Repository path: workshop/translations/cartomante/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-cartomante-R04-v1 — Machado de Assis, «A cartomante», under R04

• Source. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, «A cartomante», in Várias Histórias (Rio de Janeiro: Laemmert & C., 1896), pp. 9–29; first published in Gazeta de Notícias, 1884. Public domain (author d. 1908). 1,221 Portuguese words, paragraphs 32–56 of the story — Camilo's dread on the way to Vilela's house, the blocked street, and the whole consultation with the fortune-teller. Text and processing note at ../source-pt.txt.
• Language pair. PT→EN. The project's first translation from Portuguese — its twelfth source language.
• Regime. R04 v1.0 (lead close translation, source only). Draft then self-revision against the source, in session.
• Translated by the lead agent, in session. Cost $0; not ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Target dialect declared: American English. Declared after Unit A was frozen rather than before, which is the honest order: Unit A's "toward" was already committed and the declaration follows it. sidewalk, gray, toward throughout.
• Contamination: suspected, and the two measurements disagree — which is the point of taking both. Full output at contamination.json.
• The prospective gate passed. On Unit A, measured before paragraphs 36–56 were drafted, per the standing selection-gate rule (CLAUDE.md, method note (bcd)): longest shared run with Isaac Goldberg's 1921 English of the same story 8 tokens, against a 4-token null-control floor (the same translator's English of a different story in the same volume). 0 shared twelve-grams, 2 shared seven-grams. The 8-token run is "the sooner the better he thought I can't" — «Quanto antes, melhor, pensou ele; não posso» — settled English idiom plus a reporting clause plus a modal, forced almost token for token.
• The whole-text figure did not. Over all 1,504 English words: longest run 14 tokens, 51 shared seven-grams, 6 shared twelve-grams at three distinct loci, and tools/dependence_check.py returns DEPENDENT?. Null control on the same whole text against the other story: 4 tokens, 0 seven-grams.
• The three loci, because a count without the strings is not a declaration. (i) "a long opaque veil he thought rapidly of the inexplicability of so many things"; (ii) "on the opposite side with her back to the window so that"; (iii) "she spoke to him of the love that bound them of Rita's beauty".
• What is and is not claimed. Goldberg was not read. All three loci are flat expository sentences whose Portuguese offers an English translator very little room; the one token in them that was a real choice is inexplicability (S26 is nowhere near them, and the census records no site at any of the three). This is the same pattern S067 recorded on Gogol — convergence in the expository paragraph, divergence in the lyrical and the dialogic — now on a different language, a different translator and a different century, and it is recorded as an observation and not as a claim about memory. internal-judgment-only.
• Why this does not void anything here. No comparison of this translation against Goldberg's is made anywhere in E-20260730i. The translation is used only as a source of a decision log with option counts; the standing constraint in CLAUDE.md — that the lead cannot be the independent third translator against a canonical published English — is not engaged, and would not be even if it were, since Goldberg 1921 is not the canonical English of Machado.
• No published rendering of this story into any language was read before this text and its log were frozen. Goldberg's volume was downloaded and split programmatically; its table of contents was displayed and no body text was.

Source-text note — this is effectively a ONE-witness text, and that is declared

• W1 — the pt.wikisource transcription of the 1896 Laemmert edition. Modernised orthography; page proofreading status is mixed, and the span was chosen to lie outside the pages transcribed in 1896 spelling. Soft hyphens stripped; no other change.
• W2 — the Google/Internet Archive scan of the 1896 first edition (variashistorias00assigoog), original orthography.
• The collation was attempted over the whole span and succeeded over roughly 200 of the 1,221 words. W2's OCR of these pages returns whole stretches of character noise (ii ii it ias s s s iii s), and the scan's text order does not follow the story's. Over the legible stretches every one of the ~55 differences is an OCR letter substitution (olhos/olios, mulher/muler, enquanto/emquanto); no substantive lexical divergence was found, and none could have been found over the other 1,000 words. The span therefore rests on one witness. Stated rather than dressed up as a two-witness text.

Translation

In imagination he saw the tip of a drama's ear: Rita cowed and in tears, Vilela indignant, taking up his pen and writing the note, certain that he would come, and waiting for him in order to kill him. Camilo shuddered; he was afraid. Then he gave a sickly smile, and in any case the idea of drawing back disgusted him, and he walked on. On the way it occurred to him to go home; there might be some word there from Rita to explain everything. He found nothing, and nobody. He went back out into the street, and the idea that they had been found out seemed to him more and more likely; an anonymous denunciation was natural enough, even from the very person who had threatened him before; it might be that Vilela now knew everything. The very breaking-off of his visits, with no apparent reason, on nothing but a trifling pretext, would go to confirm the rest.

