Repository path: workshop/translations/enfermeiro/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-enfermeiro-R06-v1 — Machado de Assis, «O enfermeiro», single-pass draft

This is the frozen draft required by R04 §Procedure step 2a, and it is therefore an R06 output in its own right. It is committed before the self-revision begins, so that the R06/R04 pair is real rather than reconstructed. The revised text and the full translator's log are T-enfermeiro-R04-v1.

• Source: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, «O enfermeiro», in Várias Histórias (Rio de Janeiro: Laemmert, 1896). pt.wikisource Página:Várias histórias.djvu/175–183, transcluded from the Laemmert scan. Single witness, pagequality level 1 — not proofread — which is a real limitation and is declared rather than glossed: no second witness was collated, and the project has previously found a false paragraph boundary and 22 silent character deletions in sources it trusted. Stored at ../source-pt.txt (26 paragraphs, 1,364 words; this artifact covers ¶1–15, 758 words).
• Language pair: Portuguese → English. The project's first Portuguese, and its first from Brazilian literature.
• Regime: R06 (lead single-pass). Cost: $0, never ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Contamination: suspected pending measurement. A freely reachable published English exists — Isaac Goldberg, "The Attendant's Confession", in Brazilian Tales (Boston: Four Seas, 1921), Gutenberg #21040 — so the gate can run here, and it runs on Unit A before Unit B is drafted, per the standing selection gate in CLAUDE.md.
• No published rendering of this work into any language was consulted. The comparator was downloaded before drafting and located by heading offset only (line 796 of the Gutenberg file), per method note (abm); none of its prose was displayed.
• Units. Unit A = ¶1–3, the letter frame (164 Portuguese words). Unit B = ¶4–15, the engagement and the first three months (594 words). The two halves of this file are frozen in two separate commits, and the commit that freezes Unit A contains no Unit B text.

Unit A — draft

So it seems to you that what happened to me in 1860 might go onto a page of a book? Very well, then, on the single condition that you 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 my 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 strikes you as bad, 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 go asking 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.

Unit B — draft

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 anybody knowledgeable, 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 went on to 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. Two of them he had broken the faces of.

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 went on to 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 that was no name for a human being, and proposed to call me simply Procópio, to which I answered that I should be for whatever was to his liking. I tell you this particular 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?"

Log, written as the draft was written — Unit A

Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

D1 — «PARECE-LHE ENTÃO» is set in caps in the source and that is typography, not emphasis. Laemmert opens the story in small capitals, the ordinary Brazilian convention for a first line. Rendered as ordinary prose. The alternative — small caps in English — would import a claim about emphasis the Portuguese does not make.

D2 — «pode entrar numa página de livro» → "might go onto a page of a book". Literal, and kept literal: the whole frame is a dying man being asked for his story, and the flatness of entrar numa página is the register. Rejected: "is fit for print", which is idiomatic English and states a judgement the Portuguese leaves as a physical fact.

D3 — «Vá que seja» → "Very well, then". A concessive tag, roughly let it be so. Rejected: "So be it" (biblical-solemn in English, where the Portuguese is offhand) and "All right" (too modern for 1896).

D4 — «oito dias» → "a week". The Romance idiom counts inclusively; oito dias is a week, not eight days. This is a place where the literal and the true diverge and I have taken the true one. The cost is that the reader loses a numeral the dying man chose, and a translator who wrote "eight days" would be preserving something real.

D5 — «estou desenganado» → "the doctors have given me up". Desenganado is a single word meaning disabused of hope — specifically, told the truth by a physician. English has no verb for it. The rendering supplies the doctors, who are not in the sentence. Rejected: "I am past hope" (keeps the compression, loses the fact that someone told him), "I have no illusions" (too general). What is lost is the passive construction: the Portuguese is something done to him.

D6 — «Olhe» → "Look,". A conversational opener. The letter is spoken aloud at the reader throughout and this is the first sign of it.

D7 — «cousas» is period orthography and carries no register weight. Machado's 1896 spelling of coisas. Rendered "things"; nothing archaic imported. Same call for «dous» (= dois) later.

D8 — «ânimo» → "spirit", twice, in the same sentence, deliberately. Tempo, ânimo e papel / o ânimo é frouxo: the word is repeated in the source and the repetition is the sentence's hinge — he lists three things and then disposes of two. Rejected: "heart" and "nerve", each of which is better in one of the two positions and breaks the pair.

D9 — «o tempo assemelha-se à lamparina de madrugada» → "my time is like the little lamp at daybreak". Lamparina is a small oil lamp, and the image is of one still burning when the sun is about to come up — i.e. about to be put out. The English does not carry the "about to be extinguished" implication and nothing in my rendering supplies it; I considered "the guttering lamp at daybreak" and rejected it because guttering states what the image implies.

D10 — «um sol dos diabos» → "a devil of a sun". The construction exists in English and is of the right vintage. Rejected: "a hell of a sun" (register too low, and later this narrator will be speaking about damnation in earnest).

D11 — «não maltrate muito a arruda, se lhe não cheira a rosas» → "do not be too hard on the rue if it does not smell to you of roses". Arruda is rue, the bitter herb, and the sentence is proverbial: do not blame a bitter thing for being bitter. Kept as the herb, unglossed. An English reader gets rue as a plant name and may or may not get the bitterness; the pun available in English — rue the herb and rue the regret — is not in the Portuguese, and I have not reached for it. Rejected: "wormwood" (a different plant with a stronger English idiom behind it), and any gloss.

