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

T-enfermeiro-R04-v1 — Machado de Assis, «O enfermeiro» ¶1–15, PT→EN

• Source: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, «O enfermeiro», in Várias Histórias (Rio de Janeiro: Laemmert, 1896), ¶1–15. pt.wikisource Página:Várias histórias.djvu/175–183, single witness, pagequality level 1 — not proofread. Stored at ../source-pt.txt (whole file 26 ¶ / 1,364 words; this artifact covers ¶1–15, 758 Portuguese words).
• Language pair: Portuguese → English. The project's first Portuguese, its first Brazilian author, and its fourteenth source language.
• Regime: R04 v1.0 (lead close translation, source-only). Draft frozen separately as T-enfermeiro-R06-v1 at commit 3156969, before this revision began, per R04 §Procedure 2a.
• Translated by: the lead agent, in session. Cost: $0, never ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Evaluation: none designed and none licensed — Tier D has not passed. This pair is consumed by E-20260729e-revision-pass as material for a description of what a second pass does, never as a quality comparison.

Contamination: suspected, and measured

The selection gate ran on Unit A after it was frozen and before Unit B was drafted — the ordering CLAUDE.md's standing rule prescribes. Comparator: Isaac Goldberg, "The Attendant's Confession", Brazilian Tales (Four Seas, 1921), Gutenberg #21040, sliced by line offset and handed to tools/dependence_check.py in memory; no comparator prose was ever displayed (method note abm). Result, on 203 English words against a 324-word window:

The signal the tool names as the signal is zero on both thresholds. The 10-token run is "you asked me for a human document here it is", and the head of it is a term of art: «documento humano» is Goncourt's document humain, which the draft's own log fixed as a term (D12) before this measurement was run. The project's ARM-forced-defence work is the reason that observation is made rather than assumed — run length alone is a poor description of dependence — and the honest reading is that this is a partly forced run, not that it is a forced run, because no forcing probe was run on it.

suspected rather than none, deliberately. Machado is a major author whose stories are widely translated, and Goldberg 1921 is on Gutenberg and is therefore plausibly in the lead's training data. A none on an author of this reach would be a claim the measurement does not support.

Priming, declared: one word, in the avoidance direction

Before drafting, in the course of establishing that a free comparator existed, the lead saw the comparator's title — "THE ATTENDANT'S CONFESSION". That is one published rendering of «enfermeiro», the story's title word and its most repeated noun. No prose was seen. The draft chose "sick-nurse" on the merits (D16) — but it chose it knowing what another translator had chosen, in the direction that lowers every overlap statistic this project computes. That is the avoidance priming the backlog row opened at S056 says nothing here measures, and this is its second recorded instance.

The translation

Does it seem to you, then, that what happened to me in 1860 might go onto a page of a book? Very well, then, on the single condition that you shall divulge nothing before my death. You will not have long to wait — a week, it may be, if not less; the doctors have given me up.

Look, I could even tell you my whole life, in which there are other interesting things, but for that I should need time, spirit and paper, and I have only paper; my spirit is feeble, and time is like the little lamp at daybreak. The next day's sun will not be long in coming — a devil of a sun, impenetrable as life.

Goodbye, my dear sir; read this and think kindly of me; forgive me whatever seems bad to you, and do not be too hard on the rue if it does not smell to you of roses. You asked me for a human document; here it is. Do not ask me as well for the empire of the Grand Mogul, nor for a photograph of the Maccabees; but ask me for my dead man's shoes, and I will give them to nobody else.

You know already that it was in 1860. The year before, somewhere about the month of August, being then forty-two years old, I turned theologian — I mean that I copied out the theological studies of a priest of Niterói, an old schoolfellow, who in that way gave me, delicately, house, bed and board. In that August of 1859 he received a letter from the vicar of a certain town in the interior, asking whether he knew of somebody competent, discreet and patient who would go and serve as sick-nurse to Colonel Felisberto, for a good wage. The priest spoke to me; I accepted with both hands, being by then sick of copying out Latin citations and ecclesiastical formulas.

I came to the Court to take leave of a brother, and set out for the town.

On reaching the town I had bad news of the colonel. He was an insufferable man, wild, exacting; nobody could put up with him, not even his own friends. He spent more sick-nurses than medicines. He had broken the faces of two of them.