Camilo walked on, restless and unstrung. He did not reread the note, but the words were by heart, before his eyes, fixed; or else — and this was worse still — they were murmured in his ear, in Vilela's own voice. "Come at once, at once, to our house; I must speak to you without delay." Said like that, in the other man's voice, they had a note of mystery and menace. Come at once, at once — what for? It was getting on for one in the afternoon. His agitation grew from minute to minute. He imagined so completely what was going to happen that he came to believe it and to see it. He was positively afraid. He began to consider going armed, reasoning that if there were nothing in it he lost nothing, and the precaution was useful. A moment later he rejected the idea, ashamed of himself, and went on, quickening his pace, toward the Largo da Carioca, to take a tilbury. He reached it, got in, and told the man to drive at a fast trot.

"The sooner the better," he thought; "I can't go on like this…"

But the very trot of the horse made his agitation worse. Time was flying, and it would not be long before he was face to face with the danger. Almost at the end of the Rua da Guarda Velha the tilbury had to stop; the street was blocked by a cart that had come down. Camilo was inwardly glad of the obstacle, and waited. At the end of five minutes he noticed that at his side, on the left, right by the tilbury, stood the house of the fortune-teller Rita had consulted that once; and never had he so wanted to believe in the lesson of the cards. He looked, and saw the windows shut, when all the others were open and thick with people curious about the accident in the street. It might have been the dwelling of indifferent Destiny.

Camilo leaned back in the tilbury so as to see nothing. His agitation was great, extraordinary, and out of the bottom of his moral strata there came up certain ghosts of another time, the old beliefs, the old superstitions. The driver offered to go back to the first cross-street and take another way; he answered no, that he should wait. And he leaned out to stare at the house… Then he made an incredulous gesture: it was the idea of hearing the fortune-teller, which was passing him far off, very far off, on vast gray wings; it disappeared, reappeared, and dissolved again in his brain; but a moment later it moved its wings once more, nearer, going round in concentric circles… Out in the street the men were shouting as they worked the cart free:

"Come on! Now! Push! Heave! Heave!"

In a moment more the obstacle would be cleared. Camilo kept his eyes shut and thought of other things; but the husband's voice was whispering the words of the letter at his ears: "Come at once, at once…" And he saw the contortions of the drama, and shook. The house was looking at him. His legs wanted to get down and go in… Camilo found himself in front of a long opaque veil… he thought rapidly of the inexplicability of so many things. His mother's voice was repeating to him a whole string of extraordinary cases; and the Prince of Denmark's own sentence rang inside him: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy…" What did he lose, if…?

He came to himself on the sidewalk, at the foot of the door; he told the driver to wait, and slipped quickly down the passage and up the stairs. There was little light, the steps were eaten away by feet, the handrail sticky; but he saw nothing and felt nothing. He climbed and knocked. As nobody came, he had the idea of going down again; but it was too late, curiosity was lashing his blood, his temples were throbbing; he knocked again, one, two, three blows. A woman came; it was the fortune-teller. Camilo said he had come to consult her, and she made him come in. From there they went up to the garret, by a stair worse than the first and darker. Above there was a little room, badly lit by a window that gave on to the roof at the back. Old sticks of furniture, gloomy walls, an air of poverty that increased the prestige rather than destroyed it.

The fortune-teller made him sit down in front of the table, and sat herself on the opposite side, with her back to the window, so that what light there was from outside fell full on Camilo's face. She opened a drawer and took out a pack of long, grubby cards. While she shuffled them, rapidly, she watched him, not in the face, but from under her eyes. She was a woman of forty, Italian, dark and thin, with big eyes, sly and sharp. She turned three cards over on the table and said to him:

"Let us see first what it is that brings you here. You have had a great fright…"

Camilo, amazed, made a sign that it was so.

"And you want to know," she went on, "whether anything will happen to you or not…"

"To me and to her," he explained eagerly.

The fortune-teller did not smile; she only told him to wait. She took up the cards again quickly and shuffled them with her long thin fingers and their uncared-for nails; she shuffled them well, cut the packets, once, twice, three times; then she began to lay them out. Camilo had his eyes on her, curious and anxious.

"The cards tell me…"

Camilo leaned forward to drink the words in one by one. Then she declared to him that he had nothing to be afraid of. Nothing would happen either to the one or to the other; he, the third, knew nothing of it. All the same, great caution was indispensable; envy and spite were seething. She spoke to him of the love that bound them, of Rita's beauty… Camilo was dazzled. The fortune-teller finished, gathered up the cards and shut them away in the drawer.

