully, and so spent a good part of the afternoon.

Now once, just as Candia was going out with the empty baskets, Donna Cristina, counting the cutlery, found that a spoon was missing.

"Maria! Maria!" she cried, in a kind of fright. "Count them! There's a spoon short.... You count them!"

"How can that be? It isn't possible, signora," said Maria. "Let's have a look now."

And she set about checking the cutlery over, saying the numbers out loud. Donna Cristina watched, shaking her head. The silver tinkled out clearly.

"It's true!" Maria cried at last, throwing up her hands. "And now what are we to do?"

She was safe from any suspicion. Fifteen years in that family, and she had given her proofs of faithfulness and honesty. She had come from Ortona with Donna Cristina at the time of the wedding, almost as part of the marriage settlement; and by now she had got a certain authority in the house, under the mistress's protection. She was full of religious superstitions, devoted to her own saint and her own bell tower, and as sly as they come. With the mistress she had made a kind of hostile alliance against everything belonging to Pescara, and above all against the Pescarese saint. She named her native town at every opportunity — the beauties and the riches of her native town, the splendors of its basilica, the treasures of San Tommaso, the magnificence of the church ceremonies, against the poverty of San Cetteo, who owned one small silver arm and nothing else.

Donna Cristina said:

"Have a good look in there."

Maria went out of the room to look. She rummaged in every corner of the kitchen and the balcony, and it was no use. She came back empty-handed.

"It isn't there! It isn't there!"

Then the two of them set to thinking, guessing, hunting back through their memories. They went out onto the balcony over the courtyard, the balcony by the wash-house, for one last search. And as they were talking loudly, the women of the neighborhood came to the windows of the houses round about.

"What's happened to you, Donna Cristi? Tell us! Tell us!"

Donna Cristina and Maria told the story, with a great many words and a great many gestures.

"Jesus! Jesus! So there are thieves about?"

In a moment the noise of the theft was all over the neighborhood, all over Pescara. Men and women set to arguing about it, imagining who the thief could be. By the time the news reached the last houses of Sant'Agostino it had grown: it was no longer a question of one spoon, but of all the Lamonica silver.

Now, as the weather was fine and the roses on the balcony were beginning to flower and two siskins were singing in their cage, the women stayed at their windows for the pleasure of gossiping in the fine weather, in that sweet warmth. The women's heads showed between the pots of basil, and the chattering seemed to delight the cats along the eaves.

Donna Cristina said, clasping her hands:

"Who can it have been?"

Donna Isabella Sertale, called the Weasel, who had the quick furtive movements of a little animal of prey, asked in her shrill voice:

"Who was there with you, Donna Cristi? I think I saw Candia go by...."

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written. Target codes per R10 §5: A aimed, X a proposition bore and was not followed, N none bore.

Code counts over 21 contested sites: A 15, X 3, N 3. The three X codes are at sites 8, 11 and 16, and two of them are the same shape: a proposition of the anchor names a device the source does not use, and installing it would have been an addition rather than a rendering. That is what site 11 shows most sharply, and it is the sole site at which the frozen opportunity list was put to the test by an actual live option.

What was hard. Site 16 is the whole difficulty of R10p on this source in one row. Mansfield's naturalness is a narrator standing inside a character; d'Annunzio's ¶3 is an anatomist's inventory of three women's bodies. Contracting the narration to satisfy M04 would have produced a warmth the Italian refuses, and the log records that as a proposition disobeyed rather than as one absent for want of material — which is the distinction R10 §6's opportunity list exists to protect.

Contamination

suspected — and the word is a prior, not a finding. At the moment of freezing, nothing has been measured: CLAUDE.md's standing rule is a selection gate run before material is chosen, and this material was chosen by S075 and gated then. A freely reachable published English exists (Collier 1907, E-20260731g-provenance/material/candia-english-collier1907.txt), so a measurement is possible and is reported in E-20260801e-lead-carryover/analysis/. No English of this work was opened by the lead before this file was committed.