Repository path: workshop/translations/jeli-il-pastore/R05-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-jeli-il-pastore-R05-v1 — Giovanni Verga, «Jeli il pastore» (Vita dei campi, 1881)

This is the project's long work (ARM-longwork, charter §3). It is translated serially, in order, across sessions, under R05-serial-long-work. This artifact is append-only: each span is drafted, self-revised and frozen in its own session, and nothing already frozen is revised afterwards except by a numbered, dated erratum entry at the foot of the page. The translator's log below is cumulative, not per-span-and-abandoned, which is the whole difference from R04 and the reason R05 exists.

Pair. Italian → English. The project's first translation on the Italian pair, and its first sustained prose narrative of any length: the seventeen translations that precede it are all under ~2,200 source words and each was complete in one session.

Source. Giovanni Verga, «Jeli il pastore», from Vita dei campi (Fratelli Treves, Milan; the volume first appeared in 1880 and the edition transcribed here is the one Wikisource dates 1881 — no claim of first-edition status is made). Public domain (Verga d. 1922). Text taken from Italian Wikisource, Vita dei campi (1881)/Jeli il pastore, page marked riletto e controllato (proofread against the scan), retrieved 2026-07-27 via the MediaWiki action=parse API. The cleaned whole text is stored at ../source-it-full.txt — 11,474 whitespace-delimited tokens, 195 paragraphs (the figure read 196 until S039 — see erratum E2) — so that later spans are taken from a fixed text and no session has to refetch.

Spans. Defined by paragraph index into source-it-full.txt, so they are reproducible.

Paragraph indices are into the repaired source — see erratum E2. Span 1's range is unaffected by the repair.

After span 4, 2,806 source words remain (paragraphs 126–194, 69 of them). They are the most dialogue-heavy part of the story and therefore the shortest paragraphs in it; the whole remainder is one span of ordinary size or two small ones, so the five-span estimate below stands and is recorded here rather than revised.

At about 2,150 words a span, the whole novella is about five spans. ARM-longwork declares a cadence of one visit per three sessions minimum, so with three spans left the expected end is roughly S048 if the cadence is exactly met, and sooner if it is not.

Declared purpose (purpose-fit). A reading edition in plain modern English with an unliterary, rural lexicon — no dialect spelling, no English regional colouring, no archaism, and no smoothing of Verga's parataxis into hypotaxis. The point of the declaration is that it is the hard choice for this text and it will be tested over five spans rather than over three paragraphs: Verga's Italian is deliberately roughened toward Sicilian speech, and the two obvious English strategies — a British rural dialect, or standard literary English — each destroy one half of that. See log D1.

Contamination: suspected, and the reason is specific and small. One published English translation of this story is freely reachable and was downloaded before translating: Nathan Haskell Dole, Under the Shadow of Etna (Boston, Joseph Knight, 1896), Project Gutenberg #37979, "Jeli, the Shepherd", 12,862 words. It was not read — with one exception, which is the reason the declaration is suspected and not none. While verifying that the Dole volume had been segmented at the right offset, I printed the first 900 characters of the extracted section to standard output and read them: Dole's English of the passage, which on the conservative accounting used for the measurement (the whole sentence whose opening was visible) covers 232 words of my own eventual span 1 — 9.04% of it, corresponding to the Italian (through "Jeli insegnava al suo amico…"). That is a real priming event on the opening of the very span I then translated, and R05 §1 (inherited from R04 §1) requires it to be declared on the artifact rather than managed quietly.

What follows from it, and what does not. The measurement in RS-20260727-longwork-selection §3 is therefore reported twice: over the whole span, and over the span with the primed opening excluded. The unprimed figure is the one that carries weight; the primed figure is reported because suppressing it would be the worse error. Nothing else of Dole was seen, and D. H. Lawrence's 1928 rendering — the best-known English Vita dei campi, and therefore the one whose memory would matter most — could not be obtained in this environment, so the measurement below is a measurement against the obscure comparator and not against the likely one. That is a limitation of the gate, stated here so that no later session reads suspected as measured clean.

Contamination, measured. Added 2026-07-27 after the freeze commit ca78171, which contains the translation and the log below exactly as written before any comparator was run. Against Dole 1896 (12,862 words), paragraph-bounded: longest common run 15 tokens over the whole span, 13 with the primed region removed; a null control against 13,663 words of the same translator's other Verga stories gives 5 tokens and zero shared 12-grams. The 15-token run lies entirely inside the primed 9.04% and is verbatim what was read. Full method, the three cells, and what the numbers do and do not license: RS-20260727-longwork-selection.

Cost. $0. Lead translation, no API call, never ledgered (charter §6, A4).

Binding register. ../register.md — the terminology, naming and voice decisions made in span 1 that bind spans 2–5. This is the instrument the long form required and the short units never needed.

The translation

Span 1 (paragraphs 0–27)

Jeli, who looked after the horses, was thirteen when he came to know don Alfonso, the young master; but he was so small that he did not come up to the belly of Bianca, the old mare who wore the big bell of the herd. You saw him always here and there, up in the hills and down on the plain wherever his beasts were grazing, standing straight and still on some bank, or squatting on a big stone. His friend don Alfonso, while he was in the country for the summer, went to find him every day that God sent to Tebidi, and shared with him his own piece of chocolate, and the herd-boy's barley bread, and the fruit stolen from the neighbour. At first Jeli gave the young master his excellency, as the custom is in Sicily, but after they had gone at each other's hair properly their friendship was solidly established. Jeli taught his friend how to climb to the magpies' nests, in the tops of walnut trees higher than the bell-tower of Licodia, how to bring down a sparrow on the wing with a stone, and how to get up with one jump onto the bare backs of his half-wild beasts, catching the first that came within reach by the mane, without letting himself be frightened by the angry neighing of the unbroken colts and their desperate plunging. Ah, the fine runaway gallops over the reaped fields, with the manes in the wind! the fine April days, when the wind rolled the green grass up in waves and the mares whinnied in the pastures; the fine summer noons, when the country lay whitish and silent under a dull sky and the crickets crackled among the clods as though the stubble were catching fire! the fine winter sky through the bare branches of the almond tree, shivering in the north wind, and the path that rang frozen under the horses' hooves, and the larks trilling high up, in the warmth, in the blue! the fine summer evenings that came up slowly, slowly, like mist; the good smell of the hay you sank your elbows into, and the melancholy droning of the evening insects; and those two notes of Jeli's pipe, always the same — yuh! yuh! yuh! — that set you thinking of far-off things, of the feast of San Giovanni, of Christmas night, of the dawn of a day out in the fields, of all those great occasions gone by, which look sad because they are so far off, and made you lift your eyes, wet, as if all the stars that were coming alight in the sky were raining down into your heart and flooding it!

Jeli himself did not suffer from that melancholy; he stayed squatting on the edge of the bank with his cheeks blown out, wholly taken up with playing yuh! yuh! yuh! Then he would gather the drove with a storm of shouting and stone-throwing and push them into the stable, over beyond the Poggio alla Croce.

Panting, he would climb the slope on the far side of the gully, and now and then shout to his friend Alfonso: "Call the dog! Hey, call the dog!" or else: "Fetch the bay colt a good crack with a stone for me — he's playing the young master on me, coming along slow as you please, dawdling over the scrub in the gully"; or else: "Tomorrow morning bring me a big needle, one of gnà Lia's."