"You have given me back my peace of mind, madam," he said, reaching his hand across the table and pressing the fortune-teller's.

She stood up, laughing.

"Go along," she said; "go along, ragazzo innamorato…"

And standing there, with her forefinger, she touched him on the forehead. Camilo shuddered, as though it were the hand of the sibyl herself, and stood up too. The fortune-teller went to the chest of drawers, on which there was a plate of raisins, took a bunch of them, and began plucking them off the stalk and eating them, showing two rows of teeth that gave the lie to her nails. Even in that ordinary action the woman had something particular about her. Camilo, anxious to be gone, did not know how he was to pay; he did not know the price.

"Raisins cost money," he said at last, taking out his wallet. "How many shall I have sent up?"

"Ask your heart," she answered.

Camilo took out a ten-milreis note and gave it to her. The fortune-teller's eyes flashed. The usual price was two milreis.

"I can see the gentleman is very fond of her… And he does well; she is very fond of him. Go along, go along easy in your mind. Mind the stairs, they are dark; put your hat on…"

The fortune-teller had already put the note away in her pocket, and came down with him, talking, with a slight accent. Camilo took his leave of her below, and went down the stair that led to the street, while the fortune-teller, cheerful with what she had been paid, went back up, humming a barcarolle. Camilo found the tilbury waiting; the street was clear. He got in and drove off at a fast trot.

Translator's log

Written at translation time and frozen before E-20260730i condition C is built and before framework/traceability-inventory.md was consulted for this passage. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only, which the page asserts as a whole.

How the option lists were made, because the study limb depends on them. At every site where more than one rendering was live, every rendering I was actually willing to write is listed, in the order it occurred to me, with the chosen one marked →. The list is written before any framework candidate is named, and no candidate was consulted while translating. Where I was willing to write only one thing, the site is not in the census: it is not a decision between options and E-20260730i §4.2 excludes it, which is the class RS-20260730h §3 found in four of the 39 published R07 D codes.

Sites, in order of the text.

S1 — «Imaginariamente». → In imagination | In his mind's eye | Imaginatively | In his imagination. The English cognate is a false friend — imaginatively means inventively, which is the opposite of what a frightened man is doing.

S2 — «viu a ponta da orelha de um drama». → saw the tip of a drama's ear | caught a glimpse of a drama | saw a drama showing the tip of its ear | saw the first hint of a drama. Portuguese «mostrar a ponta da orelha» is a settled idiom (the give-away, what betrays you); English has no settled equivalent, so the choice is between a transparent calque that keeps the figure and a paraphrase that keeps the sense.

S3 — «sorriu amarelo». → gave a sickly smile | smiled a yellow smile | forced a smile | smiled wanly | gave a strained smile. Another idiom with no English counterpart. Unlike S2 the calque here is not transparent — a yellow smile means nothing in English — so the calque option is listed and was never really in play.

S4 — «repugnava-lhe a ideia de recuar». → the idea of drawing back disgusted him | he could not stomach the idea of backing out | the idea of retreating was repugnant to him | he balked at the idea of turning back.

S5 — «recado». → word | message | note | a line. «Bilhete» is already note eleven words later, so note is out on consistency grounds; that is the only thing deciding this one.

S6 — «denúncia anônima». → anonymous denunciation | anonymous tip-off | anonymous letter | anonymous information. The story has already had two «cartas anônimas», so anonymous letter would silently identify this hypothetical with those actual letters.

S7 — «A mesma suspensão das suas visitas». → The very breaking-off of his visits | The suspension of his visits itself | His own leaving off of his visits | That same suspension of his visits. «Mesma» here is emphatic (the very), not identifying (the same), and the two readings give different English.

S8 — «inquieto e nervoso». → restless and unstrung | uneasy and nervous | restless and on edge | anxious and jumpy.

S9 — «as palavras estavam decoradas». → the words were by heart | he knew the words by heart | the words were memorised | the words were learned by heart. «Decorar» = to learn by heart; decorated is the false friend and is not a live option. The live question is whether English can keep the passive-adjectival shape («estavam decoradas») or must supply a subject.

S10 — «Vem já, já». → Come at once, at once | Come now, now | Come right away, right away | Come immediately, immediately. The doubling recurs verbatim two paragraphs later and has to be the same string in both places, which is a consistency constraint, not a lexical one.