I answered that I was not afraid of people in health, still less of sick ones; and after coming to an understanding with the vicar, who confirmed the news I had had and recommended meekness and charity to me, I set out for the colonel's house.

I found him on the veranda of the house, stretched out in a chair and puffing hard. He did not receive me badly. He began by saying nothing; he set on me two eyes of a cat that is watching; then a kind of malignant laugh lit up his features, which were hard. At last he told me that none of the sick-nurses he had had was worth anything: they slept too much, they answered back, and they went about on the scent of the slave women; two had even been thieves!

"Are you a thief?"

"No, sir."

Next he asked me my name; I told him, and he made a gesture of astonishment. Columbus? No, sir: Procópio José Gomes Valongo. Valongo? He thought it no name for a person, and proposed to call me simply Procópio, to which I answered that I was agreeable to whatever pleased him. I tell you this detail not only because it seems to me to paint him well, but because my answer gave the colonel the best idea of me. He declared as much himself to the vicar, adding that I was the most agreeable of all the sick-nurses he had had. The truth is that we lived a honeymoon of seven days.

On the eighth day I entered upon the life of my predecessors, a dog's life: not sleeping, not thinking of anything else, gathering up insults, and sometimes laughing at them with an air of resignation and acquiescence; I noticed that this was a way of paying court to him. All of it the impertinences of sickness and of temper.

The sickness was a whole rosary of them: he suffered from an aneurysm, from rheumatism, and from three or four lesser complaints. He was close on sixty, and since the age of five everybody had done his will. Had he been merely peevish, well and good; but he was wicked besides, and took delight in the pain and the humiliation of others. At the end of three months I was sick of putting up with him; I determined to come away; I only waited for an occasion.

The occasion was not long in coming. One day, when I did not give him a fomentation in time, he took up his cane and dealt me two or three blows. No more was needed; I gave notice on the spot and went to get my trunk ready. He came after me, to my room, and begged me to stay — it was not worth getting angry over an old man's crotchet. He pressed me so hard that I stayed.

"I am hanging by a thread, Procópio," he would say to me at night; "I cannot live long. I am here, and I am in the grave. You are to come to my burial, Procópio; I let you off it on no account. You are to come, you are to pray at the foot of my grave. If you do not," he added, laughing, "I shall come back at night and pull you by the legs. Do you believe in souls from the other world, Procópio?"

Translator's log — revision pass

Decisions D1–D29 were written as the R06 draft was written and frozen with it at commit 3156969; they are on T-enfermeiro-R06-v1 and are not repeated here. Decisions D30–D45 were written during this self-revision. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

This log is written BEFORE the mechanical diff over this pair is computed (design §5.3), and by a lead that knows the count is coming. That is a confound and it is the one experimental handle ARM-revision has: the three retrospective logs it will be compared against were written by sessions that could not anticipate being counted. It is declared here as well as on the arm page because whoever quotes either number needs it.

Method. One pass against the Portuguese, paragraph by paragraph, in R04's order: misreadings, omissions and additions first, then the English. Twelve changes were made across fifteen paragraphs, and four places were examined and deliberately left alone.

Accuracy against the source — five

D30 — «Parece-lhe então que…?»: "So it seems to you that…" → "Does it seem to you, then, that…". The Portuguese is an interrogative and the draft rendered it as a statement with a question mark — readable, but it turns the narrator's opening challenge into an observation. The revision restores the syntax. Cost: the English is heavier, and então now sits in a comma-clause where the Portuguese has it running.

D31 — «não há de divulgar nada»: "that you divulge nothing" → "that you shall divulge nothing". Haver de is obligative, not merely future; the dying man is imposing a term, not predicting one. The draft's bare present made it a description of what the correspondent would happen to do.

D32 — «o tempo assemelha-se à lamparina de madrugada»: "my time is like…" → "time is like…". The draft supplied a possessive the Portuguese does not have. It is defensible — a Romance definite article often does a possessive's work, and the preceding clause («o ânimo é frouxo») is rendered my spirit on exactly that reasoning — but here the image is general and the generality is the sentence's force: he is not saying his own time is short, he is saying time is a lamp at dawn. The two clauses are therefore now handled differently, and that is a choice, not an oversight: o ânimo keeps my and o tempo loses it.