He could do every kind of work with a needle; and he kept a little bundle of rags in his canvas bag, for patching his breeches and the sleeves of his jacket when they needed it; he could plait braids of horsehair too, and he washed for himself, with clay out of the gully, the kerchief he tied round his neck when he was cold. In short, so long as he had his bag slung across him he needed nobody in the world, whether he was in the woods of Resecone or lost at the far end of the plain of Caltagirone. Gnà Lia used to say: "You see Jeli the herdsman? He's been out alone in the fields for ever, as if his own mares had foaled him, and that's why he can cross himself with both hands!"

For the rest it is true that Jeli needed nobody, but everyone at the farm would gladly have done something for him, since he was an obliging boy and there was always the chance of getting something out of him. Gnà Lia baked his bread for the love of her neighbour, and he paid her back with fine little wicker baskets for the eggs, cane winders for the yarn, and other small things. "We do as his beasts do," gnà Lia would say, "that scratch each other's necks."

At Tebidi they had all known him from a little thing, when he was not to be seen among the horses' tails as they grazed on the litter-man's flat, and he had grown up, you might say, under their eyes, though nobody ever saw him and he was always roaming here and there with his herd. "He had rained down from the sky, and the earth had taken him in," as the proverb says; he was exactly one of those who have neither house nor kin. His mother was in service at Vizzini, and he saw her only once a year, when he took the colts to the fair of San Giovanni; and the day she died they came to call him, on a Saturday evening, and on the Monday Jeli was back with the herd, so that the peasant who had stood in for him at the horse-guarding did not even lose a day's pay; but the poor boy had come back so shaken that sometimes he let the colts get away into the sown ground. "Hey, Jeli!" Massaro Agrippino would shout at him then from the threshing floor. "Or do you want a taste of the holiday whip, you son of a bitch?" Jeli would set off running after the scattered colts and push them meekly back towards the hill; but before his eyes he always had his mother, her head wrapped in the white kerchief, not talking any more.

His father was a cowherd at Ragoleti, beyond Licodia, "where you could reap the malaria," as the peasants round about said; but on malarial ground the pasture is rich, and the cows do not take the fever. So Jeli stayed out in the fields all the year, either at Donferrante, or in the enclosures of the Commenda, or in the valley of the Jacitano, and the hunters, or the travellers who took the short cuts, always saw him here and there, like a dog with no master. He did not suffer by it, because he was used to being with the horses that walked ahead of him, step by step, cropping the clover, and with the birds that wandered in flocks around him, all the time the sun took over its slow, slow journey, until the shadows lengthened and then melted away; he had time to watch the clouds pile up little by little and make mountains and valleys of themselves; he knew how the wind blows when it is bringing a storm, and what colour the cloud is when it is going to snow. Everything had its look and its meaning, and there was always something to see and something to listen to at every hour of the day. So, towards sunset, when the herdsman set himself to playing on his elderwood pipe, the black mare would come up chewing the clover without appetite, and stand looking at him too, with her big thoughtful eyes.

The only place he did suffer a little melancholy was on the empty wastes of Passanitello, where neither scrub nor bush comes up, and in the hot months not a bird flies over. The horses would gather in a ring with their heads hanging, to give one another shade, and through the long days of the threshing that great silent light rained down always the same and stifling for sixteen hours.

But where the feed was plentiful and the horses were content to linger, the boy busied himself with other things: he made cane cages for the crickets, carved pipes, and little rush baskets; with four twigs he could put up a bit of a roof, when the north wind drove the long files of crows down the valley, or when the cicadas beat their wings in the sun that scorched the stubble; he roasted acorns from the oak wood in the embers of sumac cuttings, till it was like eating roast chestnuts, or toasted on them the wide slices of bread when they began to grow a beard of mould, because when he was at Passanitello in the winter the roads were so bad that sometimes a fortnight went by without a living soul passing.

Don Alfonso, who was kept in cotton wool by his parents, envied his friend Jeli the canvas bag that held everything he owned — the bread, the onions, the little flask of wine, the kerchief for the cold, the bundle of rags with the thread and the big needles, the tin box with the tinder and the flint; he envied him the splendid dapple mare too, that beast with the tuft of bristling hair on her forehead, who had a vicious eye and blew out her nostrils like a snarling mastiff when anyone wanted to mount her. But Jeli she let mount her, and scratch her ears, which she was jealous about, and she would go sniffing him over to hear what he wanted to tell her. "Leave the Dapple alone," Jeli warned him, "she isn't bad, but she doesn't know you."

After Scordu from Buccheri took away the Calabrian mare he had bought at San Giovanni — on the agreement that they should keep her in the herd for him until the vintage — the bay colt, left an orphan, would not be comforted, and went racing up the banks of the mountain with long complaining whinnies and his nostrils to the wind. Jeli ran after him, calling him with loud shouts, and the colt would stop to listen, his neck stretched out and his ears restless, whipping his flanks with his tail. "It's because they've taken his mother from him, and he doesn't know what he's doing any more," the herdsman observed. "Now we have to keep an eye on him, because he'd be quite capable of letting himself go over the cliff. I was the same, when my mother died: I couldn't see out of my eyes."

Then, after the colt began to sniff at the clover again, and to take a reluctant mouthful of it: "You see! Little by little he's beginning to forget her."

"But he'll be sold too. Horses are made to be sold; the way lambs are born to go to the slaughterhouse, and clouds carry rain. Only the birds have nothing to do but sing and fly all day long."

His ideas did not come to him clean and spun out one behind another, for he had rarely had anyone to talk to and so was in no hurry to root them out and untangle them at the back of his head, where he was used to letting them shell themselves and push out little by little, the way the buds do on the twigs in the sun. "The birds too," he added, "have to get themselves food, and when the snow covers the ground they die of it."

Then he thought it over a while. "You're like the birds; only when the winter comes you can sit by the fire and do nothing."

But don Alfonso answered that he went to school too, to learn. Then Jeli would open his eyes wide, and be all ears if the young master started to read, and look at the book and at him with a suspicious air, listening with that faint blinking of the lids that shows the intensity of attention in the animals that come closest to man. He liked the verses, which stroked his hearing with the harmony of a song he could not understand, and sometimes he would knit his brows, set his chin, and seem to have a great labour going on inside him; then he would nod yes and yes with his head, with a sly smile, and scratch it. And when the young master set himself to writing, to show how many things he could do, Jeli would have stayed whole days watching him, and all at once he would let a suspicious glance escape him. He could not bring himself to believe that words he had spoken himself, or that don Alfonso had spoken, and even things that had never come out of his mouth at all, could afterwards be said over again on paper; and he ended by making that sly smile.

Every new idea that knocked at his head to be let in put him on his guard, and he seemed to sniff at it with the wild mistrust of his Dapple. But he showed no wonder at anything in the world: had they told him that in the city the horses rode in carriages he would have stayed unmoved, with that mask of oriental indifference which is the dignity of the Sicilian peasant. He seemed instinctively to entrench himself in his ignorance, as if it were the strength of the poor. Every time he ran short of arguments he repeated: "I know nothing about it. I am poor" — with that stubborn smile which was meant to be sly.

He had asked his friend Alfonso to write Mara's name for him on a scrap of paper he had found who knows where — for he picked up everything he saw on the ground — and he had put it away in the bundle of rags. One day, after being quiet a while, looking about him here and there with his mind elsewhere, he said to him, quite seriously:

"I've got a sweetheart."

Alfonso, for all that he could read, opened his eyes wide. "Yes," Jeli repeated, "Mara, Massaro Agrippino's daughter who was here; and now she's at Marineo, in that big block of a house on the plain that you can see from the litter-man's flat, up there."

"So you're getting married, then?"

"Yes, when I'm grown and I have six onze a year in wages. Mara doesn't know anything about it yet."