S11 — «falar-te». → speak to you | talk to you | have a word with you. Vilela uses «tu» with Camilo and «você» is used elsewhere in the story; English cannot mark the difference and nothing is available to compensate with. Recorded as a loss, not as a choice.

S12 — «A comoção crescia». → His agitation grew | His emotion grew | The commotion grew | His distress grew. False friend: «comoção» is inward disturbance, not a disturbance in the street — which matters here because there is a disturbance in the street forty lines later. Commotion is listed because it is exactly the trap.

S13 — «vexado de si mesmo». → ashamed of himself | vexed with himself | embarrassed at himself | disgusted with himself. Second false friend of the same shape.

S14 — «picando o passo». → quickening his pace | stepping out | hurrying his step | pricking on.

S15 — «tílburi». → tilbury | cab | carriage | gig | hansom | keep «tílburi» italicised. A tilbury is a specific light two-wheeled open carriage; cab is what the vehicle is for here (it is hired, with a driver) and tilbury is what it is. Hansom is the wrong vehicle and the wrong city. The word recurs six times, so whatever is chosen is chosen six times.

S16 — «a trote largo». → at a fast trot | at a round trot | at a long trot | at a good trot. Recurs at the very end of the passage, closing it; same string both times.

S17 — «entestar com o perigo». → be face to face with the danger | run head-on into the danger | be up against the danger | come to grips with the danger. «Entestar» is rare and physical (to butt heads with); every English option is commoner in English than the Portuguese is in Portuguese, so the markedness is lost whatever is chosen.

S18 — «carroça». → cart | wagon | dray | wain. The vehicle contrast with the tilbury is doing work — a heavy working vehicle against a light private one.

S19 — «estimou o obstáculo». → was inwardly glad of the obstacle | welcomed the obstacle | was privately pleased at the obstacle | valued the obstacle. «Estimar» here is to be pleased at, not to esteem; valued is the false friend and is listed for that reason.

S20 — «pejadas de curiosos». → thick with people curious about | crammed with onlookers | packed with the curious | full of people gawking at.

S21 — «Dir-se-ia a morada do indiferente Destino». → It might have been the dwelling of indifferent Destiny | One would have said it was the dwelling of indifferent Destiny | You would have called it the abode of indifferent Destiny | It looked like the house of indifferent Destiny. The capital on «Destino» is Machado's and is kept in all four.

S22 — «do fundo das camadas morais». → out of the bottom of his moral strata | from the depths of his moral layers | from the lower layers of his moral being | from the deeper strata of his mind. A geological figure for the psyche, odd in Portuguese and odd in English; the options differ in how much of the oddity they keep.

S23 — «travessa». → cross-street | side street | turning | alley. A Rio travessa is a short street joining two longer ones; alley is wrong in scale.

S24 — «Anda! agora! empurra! vá! vá!» → Come on! Now! Push! Heave! Heave! | Go on! now! push! go! go! | Now then! now! shove! there she goes! there she goes! | Move! now! push! away! away!. Five imperatives from a work-gang; English wants a work-gang idiom and Portuguese is using plain verbs, so any idiomatic English is an addition and any literal English is flat.

S25 — «sussurrava-lhe às orelhas». → was whispering at his ears | was whispering in his ears | was whispering into his ear. Machado writes «orelhas» (the outer ear) where «ouvidos» is ordinary; at his ears keeps the physicality and is slightly strained.

S26 — the Hamlet quotation, «Há mais cousas no céu e na terra do que sonha a nossa filosofia». → "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy" | Shakespeare's own words restored: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" | "There are more things in heaven and earth than our philosophy dreams of" | the Portuguese kept and the English glossed in a note. This is the hardest site in the passage. Machado has already used the line in the story's first sentence and has changed it twice over: he drops Horatio and he writes «nossa» where Shakespeare has your. Restoring the canonical English would put back what the author took out, and the alteration is not decorative — «nossa» makes the scepticism Camilo's own. Restoring it would also make Machado's Portuguese-language narrator quote an English text the character has not read.

S27 — «Que perdia ele, se…?» → What did he lose, if…? | What had he to lose, if…? | What would he lose, if…? | What was the harm, if…?. The Portuguese imperfect is doing free indirect discourse; what had he to lose is the idiomatic English but flattens the tense that marks the shift into Camilo's head.

S28 — «Deu por si na calçada». → He came to himself on the sidewalk | He found himself on the pavement | He came to on the sidewalk | He woke to find himself on the sidewalk. The sidewalk/pavement choice is settled by the declared dialect and by nothing else.