D12 — «um documento humano» → "a human document", unglossed. The naturalists' term of art — Goncourt's document humain — and Machado is being sardonic about the school. English kept it as a term.

D13 — «o império do Grão-Mogol» / «a fotografia dos Macabeus» → "the empire of the Grand Mogul" / "a photograph of the Maccabees". Two impossibilities, one geographic and one chronological; the joke is the second, since photography postdates the Maccabees by two thousand years. Both kept literal. Grão-Mogol has an established English form and is used.

D14 — «os meus sapatos de defunto» → "my dead man's shoes". English has the fixed phrase to wait for dead men's shoes and Portuguese does not; the possessive here is doing something close to it, and the coincidence is used rather than avoided. Declared because it is the one place in Unit A where the English idiom is stronger than the source's.

D15 — «não os dou a ninguém mais» → "I will give them to nobody else". Present in Portuguese, future in English. The present is a promise about a future act and English will not carry it in the present tense without sounding habitual.

Log, written as the draft was written — Unit B

D16 — «enfermeiro» → "sick-nurse", and a priming declaration belongs with it. The word is the story's title and its subject: a man paid to nurse an invalid. Before drafting, in the course of establishing that a free comparator existed, the lead saw the comparator's TITLE — "THE ATTENDANT'S CONFESSION" — and therefore saw one published rendering of this very word. No prose was seen. "Sick-nurse" was chosen on the merits — it is the period English for a man hired to this work, where attendant is institutional and modern — but the choice was made in awareness of another translator's, in the direction that lowers overlap, which is exactly the avoidance priming the backlog row opened at S056 says nothing here measures. Declared rather than left unmeasured.

D17 — «fiz-me teólogo» → "I turned theologian". The joke is that he did no such thing: the next clause says he copied out another man's theology. Turned keeps the pretension and the deflation. Rejected: "I became a theologian" (flat), "I set up as a theologian" (adds a commercial note).

D18 — «casa, cama e mesa» → "house, bed and board". Three nouns for three, and English has a fixed pair (bed and board) inside the three, which the Portuguese does not. Kept anyway: the triad is the sentence's rhythm and the English pair does not break it.

D19 — «a Corte» → "the Court", unglossed. Rio de Janeiro under the Empire, named as the seat of the court; every Brazilian reader in 1896 read it as the city. An English reader will not, and I have supplied nothing. Rejected: "the capital" (clear, and deletes the Empire), "Rio" (clear, and deletes the word). This is the largest unglossed realia loss in the unit.

D20 — «Gastava mais enfermeiros que remédios» → "He spent more sick-nurses than medicines". Gastar is to spend or to use up, and the line's whole force is that it takes the verb for money and applies it to people. English spend carries the same double use. Kept literally.

D21 — «A dous deles quebrou a cara» → "Two of them he had broken the faces of". Quebrar a cara is literal here — he hit them — and not the figurative sense (to come a cropper) the phrase also has. The English is awkward in its word order and I have left it awkward, because the Portuguese fronts the two men and I wanted them fronted.

D22 — «dous olhos de gato que observa» → "two eyes of a cat that is watching". A literal rendering of a strange construction: not cat's eyes but two eyes of a watching cat, as though the eyes were detachable. The English is odd where the Portuguese is odd. The smooth version — "the eyes of a watching cat" — was rejected for tidying it.

D23 — «andavam ao faro das escravas» → "they went about on the scent of the slave women". Faro is an animal's scent-tracking, and the sentence puts the nurses on all fours. The women are enslaved and the text says so; nothing is softened. Rejected: "the servant girls", which would be a translation of a different society.

D24 — «Colombo?» — the colonel's joke on the name is kept and is not explained. He hears Valongo and offers Colombo. What no English reader gets, and what I have not supplied: the Valongo was the wharf in Rio where slave ships landed, so Machado has given his narrator the name of the slave market in a story that has just put slave women in it. The gloss would be four lines long and would be mine, not his. Recorded as a loss rather than repaired.

D25 — «vá» → "well and good", the second appearance of the concessive tag of D3. In Unit A it was Vá que seja → "Very well, then"; here Se fosse só rabugento, vá → "Had he been merely peevish, well and good". The two renderings are different English for the same Portuguese word, and I have not levelled them, because the constructions around them are not the same. Noted as an inconsistency I chose.

D26 — «um rosário delas» → "a whole rosary of them". Kept as the object. The English has no idiom here and the image is legible without one; whole is an addition, supplying the enumerative force rosário has in Portuguese and rosary does not.

D27 — «Estou na dependura» → "I am hanging by a thread". Dependura is a colloquial hanging — on the point of falling. The English idiom is close and is idiomatic where the Portuguese is idiomatic. Cost: the Portuguese is a noun phrase and slightly odd; the English is a dead metaphor and is not.

D28 — «para lhe puxar as pernas» → "to pull you by the legs", and the reason is a collision. The Brazilian ghost pulls the sleeper's legs, and the literal English — pull your legs — is one letter from pull your leg, which means to make a joke of someone. In a sentence where the colonel is laughing as he says it, that reading would take over completely. "By the legs" breaks the idiom and keeps the ghost.

D29 — «almas de outro mundo» → "souls from the other world". De outro mundo is of another world; English wants the definite article for the afterlife. The indefinite version was tried and reads as science fiction.

What the draft did not resolve. «estúrdio» came out as "wild"; the word carries a madcap-dissolute sense that "wild" only partly has, and I could not find better in one pass. «impertinências» is left as "impertinences", which is narrower in English than in Portuguese, where it covers the unreasonableness of an illness as well as of a man.