"Why haven't you told her?"

Jeli shook his head, and set himself to thinking. Then he unwound the bundle and spread out the paper he had had written for him.

"It really does say Mara; don Gesualdo the field-guard read it too, and Fra Cola, when he came down for the bean collection."

"Somebody who can write," he observed then, "is like somebody who kept his words in the tinder-box, and could carry them about in his pocket, and even send them here and there."

"And what will you do now with that scrap of paper, when you can't read?" Alfonso asked him.

Jeli shrugged his shoulders, but went on carefully winding his little written sheet back into the bundle of rags.

Span 2 (paragraphs 28–61)

He had known Mara since she was a little girl; they had begun by giving each other a good hiding, one time when they met along the gully, picking blackberries in the bramble hedges. The little girl, who knew she was 'on her own ground', had grabbed Jeli by the neck, like a thief. For a while they traded punches on the back, one you and one me, the way the cooper does on the hoops of a barrel, but when they were tired they gradually quietened down, still holding each other by the hair.

"Who are you?" Mara asked him.

And since Jeli, being wilder, would not say who he was,

"I am Mara, the daughter of Massaro Agrippino, who is the field-guard of all these fields here."

Then Jeli let go altogether, and the little girl set about picking up the blackberries she had dropped in the fight, squinting now and then at her adversary with curiosity.

"Beyond the little bridge, in the garden hedge, there's lots of big blackberries," the little one added, "and the hens eat them."

Jeli meanwhile was making off, low and quiet, and Mara, after standing and following him with her eyes as long as she could see him in the oak wood, turned her back too, and took to her heels for home.

But from that day on they began to grow tame with each other. Mara would go and spin tow on the parapet of the little bridge, and Jeli, slowly, slowly, would push the herd towards the lower slopes of the Bandito hill. At first he kept apart, buzzing round her, watching her from a distance with a suspicious air, and little by little he went on coming closer with the wary walk of a dog used to having stones thrown at it. When at last they were side by side, they stayed there long hours without opening their mouths. Jeli watching closely the tangled business of the stocking her mother had hung round Mara's neck, or else she would watch him cut the fine zigzags on his almond sticks. Then they went off, one this way and the other that, without saying a word to each other, and the little girl, once she was in sight of the house, would start to run, making her little skirt fly up over her little red legs.

Then at prickly-pear time they settled themselves in the thick of the scrub, peeling figs the whole blessed day. They wandered together under the hundred-year-old walnut trees, and Jeli knocked down so many walnuts that they rained thick as hail; and the little girl wore herself out gathering up all she could, with shouts of joy; and then she would run off, quick, quick, holding the two corners of her apron stretched out, swaying along like a little old woman.

Through the winter Mara did not dare put her nose outside, in that great cold. Sometimes, towards evening, you could see the smoke of the little sumac fires Jeli went about making on the litter-man's flat, or on the Macca hill, so as not to be left stiff with cold like those tomtits he found in the morning behind a stone, or under the shelter of a clod. The horses too found pleasure in swinging their tails a little round the fire, and pressed against one another to keep warmer.

With March the larks came back to the plain, the sparrows to the roof, the leaves and the nests to the hedges, Mara took up her walks again, in Jeli's company, in the soft grass, among the flowering scrub, under the trees still bare that were beginning to be dotted with green. Jeli would shove into the thorn-brakes like a hound to go and turn up nestfuls of blackbirds that stared out astonished with their little peppercorn eyes; the two children often carried in the breast of their shirts small rabbits just dug out, almost naked, but with long ears already restless. They tore about the fields after the drove of horses, going into the stubble behind the reapers, step by step with the herd, stopping every time a mare stopped to tear off a mouthful of grass. In the evening, when they reached the little bridge, they went off one this way and the other that, without saying goodbye.

So they passed the whole summer. Meanwhile the sun was beginning to set behind the Poggio alla Croce, and the robins went after it towards the mountain, as it grew dark, following it through the prickly-pear scrub. The crickets and the cicadas were not to be heard any more, and at that hour there spread through the air something like a great melancholy.

About that time there came to Jeli's hut his father, the cowherd, who had caught the malaria at Ragoleti, and could not even hold himself up on the donkey that had carried him. Jeli lit the fire, quick, quick, and ran over to 'the houses' to look for a hen's egg for him. "Better spread a bit of litter near the fire," his father said to him, "for I feel the fever coming back."

The shivering of the fever was so strong that compare Menu, buried under his big cloak, the donkey's saddlebag and Jeli's canvas bag, shook the way the leaves do in November, in front of the great blaze of cuttings that made his face white, white as a dead man's. The farm-hands came to ask him: "How do you feel, compare Menu?" The poor man answered nothing but a whimper, the way a suckling pup does. "It's the malaria of the kind that kills better than a gunshot," his friends said, warming their hands at the fire.

The doctor was called in too, but it was all money thrown away, because the illness was one of those plain and well-known ones that even a boy would know how to treat, and if the fever was not of the kind that kills you whatever you do, with the sulphate it would have been cured at once. Compare Menu spent the eyes out of his head on that much sulphate, but it was like throwing it down the well. "Take a good decoction of ecalibus, it costs nothing," Massaro Agrippino advised, "and if it does no good, no more than the sulphate, at least you don't ruin yourself spending." The eucalyptus decoction was taken as well, and still the fever always came back, even stronger. Jeli looked after his father as well as he knew how. Every morning, before going off with the colts, he left him the decoction ready in the bowl, the bundle of cuttings under his hand, the eggs in the hot ash, and came back early in the evening, with more wood for the night, and the little flask of wine and some scrap of mutton he had run all the way to Licodia to buy. The poor boy did everything neatly, like a good housewife, and his father, following him with tired eyes in his little errands here and there about the hut, smiled from time to time, thinking the boy would know how to fend for himself when he was left alone.

On the days when the fever left off for a few hours, compare Menu would get up, all haggard and his head tied tight in a kerchief, and set himself in the doorway to wait for Jeli, while the sun was still warm. As Jeli dropped the bundle of wood beside the door and set the flask and the eggs on the table, he would say to him: "Put the ecalibus on to boil for tonight," — or else — "mind that your mother's gold is in zia Agata's keeping, for when I am not here any more." Jeli said yes with his head.

"It's no use," Massaro Agrippino would repeat every time he came back to see compare Menu with the fever. "The blood by now is all one plague." Compare Menu listened without batting an eyelid, his face whiter than his cap.

By then he did not get up any more. Jeli would start crying when his strength was not enough to help him turn from one side to the other; little by little compare Menu ended by not speaking at all any more. The last words he said to his boy were:

"When I am dead, you'll go to the master of the cows at Ragoleti, and you'll get him to give you the three onze and the twelve tumoli of wheat that have been owing to me since May."

"No," Jeli answered, "it's only 2 onze and fifteen, because you left the cows more than a month ago, and the reckoning with the master has to be right."

"That's true!" compare Menu confirmed, half closing his eyes.

"Now I am really alone in the world like a strayed colt, that the wolves can eat him!" Jeli thought, when they had carried his father to the cemetery at Licodia.

Mara had come to see the dead man's house too, with the uneasy curiosity that frightening things stir up. "You see how I am left?" Jeli said to her, the girl drew back dismayed, for fear he would make her go into the house where the dead man had been.