S29 — «os degraus comidos dos pés». → the steps were eaten away by feet | the steps worn hollow by feet | the steps worn away underfoot | the treads eaten by feet. «Comidos» is literal eating; worn is the English default and loses it.

S30 — «as fontes latejavam-lhe». → his temples were throbbing | his temples pounded | the blood beat in his temples. «Fontes» = temples, and the false friend (fountains, sources) is not live in context; listed because the same word in isolation is a trap.

S31 — «sótão». → garret | attic | loft | top room. Garret carries the poverty that the next sentence spells out; attic is neutral.

S32 — «Velhos trastes». → Old sticks of furniture | Old junk | Battered old furniture | Old lumber. «Trastes» is dismissive.

S33 — «grandes olhos sonsos e agudos». → big eyes, sly and sharp | large, demure, keen eyes | big cunning shrewd eyes | large artful piercing eyes. «Sonso» is sly by way of feigning simplicity — the single hardest adjective here, and no single English word carries both halves.

S34 — «O senhor» / «A senhora» as address. → the gentleman / madam | you / you | sir / ma'am | you, sir / you, madam. Portuguese third-person polite address has no English equivalent; the fortune-teller's «Vejo bem que o senhor gosta muito dela» is third-person about a man who is sitting in front of her. Kept as the gentleman in her mouth and madam in his, which is inconsistent by design: it marks her register and his.

S35 — «unhas descuradas». → uncared-for nails | neglected nails | dirty nails | unkempt nails. The nails return four paragraphs later («dentes que desmentiam as unhas»), so the choice binds twice.

S36 — «transpôs os maços». → cut the packets | cut the pack | shifted the packets | divided the packs. A card-handling technical term; cut is the English term of art and «transpor» is not.

S37 — «ferviam invejas e despeitos». → envy and spite were seething | envy and resentment were boiling | jealousies and grudges were seething | there was envy and spite at work. Both Portuguese nouns are plural and abstract-countable, which English resists.

S38 — «ragazzo innamorato». → kept in Italian, italicised | kept in Italian, unitalicised | translated (lovesick boy) | kept with a gloss. The fortune-teller is Italian and the phrase is the only Italian in the passage; her «leve sotaque» is mentioned only in the last paragraph, so the Italian is the reader's first evidence of it.

S39 — «passas / um cacho destas / despencá-las». → raisins / a bunch of them / plucking them off the stalk | raisins / a cluster / pulling them off | dried grapes / a bunch / picking them off | raisins / a handful / pulling them apart. «Cacho» and «despencar» say these raisins are still on the stalk, which a handful would silently remove.

S40 — «não sabia como pagasse». → did not know how he was to pay | did not know how to pay | was at a loss how to pay. The Portuguese imperfect subjunctive marks this as Camilo's own puzzling; did not know how to pay is the English default and loses the mood.

S41 — «Quantas quer mandar buscar?» → How many shall I have sent up? | How many would you like to send for? | How many shall I send out for? | How many do you want fetched?. Camilo is offering to pay for raisins as a way of paying for the reading, and «mandar buscar» leaves who does the sending unstated in a way English will not.

S42 — «dez mil-réis» / «dois mil-réis». → a ten-milreis note / two milreis | ten mil-réis with the accent kept | ten thousand réis | a converted or glossed equivalent. The whole point of the sentence is the ratio five-to-one, so any option that keeps the numbers keeps the point; the currency name is what varies.

S43 — «algibeira». → pocket | pouch | purse | skirt-pocket. «Algibeira» is the older word for pocket and is faintly dated in 1884; English pocket is not.

S44 — «alegre com a paga». → cheerful with what she had been paid | pleased with her fee | happy with the payment | delighted at the money. «Paga» is blunter than «pagamento».

S45 — «cantarolando uma barcarola». → humming a barcarolle | singing a barcarolle under her breath | humming a boat-song | trilling a barcarolle. The barcarolle is Italian and is the paragraph's second signal of her origin.

Three things I know I did not resolve. (i) S26 is not resolved so much as decided: I translated Machado's Portuguese rather than restoring Shakespeare, and I do not think the two options are commensurable enough for the choice to be right or wrong. (ii) S34's deliberate inconsistency — the gentleman in her mouth, madam in his — is the only place in the passage where I broke a uniform policy on purpose, and it may read as an error. (iii) The passage's long paragraph of free indirect discourse (S25–S27) runs on Portuguese imperfects that English has to render with four different constructions, and I did not test whether the resulting English keeps the single continuous drift into Camilo's head that the Portuguese has. internal-judgment-only.