D33 — «perdoe-me o que lhe parecer mau»: "whatever strikes you as bad" → "whatever seems bad to you". Parecer is to seem; strikes you as is livelier English and imports an impact the verb does not have.

D34 — «Não me peça também»: "Do not go asking me as well for" → "Do not ask me as well for". Go asking adds a manner — repeated, importunate asking — that the plain imperative does not.

Consistency — two, and one of them the draft could not have made

D35 — «segui para a vila» / «segui para a residência do coronel»: "went on to" → "set out for", at both sites. One Portuguese verb, twice, four paragraphs apart, at the two departures that frame the arrival. The draft rendered both went on to, which is consistent but wrong at the first site — ¶5 is a departure from the Court, not a continuation — and the revision takes the pair together. This is the clearest case in the pass of something visible only on a second reading: the draft wrote ¶5 before ¶7 existed and had nothing to be consistent with.

D36 — «achou que não era nome de gente»: "no name for a human being" → "no name for a person". Gente is people, not humankind; human being raised the register into the philosophical, which is the colonel's joke's opposite.

English — five

D37 — «A dous deles quebrou a cara»: "Two of them he had broken the faces of." → "He had broken the faces of two of them." The draft kept the Portuguese fronting and produced a stranded preposition at the end of a three-word sentence. The cost is real and is the thing I was protecting: the Portuguese puts the two men first, and the revision puts the colonel first, which is a different sentence about the same fact. I took the English.

D38 — «pessoa entendida»: "anybody knowledgeable" → "somebody competent". Entendido is one who understands the work. Knowledgeable is about what a person has; competent is about what they can do, which is what a vicar advertising for a sick-nurse means.

D39 — «estaria pelo que fosse de seu agrado»: "I should be for whatever was to his liking" → "I was agreeable to whatever pleased him". The draft was a calque of estar por. And the rendering is doing double duty I did not plan: agreeable is the same word the next sentence but one uses for «simpático», so the narrator's answer and the colonel's verdict on him now share a word in English that they do not share in Portuguese. Recorded because it is an addition, and because I noticed it only on the reread.

D40 — «esta particularidade»: "this particular" → "this detail". Particular as a count noun is available in period English and is what the draft reached for; particularidade is ordinary Portuguese and detail is ordinary English. The draft matched a rare word to a common one.

D41 — «que assim me dava, delicadamente, casa, cama e mesa»: unchanged, and recorded as a change I decided against making twice. Delicately sits where the Portuguese has it, between commas, and English wants it elsewhere. Moving it improves the sentence and destroys the aside.

What was examined and deliberately not changed — four, recorded because a log of only the changes overstates the pass

D42 — «estúrdio» stays "wild", and the draft's own log flagged it as unresolved. The word is extravagant, dissolute, given to escapades. Wild has the dissoluteness and not the eccentricity. The revision reopened it, tried riotous (too public for a bedridden man), harum-scarum (a different century and a different class) and erratic (loses the appetite), and closed it the same way. The loss the draft named stands unrepaired, and a second pass did not repair it.

D43 — «Gastava mais enfermeiros que remédios» stays "He spent more sick-nurses than medicines". Got through is the idiomatic English and would read easily. The line's whole force is that gastar is the verb for money and it is being spent on people; English spend carries the same double use, and the idiom would delete it. Kept, at a cost in naturalness that is deliberate.

D44 — «riso maligno» stays "malignant laugh". Sorriso is a smile and Machado wrote riso. Against it: alumiou-lhe as feições (lit up his features) fits a smile better, and an English reader may hear a sound that is not there. Kept, because choosing smile would be correcting the author's word on the strength of the verb next to it.

D45 — «dous olhos de gato que observa» stays "two eyes of a cat that is watching". D22 kept the strangeness on purpose and the revision reopened it. The eyes of a watching cat is the smooth version and it makes the eyes belong to the cat; the Portuguese makes them two objects the colonel puts on someone. The English is odd where the Portuguese is odd, and a translator who smoothed it would not be making an error I could demonstrate.

What this log does not contain

Any change I made without noticing that I was making one. That is R04 §Known limitations' standing warning about self-report, and this pair exists partly in order to find out how large it is — which is a thing the log cannot tell you about itself.