Jeli went to collect his father's money, and set off with the herd for Passanitello, where the grass was already high on the ground left for fallow and the feed was plentiful; so the colts stayed grazing there a long time. Meanwhile Jeli had grown big, and Mara too must have grown up, he often thought, while he played his pipe; then when he came back to Tebidi after so long, pushing the mares ahead of him slowly, slowly along the slippery paths by zio Cosimo's spring, he went looking with his eyes for the little bridge over the gully, and the hut in the Jacitano valley, and the roof of the 'big houses', with the pigeons always fluttering over it. But by that time the master had dismissed Massaro Agrippino and Mara's whole family was moving out. Jeli found the girl, who had grown fairly big and rather good-looking, at the courtyard door, keeping an eye on her things while they loaded them on the cart. Now the empty room looked darker and smokier than usual. The table, and the bed, and the chest of drawers, and the pictures of the Virgin and of San Giovanni, and even the nails for hanging up the seed-gourds had left their mark on the walls where they had been for so many years. "We're going away," Mara said to him when she saw him looking. "We're going off down there to Marineo, where there's that big block of a house on the plain."

Jeli set about helping Massaro Agrippino and gnà Lia to load the cart, and when there was nothing else left to carry out of the room, he went and sat with Mara on the parapet of the drinking trough. "Houses too," he said to her when he had seen the last basket stacked on the cart, "houses too, once their things are taken away out of them, don't seem the same any more."

"At Marineo," Mara answered, "we'll have a nicer room, mamma said, and as big as the cheese store."

"Now that you'll be away, I don't want to come here any more; because it'll seem to me the winter's come back, to see that door shut."

"At Marineo, though, we'll find other people, Pudda the redhead, and the field-guard's daughter; we'll have a fine time, for the harvest more than eighty reapers will come, with the bagpipe, and there'll be dancing on the threshing floor."

Massaro Agrippino and his wife had started off with the cart, Mara ran after them all merry, carrying the basket with the pigeons. Jeli wanted to go with her as far as the little bridge, and when Mara was about to disappear into the valley he called her: "Mara! oh! Mara!"

"What do you want?" said Mara.

He did not know what he wanted. "And you, what will you do here all alone?" the girl asked him then.

"I'm staying with the colts."

Mara went off skipping, and he stayed there without moving, as long as he could hear the noise of the cart bouncing on the stones. The sun was touching the high rocks of the Poggio alla Croce, the grey heads of the olives were fading into the dusk, and over the wide country, far, far off, nothing was to be heard but Bianca's big bell in the silence that was widening.

Mara, once she had gone off to Marineo among the new people, and the business of the vintage, forgot him; but Jeli thought about her all the time, because he had nothing else to do, in the long days he spent watching the tails of his beasts. Now he had no reason at all to go down into the valley, beyond the little bridge, and nobody saw him at the farm any more. So he did not know for a good while that Mara had become a bride, since meanwhile the water had gone and gone under the little bridge. He saw the girl again only on the day of the feast of San Giovanni, when he went to the fair with the colts to sell: a feast that turned all to poison on him, and made the bread fall out of his mouth, because of an accident that happened to one of the master's colts, God save us.

Span 3 (paragraphs 62–92)

On the day of the fair the overseer had been waiting for the colts since dawn, going up and down in his polished boots behind the rumps of the horses and mules, drawn up in a line on this side and that of the high road. The fair was nearly over, and Jeli had still not come into sight with the beasts, beyond the bend the high road made. On the slopes burnt bare from the Calvario and the Mulino a vento there still remained a few flocks of sheep, packed in a ring with their muzzles to the ground and their eyes dead, and a few pairs of long-haired oxen, of the kind that are sold to pay the rent on the land, waiting motionless under the scorching sun. Down there, towards the valley, the bell of San Giovanni was ringing high mass, with the long crackle of the little mortars behind it. Then the fair ground seemed to start, and a shouting ran through it that carried on among the pedlars' awnings drawn up along the salita dei Galli, went down through the streets of the town, and seemed to come back from the valley where the church was. Viva San Giovanni!

"Holy great devil!" the overseer was shrieking, "that murderer Jeli is going to make me lose the fair!"

The sheep lifted their astonished muzzles, and set to bleating all at once, and the oxen too took a few slow steps, looking about them, with big intent eyes.

The overseer was in such a rage because that day the rent on the big enclosures had to be paid, 'when San Giovanni should have come under the elm,' the contract said, and to make up the sum they had counted on the sale of the colts. Meanwhile of colts, and horses, and mules there were as many as the Lord had made, all curried and shining, and got up with tassels, and pompoms, and bells, swishing their tails to drive off the boredom, and turning their heads towards everyone who went by, as though they were waiting for some charitable soul who might want to buy them.

"He'll have laid himself down to sleep, that murderer!" the overseer goes on shouting. "And leaves me the colts on my belly!"

Jeli, on the contrary, had walked all night, so that the colts should reach the fair fresh and get a good place as they came in, and he had got to the flat of the Corvo while the three kings had still not gone down, and were glittering over Monte Arturo, with their arms in a cross. Along the road carts went by continually, and people on horseback, on their way to the feast; and so the lad kept his eyes wide open, so that the colts, frightened by the unusual coming and going, should not scatter, but should keep together along the edge of the road, behind Bianca, who walked straight and quiet with the big bell at her neck. Now and again, when the road ran over the tops of the hills, the bell of San Giovanni could be heard even up there, so that the feast reached into the dark and the silence of the country too, and all along the high road, far, far off, as far as there were people on foot or on horseback going to Vizzini, you could hear them shouting — Viva San Giovanni! — and the rockets went up straight and shining behind the hills of the Canziria, like the stars that rain down in August.

"It's like Christmas night!" Jeli kept saying to the boy who was helping him bring the drove along, "when there's feasting and lights at every farm, and all over the country you see fires here and there."

The boy was dozing, pushing one leg slowly, slowly after the other, and answered nothing; but Jeli, who felt all his blood stirred up by that bell, could not keep quiet, as if every one of those rockets that slid across the dark, silent and shining, behind the hill, were breaking open out of his own soul.

"Mara will have gone to the feast of San Giovanni too," he said, "because she goes every year."

And without minding that Alfio, the boy, answered nothing:

"Don't you know? Mara's this tall now, taller than her own mother that made her, and when I saw her again I couldn't believe it was the very same one I used to go picking prickly pears with, and knocking down walnuts."

And he set to singing at the top of his voice all the songs he knew.

"Hey, Alfio, are you asleep?" he shouted at him when he had finished. "Mind that Bianca keeps coming along behind you, mind!"

"No, I'm not asleep!" Alfio answered in a hoarse voice.

"Do you see the puddara, winking at us up there, towards Granvilla, as if they were letting off rockets at Santa Domenica too? It can't be long to daybreak; we'll get to the fair in time to find a good place all the same. Hey there, my fine little black! You'll be having the new halter, with the red pompoms, for the fair! and you too, Star!"

So he went on talking to one colt and another, so that they should take heart from hearing his voice in the dark. But it hurt him that the star colt and the little black were going to the fair to be sold.

"When they're sold, they'll go off with the new master, and they won't be seen in the herd any more, the way it was with Mara, after she went off to Marineo."

"Her father's doing very well down there at Marineo; because when I went to see them they put bread in front of me, and wine, and cheese, and every good thing of God's, seeing he's nearly the overseer, and has the keys of everything, and I could have eaten the whole farm if I'd wanted. Mara hardly knew me any more, it was so long since we'd seen each other! and she started shouting: 'Oh, look! it's Jeli, the one that minds the horses, the one from Tebidi!' It's like when a man comes back from far off, and just seeing the top of a hill is enough for him to know the place where he grew up straight away. Gnà Lia didn't want me to say tu to Mara any more, now that her daughter's got big, because people that know nothing talk easily. Mara laughed instead, and looked as if she'd just that minute taken the bread out of the oven, she was so red; she was laying the table, and spreading the cloth so that it didn't look like the same one any more. 'And do you still remember Tebidi?' I asked her, as soon as gnà Lia had gone out to draw some cool wine from the cask. 'Yes, yes, I remember,' she told me, 'at Tebidi there was the bell with the bell-tower that looked like the handle of a salt-cellar, and they rang it from the gallery, and there were two stone cats as well, that purred on the garden gate.' I could feel all those things here inside me, as she went on saying them. Mara looked me up and down with her eyes wide, and said again, 'How big you've got!' and she started laughing too, and gave me a smack here, on the head."

That was how Jeli, the one who minded the horses, lost his bread, because just at that moment there came up all of a sudden a carriage that had not been heard before, while it was climbing the rise step by step, and had put on a trot as soon as it reached the flat, with a great racket of whip and bells, as if the devil were carrying it. The colts, frightened, scattered in a flash, so that it was like an earthquake, and it took calling, and shouting, and ohi! ohi! ohi! from Jeli and the boy before they could gather them round Bianca, who was jogging along listlessly herself, with the big bell at her neck. As soon as Jeli had counted his beasts he saw that the star colt was missing, and he thrust his hands into his hair, because at that place the road ran along the ravine, and it was in the ravine that the star colt smashed his back, a colt that was worth twelve onze like twelve angels of paradise! Crying and shouting he went on calling the colt — ahu! ahu! ahu! — for there was still no seeing anything. The star colt answered at last from the bottom of the ravine, with a neigh full of pain, as if he had had the power of speech, poor beast!

"Oh! mamma mia!" Jeli and the boy went on shouting. "Oh! what a disaster, mamma mia!"

The travellers going to the feast, who heard crying like that in the middle of the dark, asked what they had lost; and then, once they knew what it was about, they went on their way.

The star colt lay motionless where he had fallen, with his legs in the air, and while Jeli went feeling him all over, crying and talking to him as if he could have made himself understood, the poor beast raised his neck painfully, and turned his head towards him, and then you could hear the breath broken by the spasm.

"Something must be broken!" Jeli whimpered, in despair at not being able to see anything for the dark; and the colt, inert as a stone, let his head fall back with its own weight. Alfio, who had stayed on the road to guard the drove, was the first to be easy again and had pulled the bread out of his bag. Now the sky had turned whitish and the hills all round seemed to be coming up one by one, black and high. From the turn of the high road the town was beginning to be visible, with the hill of the Calvario and of the Mulino a vento printed on the daybreak, still dim, sown with the white patches of the sheep, and as the oxen grazing on the crown of the hill, in the blue, went this way and that, it seemed that the outline of the hill itself came alive and swarmed. From the bottom of the ravine the bell could not be heard any more, the travellers had grown rarer, and the few who passed were in a hurry to get to the fair. Poor Jeli did not know what saint to turn to in that solitude; Alfio by himself was no use to him at all; and so the boy went on nibbling his piece of bread, slowly.

At last the overseer comes riding up, making a racket and swearing from a long way off as he hurries, at the sight of the animals standing still on the road, so that Alfio himself took to his heels up the hill. But Jeli did not move from beside the star colt. The overseer left the mule on the road and went down into the ravine himself too, trying to help the colt get up and pulling him by the tail. "Leave him alone!" Jeli was saying, white in the face as if he had smashed his own back. "Leave him alone! Can't you see he can't move, poor beast?"

And in fact at every movement, and every effort they made him make, the star colt gave a rattle that sounded like a Christian. The overseer worked off his rage in kicks and cuffs on Jeli, and pulled the angels and the saints of paradise down by their feet. Then Alfio, more reassured, had come back onto the road, so as not to leave the beasts unguarded, and kept clearing himself, saying: "It's not my fault. I was going on ahead with Bianca."

"There's nothing more to be done here," the overseer said at last, once he was satisfied it was all time wasted. "There's nothing to be got out of him now but the hide, while it's still good."

Jeli began to shake like a leaf when he saw the overseer go to unfasten the gun from the mule's pack-saddle. "Get out of there, bread-waster!" the overseer yelled at him, "for I don't know what's holding me from laying you out on the ground next to that colt, who was worth a great deal more than you, for all the pig of a baptism that thieving priest gave you!"

The star colt, not being able to move, turned his head with his eyes wide open as if he had understood everything, and his coat curled up in waves along his ribs, and it looked as if a shiver were running underneath. That was how the overseer killed the star colt on the spot, to get at least the hide out of him, and the dull sound the shot fired point-blank made inside the living flesh, Jeli felt as if he were hearing it inside himself.

"Now, if you want my advice," the overseer said as he went, "try not to let the master see you again about that wage you're owed, because he'd pay it to you good and salty!"

The overseer went off together with Alfio, with the other colts, who did not even turn round to see where the star colt was left, and went along tearing the grass from the bank. The star colt stayed alone in the ravine, waiting for them to come and skin him, with his eyes still wide open and his four legs stretched out, which only then had he been able to stretch. Jeli, now that he had seen how the overseer had been able to take aim at the colt as it painfully turned its head in terror, and had had the heart to fire the shot, did not cry any more, and stayed looking at the star colt hard, hard, sitting on the stone, until the men came who were to take the hide.

Now he could go off and take a walk, and enjoy the feast, or stay in the piazza all day watching the gentry in the café, whichever he liked best, seeing he had neither bread nor roof any more, and would have to look for a master, if anybody would have him, after the disaster of the star colt.

Span 4 (paragraphs 93–125)

That is how the things of this world go: while Jeli went about looking for a master with his bag slung across him and his stick in his hand, the band was playing away merrily in the piazza, with plumes in their hats, in the middle of a crowd of white caps as thick as flies, and the gentry sat enjoying it in the café. Everybody was dressed for the feast, like the animals at the fair, and in one corner of the piazza there was a woman with a short skirt and flesh-coloured stockings that made her look bare-legged, banging on the big drum in front of a great painted sheet, where you could see a butchery of Christians with the blood running down in torrents; and in the crowd that stood watching open-mouthed there was Massaro Cola too, who had known him since the time at Passanitello, and he told him that he would find him a master himself, seeing that compare Isidoro Macca was looking for someone to mind his pigs. "But don't say anything about the star colt," Massaro Cola warned him. "A misfortune like that can happen to anybody in this world. But it's better to say nothing."

So they went to look for compare Macca, who was at the dancing, and while Massaro Cola went in to do the errand Jeli waited in the street, in the middle of the crowd that stood watching from the door of the shop. In the big bare room there was a world of people, jumping about and enjoying themselves, all red and blown, and they made such a stamping of hobnailed boots on the brick floor that you could not even hear the thrum of the double bass; and as soon as a tune was over, which cost a grano, they held up a finger to show that they wanted another; and the man with the double bass made a cross in charcoal on the wall, to reckon it all up at the end, and began again from the top. "These people spend it without thinking twice," Jeli kept saying to himself, "and that means their pockets are full and they're not in straits like me for want of a master, if they sweat and wear themselves out jumping about for their own pleasure as though somebody were paying them by the day!" Massaro Cola came back saying that compare Macca had no need of anybody. Then Jeli turned his back and went off downhearted.

But she lived over towards Sant'Antonio, where the houses climb up the hill facing the gully of the Canziria, all green with prickly pears, and with the mill-wheels foaming down at the bottom on the stream; and Jeli had not the heart to go that way now that they had not wanted him even for minding pigs, and wandering about in the middle of the crowd that jostled him and shoved him without taking any notice of him, it seemed to him he was more alone than when he was with the colts on the wastes of Passanitello, and he felt like crying. At last Massaro Agrippino came upon him in the piazza, as he went here and there with his arms dangling, enjoying the feast, and started shouting after him, "Hey! Jeli! hey!" and carried him off home. Mara was in her best, with earrings so big that they knocked against her cheeks, and she was standing in the doorway with her hands on her belly, loaded with rings, waiting for it to get dark so as to go and see the fireworks.

"Oh!" Mara said to him, "so you've come for the feast of San Giovanni too!"

Jeli would rather not have gone in, because he was badly dressed; but Massaro Agrippino pushed him by the shoulders, telling him that this was not the first time they had set eyes on one another, and that everybody knew he had come to the fair with the master's colts. Gnà Lia poured him out a good glass of wine, and they wanted to take him along with them to see the illumination, together with the comari and the neighbours.

Coming into the piazza, Jeli stood open-mouthed with wonder: the whole piazza looked like a sea of fire, as when the stubble catches fire, from the great number of rockets the faithful were letting off under the eyes of the saint, who stood enjoying them from the mouth of the Rosario, all black under his silver canopy. The faithful came and went among the flames like so many devils, and there was even a woman with her dress undone and her hair loose and her eyes starting out of her head, letting off rockets herself, and a priest in a black cassock, without a hat, who looked possessed with devotion.

"That one there is Massaro Neri's son, the overseer of the Salonia, and he's spending more than ten lire on rockets!" gnà Lia was saying, pointing out a young fellow who went round the piazza holding two rockets at a time in his hands, like a pair of candles, so that all the women ate him up with their eyes and shouted at him, "Viva San Giovanni!"

"His father's rich, and owns more than twenty head of cattle," Massaro Agrippino added.

Mara knew as well that he had carried the great banner in the procession, and held it straight as a spindle, so strong and fine a young man he was.

Massaro Neri's son seemed to hear, and to be letting off his rockets for Mara, spreading his tail in front of her; and after the fireworks were over he went along with them, and took them to the dancing, and to the cosmorama, where you could see the old world and the new, paying for everybody himself, even for Jeli, who followed the party like a dog with no master, to watch Massaro Neri's son dance with Mara — who turned round and round and squatted down like a little dove on the roof-tiles, and held out one corner of her apron very prettily — while Massaro Neri's son jumped like a colt, so that gnà Lia cried for the comfort of it, and Massaro Agrippino nodded his head that the thing was going well.

At last, when they were tired, they went up and down with the promenade, dragged along by the crowd as if they were in the middle of a river in flood, to see the lighted transparencies, where they were cutting San Giovanni's neck, which would have moved the very Turks to pity, and the saint kicked his legs like a roebuck under the cleaver. Close by there was the band playing, under a great wooden umbrella all lit up, and in the piazza there was such a crowd that never had so many Christians been seen at the fair.

Mara went on Massaro Neri's son's arm like a young lady, and talked into his ear, and laughed as if she were enjoying herself very much. Jeli could not hold out any longer for tiredness, and fell asleep sitting on the kerb, until the first crackers of the fireworks woke him. Just then Mara was still at Massaro Neri's son's side, leaning on him with her two hands clasped on his shoulder, and by the light of the coloured fires she looked now all white and now all red. When the last rockets went off up the sky in a crowd, Massaro Neri's son turned towards her, green in the face, and gave her a kiss.

Jeli said nothing, but at that moment the whole feast he had been enjoying till then turned to poison in him, and he went back to thinking of all his misfortunes, which had gone out of his mind — that he had been left without a master, and did not know what to do any more, nor where to go, and had neither bread nor roof, and that the dogs might eat him the same as the star colt, who had stayed at the bottom of the ravine, skinned down to the hooves.

Meanwhile the people round him were still making a racket in the dark that had come down, and Mara with the other girls went skipping and singing along the stony little street as they walked home.

"Good night! Good night!" the girls kept saying, as they parted from one another along the way.

Mara said her good night as though she were singing, there was so much happiness in her voice; and Massaro Neri's son looked for all the world as if he did not want to let her go at all, while Massaro Agrippino and gnà Lia quarrelled over getting the house door open. Nobody took any notice of Jeli; only Massaro Agrippino remembered him, and asked:

"And now where will you go?"

"I don't know," said Jeli.

"Come and find me tomorrow, and I'll help you look for a place. For tonight go back to the piazza where we were listening to the band; you'll find room on some bench or other, and sleeping out of doors is a thing you must be used to."

Jeli was used to it, but what hurt him was that Mara said nothing to him, and left him standing in the doorway like a beggar; and the next day, when he went back to find Massaro Agrippino, as soon as he was alone with the girl he said to her:

"Oh, gnà Mara! how you forget your friends!"

"Oh, is it you, Jeli?" said Mara. "No, I haven't forgotten you. But I was so tired after the fireworks!"

"Do you care for him, at least — for Massaro Neri's son?" he asked, turning his stick over and over in his hands.

"What talk is this you're making!" gnà Mara answered sharply. "My mother's in there and hears everything."

Massaro Agrippino found him a place as a shepherd at the Salonia, where Massaro Neri was overseer; but as Jeli knew little of the trade he had to be content with a big cut in his wages.

Now he minded his sheep, and learned how cheese is made, and ricotta, and caciocavallo, and every other product of the flock; but in the talk that went on of an evening in the yard among the other herdsmen and the peasants, while the women shelled the beans for the soup, if it came round to Massaro Neri's son, who was taking Mara di massaro Agrippino to wife, Jeli said nothing any more, and did not even dare to open his mouth. Once when the field-guard twitted him, saying that Mara had wanted nothing more to do with him after everybody had said the two of them would be man and wife, Jeli, who was minding the pot the milk was boiling in, answered as he let the rennet dissolve slowly, slowly:

"Mara's grown handsomer with growing up, so that she looks like a lady now."

But as he was patient and hard-working he soon learned everything about the trade better than a man born to it, and as he was used to being with animals he loved his sheep as if he had made them himself, and so the sickness at the Salonia did not do so much slaughter, and the flock prospered, which was a pleasure to Massaro Neri every time he came to the farm; so much so that at the new year he brought himself to press the master to raise Jeli's wages, and Jeli came to have almost what he used to get for minding the horses. And it was money well spent, for Jeli thought nothing of counting the miles and the miles to look for the best pasture for his animals, and if the ewes were lambing or were sick he carried them out to graze in the donkey's saddle-bags, and took the lambs on his neck, and they bleated in his face with their muzzles out of the sack and sucked at his ears. In the famous snowfall on the night of Santa Lucia the snow fell four palms deep in the dead lake at the Salonia, and all round for miles and miles nothing else was to be seen over the whole country when the day came — and there would not have been so much as the ears of the sheep left, if Jeli had not got up three or four times in the night to drive them about the fold, so that the poor beasts shook the snow off their backs and were not buried as so many were in the flocks near by — according to what Massaro Agrippino said when he came to take a look at a little bean-field he had at the Salonia; and he said too that of that other story about Massaro Neri's son, who was to marry his daughter Mara, there was no truth at all, for Mara had something quite different in her head.

"But they said they were to be married at Christmas," said Jeli.

"There's no truth in it at all, they weren't to marry anybody; it's all talk from envious people that meddle in other folk's business," Massaro Agrippino answered.

But the field-guard, who knew more about it, having heard it talked of in the piazza when he went into the town on a Sunday, told the thing instead just as it was, after Massaro Agrippino had gone: They were not to be married any more because Massaro Neri's son had got to know that Mara di massaro Agrippino had an understanding with don Alfonso, the young master, who had known Mara since she was a little thing; and Massaro Neri had said that he wanted his boy to be honoured as his father was, and that of horns in the house he wanted none but his own oxen's.

Jeli was there too, sitting in the ring with the others at breakfast, and just then he was slicing the bread. He said nothing, but his appetite went from him for that day.

While he was taking the sheep out to pasture he went back to thinking of Mara, when she was a little girl, and they were together all day long and went into the valley of the Jacitano and up the Poggio alla Croce, and she would stand watching him with her chin in the air while he climbed to take the nests from the tops of the trees; and he thought too of don Alfonso, who used to come and find him from the villa near by, and they would lie flat on their faces on the grass, teasing the crickets' nests with a bit of straw. All those things he went turning over for hours and hours, sitting on the edge of the ditch with his knees in his arms — the tall walnut trees of Tebidi, and the thick scrub of the gullies, and the slopes of the hills green with sumac, and the grey olives crowding into the valley like mist, and the red roofs of the farm buildings, and the bell-tower 'that looked like the handle of a salt-cellar' among the orange trees of the garden. — Here the country stretched out in front of him bare and empty, patched with scorched grass, fading away silent into the far-off heat-haze.

Span 5 (paragraphs 126–194)

In spring, as soon as the bean pods were beginning to bend their heads, Mara came to the Salonia with her father and mother, and the boy and the little donkey, to pick the beans, and they all came to sleep at the farm together for those two or three days the picking lasted. In that way Jeli saw the girl morning and evening, and often they sat by the low wall of the sheepfold, talking together, while the boy counted the sheep. "I feel as if I'm at Tebidi," Mara would say, "when we were little, and we would sit on the little bridge on the path."

Jeli remembered every bit of it too, though he said nothing, because he had always been a sensible boy and of few words.

When the picking was over, on the eve of their going, Mara came to say goodbye to the young man, at the time when he was making the ricotta, and was wholly taken up with skimming off the whey with the ladle. "Now I'll say goodbye to you," she said to him, "because tomorrow we're going back to Vizzini."

"How did the beans do?"

"They did badly! The broomrape has eaten them all this year."

"It comes of the rain being scarce," said Jeli; "we've been forced to kill the ewe lambs as well, because they had nothing to eat; over the whole Salonia not three fingers of grass came up."

"But it doesn't matter much to you. You have your wages just the same, good year or bad!"

"Yes, that's true," he said; "but I'm sorry to give those poor beasts into the butcher's hands."

"Do you remember when you came for the feast of San Giovanni, and you'd been left without a master?"

"Yes, I remember."

"It was my father that found you a place here, with Massaro Neri."

"And you, why didn't you marry Massaro Neri's son?"

"Because it wasn't God's will." — "My father's had bad luck," she went on after a little. "Ever since we went away to Marineo everything has turned out badly for us. The beans, the sowing, that little piece of vineyard we have up there. Then my brother went for a soldier, and a mule died on us as well that was worth forty onze."

"I know," Jeli answered, "the bay mule!"

"Now that we've lost everything we had, who do you think will marry me?"

Mara went on crumbling a little twig of blackthorn while she talked, with her chin on her breast and her eyes down, and with her elbow she gave Jeli's elbow a little poke, without noticing. But Jeli, with his eyes on the churn, said nothing either; and she went on:

"At Tebidi they used to say we'd be man and wife, do you remember?"

"Yes," said Jeli, and he laid the ladle on the rim of the churn. "But I'm a poor shepherd, and I can't look so high as a Massaro's daughter like you."

Mara stayed quiet a little while, and then said:

"If you want me, for my part I'll take you willingly."

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

"And what will Massaro Agrippino say?"

"My father says you know the trade now, and you're not one of those that go and spend their wages, but you make two soldi out of one, and you don't eat so as not to use up the bread, so you'll come to have sheep of your own as well, and you'll make yourself rich."

"If that's how it is," Jeli concluded, "I'll take you willingly too."

"Here!" Mara said to him, when it had got dark, and the sheep were falling quiet little by little. "If you want a kiss I'll give you one now, because we're to be man and wife."

Jeli took it peaceably enough, and not knowing what to say he added:

"I've always been fond of you, even when you wanted to leave me for Massaro Neri's son"; but he had not the heart to tell her about the other one.

"Don't you see? we were fated for it!" Mara concluded.

Massaro Agrippino did say yes, in fact, and gnà Lia soon put together a new jacket and a pair of velvet breeches for her son-in-law. Mara was fine and fresh as a rose, with that little white cape that made her look like the paschal lamb, and that amber necklace that made her neck white; so that Jeli, when he went along the streets at her side, walked stiff as a post, dressed all in new cloth and velvet, and did not dare blow his nose with the red silk handkerchief, so as not to be noticed, and the neighbours and everybody who knew the story of don Alfonso laughed in his face. When Mara said yes sir, and the priest gave her to him for his wife with a great big sign of the cross, Jeli took her home with him, and it seemed to him they had given him all the gold of the Madonna, and all the lands he had ever seen with his eyes.

"Now that we're man and wife," he said to her when they got home, sitting facing her and making himself small, small, "now that we're man and wife, I can tell you that it doesn't seem true to me you should have wanted me... when you could have taken so many better than me... as fine and pretty as you are!..."

The poor fellow did not know what else to say to her, and he did not fit inside his new clothes for the contentment of seeing Mara about the house, tidying and touching everything, and playing the mistress. He could not find the way to tear himself from the door and get back to the Salonia; when Monday had come, he lingered over settling the saddlebags and the cloak and the waxed-cloth umbrella on the donkey's pack-saddle. "You ought to come to the Salonia too!" he kept saying to his wife, who stood watching him from the threshold. "You ought to come along with me." — But the woman began to laugh, and answered him that she was not born to keep sheep, and had nothing to go and do at the Salonia.

And in fact Mara was not born to keep sheep, and she was not used to the January north wind when the hands stiffen on the staff and it seems as if the nails were dropping off, nor to the furious downpours, where the water gets into you as far as your bones, nor to the choking dust of the roads, when the sheep walk under the scorching sun, nor to the hard bed and the mouldy bread, nor to the long silent lonely days, when over the burnt country nothing else is to be seen far off, and that seldom, but some peasant black with the sun, driving his little donkey silently ahead of him along the white and unending road. At least Jeli knew that Mara was warm under the blankets, or spinning in front of the fire, in a ring with the neighbours, or enjoying the sun on the landing, while he came back from the pasture tired and thirsty, or soaked with rain, or when the wind drove the snow into the hut and put out the fire of cuttings. Every month Mara went to draw the wages from the master, and she was short of nothing, neither the eggs in the hen-house, nor the oil in the lamp, nor the wine in the flask. Twice a month, then, Jeli went to find her, and she waited for him on the landing, with the spindle in her hand; and after he had tied the donkey in the stable and taken off its pack-saddle, put the fodder in the manger, and stowed the wood under the shed in the yard, or whatever he was carrying, in the kitchen, Mara helped him hang the cloak on its nail, and get off his leather leggings, in front of the hearth, and poured him out the wine, put the soup on to boil, laid the table, quiet, quiet and provident like a good housewife, all the while she talked to him of this and that, of the broody hen she had set to sit, of the cloth that was on the loom, of the calf they were rearing, without forgetting a single one of the little jobs she was doing, Jeli, when he was in his own house, felt he was more than the pope.

But on the night of Santa Barbara he came home at an unusual hour, when all the lights were out in the little street, and the town clock was striking midnight. He was coming because the mare the master had left out at pasture had fallen sick all of a sudden, and it was plain to see this was a thing that wanted the farrier at once, at once, and it had taken some doing to bring her all the way into the town, with the rain falling like a torrent, and the roads where you sank in half up your leg. All the same, he might knock and call Mara from behind the door as much as he liked, he had to wait half an hour under the eaves, so that the water was running out of his heels. His wife came at last to open to him, and set about scolding him worse than if it had been her racing about the fields in that filthy weather.

"Why, what's the matter with you?" he kept asking her.

"What's the matter is you frightened me at this hour! Does this seem to you an hour for Christians? Tomorrow I'll be ill!"

"Go and lie down, I'll light the fire."

"No, I have to go and get the wood."

"I'll go."

"No, I tell you!"

When Mara came back with the wood in her arms Jeli said to her:

"Why did you open the yard door? Wasn't there any more wood in the kitchen?"

"No, I went to get it from under the shed."

She let herself be kissed, cold, cold, and turned her head the other way.

"His wife leaves him to soak behind the door," the neighbours said, "when there's a thrush in the house!"

But Jeli knew nothing about it, that he was a cuckold, nor did the others trouble to tell him, because he did not care about it at all, and had taken the woman on with the damage, after Massaro Neri's son had thrown her over for having got to know the story of don Alfonso. Jeli, on the contrary, lived on in the disgrace blessed and contented, and grew fat as a pig, 'for horns are lean, but they keep the house fat!'

One time at last the flock-boy said it to his face, while they were squabbling over the cheeses that had been found shaved. "Now that don Alfonso has taken your wife, you think you're his brother-in-law, and you've grown so proud you think you're a crowned king, with those horns you've got on your head."

The overseer and the field-guard expected to see blood run at those words; but instead Jeli stayed stupefied as if he had not heard them, or as if it were no affair of his, with the face of an ox on which the horns really did sit well.

Now Easter was coming on, and the overseer was sending all the men of the farm to confess, in the hope that for the fear of God they would not steal any more. Jeli went too, and coming out of church he looked for the boy those words had passed with, and threw his arms round his neck, saying to him:

"The confessor told me to forgive you; but I'm not angry with you over that talk; and if you don't shave the cheese any more I don't care at all about what you said to me in your anger."

It was from that moment they gave him the nickname Golden Horns, and the nickname stayed with him, with him and all his, even after he washed his horns in blood.

Mara had been to confess too, and came back from church all gathered into her little cape, with her eyes down, so that she looked like a Saint Mary Magdalen. Jeli, who was waiting for her silent on the landing, when he saw her come like that, so that you could see she had the Lord inside her, stood looking at her pale, pale from foot to head, as if he were seeing her for the first time, or as if they had changed his Mara on him, and he hardly dared lift his eyes to her, while she spread out the cloth, and put the bowls on the table, calm and neat as she always was.

Then, after thinking about it a great while, he asked her:

"Is it true you have an understanding with don Alfonso?"

Mara planted her fine big black, black eyes in his face, and made the sign of the cross. "Why do you want to make me sin on this day!" she exclaimed.

"I didn't believe it, because don Alfonso and I were always together, when we were boys, and not a day went by that he didn't come to Tebidi, when he was in the country near by. And besides he's rich, he has money by the shovelful, and if he wanted women he could marry, and he'd not be short of goods, or of bread to eat."

But Mara was working herself up, and began to scold him in an ugly way, so that the poor fellow did not dare lift his nose from his plate.

At last, so that the grace of God they were eating should not turn to poison, Mara changed the subject, and asked him whether he had thought about having that bit of flax they had sown in the bean field hoed.

"Yes," Jeli answered, "and the flax will come up well."

"If that's so," said Mara, "this winter I'll make you two new shirts that will keep you warm."

In short, Jeli did not understand what being a cuckold means, and did not know what jealousy was; every new thing had trouble getting into his head, and this one came out so big that it was the devil's own work for it to get in at all, above all when he had in front of him his Mara, so fine, and white, and neat, who had wanted him herself, and whom he had thought about for years and years, ever since he was a boy, so that the day they told him she meant to marry another he had not had the heart to eat or drink all day — and even when he thought of don Alfonso, with whom he had been together so many times, and who brought him sweets and white bread every time, it seemed to him he still had him in front of his eyes with those new little clothes, and the curly hair, and the face white and smooth like a girl's, and since he had not seen him again, because he was a poor shepherd and stayed all the year out in the country, he had always stayed in his heart that way. But the first time that, for his misfortune, he saw don Alfonso again, after so many years, Jeli felt inside him as if they were cooking him. Don Alfonso had grown big, so that he did not look like the same one; and now he had a fine curly beard to match his hair, and a velvet jacket, and a little gold chain on his waistcoat. All the same he knew Jeli, and even clapped him on the shoulders in greeting. He had come with the master of the farm along with a party of friends, to make a day of it in the country while the sheep were being sheared; and Mara had come as well, all of a sudden, on the pretext that she was pregnant and had a craving for fresh ricotta.

It was a fine warm day, in the yellow fields, with the hedges in flower, and the long green rows of the vines; the sheep skipped and bleated for the pleasure of feeling themselves stripped of all that wool, and in the kitchen the women were making a great fire to cook the great lot of provisions the master had brought for the dinner. The gentlemen meanwhile, while they waited, had put themselves in the shade, under the carob trees, and were having the tambourines and the bagpipes played, and dancing with the women of the farm so that they seemed all one thing. Jeli, while he went on shearing the sheep, felt something inside him, without knowing why, like a thorn, like a nail, like a pair of shears working away inside him fine, fine, like a poison. The master had ordered two kids to be slaughtered, and the year-old wether, and some fowls, and a turkey. In short he wanted to do the thing in style, and without sparing, to do himself honour with his friends, and while all those beasts were shrieking with the pain, and the kids were screaming under the knife, Jeli felt his knees shaking, and from time to time it seemed to him that the wool he was shearing and the grass the sheep were skipping in blazed up with blood.

"Don't go!" he said to Mara, as don Alfonso was calling her to come and dance with the others. "Don't go, Mara!"

"Why?"

"I don't want you to go! Don't go!"

"Don't you hear them calling me?"

He did not utter another word you could make out, while he stayed bent over the sheep he was shearing. Mara shrugged her shoulders and went off to dance. She was red and merry, with her black eyes that looked like two stars, and she laughed so that you could see her white teeth, and all the gold she had on her clattered and glittered on her cheeks and on her breast, so that she looked like the Madonna, exactly. Jeli all at once had straightened up, with the long shears in his fist, and so white in the face, so white as his father the cowherd once was, when he shook with the fever beside the fire, in the hut. All of a sudden he saw that don Alfonso, with the fine curly beard, and the velvet jacket and the little gold chain on his waistcoat, took Mara by the hand to dance; only then, when he saw that he was touching her, he threw himself on him, and cut his throat at a single stroke, just like a kid.

Later on, while they were taking him before the judge, bound, undone, without his having dared to put up the least resistance.

"What," he kept saying, "wasn't I even to kill him?... When he had taken Mara from me!..."

Translator's log

Cumulative across spans. Written at translation time and frozen span by span, before any evaluation of this translation is designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only — which the front matter asserts for the page as a whole.

Numbering is continuous across spans: span 1 issued D1–D19, span 2 will begin at D20 and nothing already issued will be renumbered.

Span 1 (paragraphs 0–27, 2,288 source words → 2,340 English words)

D1 — The register, and it is the decision the whole work turns on. Verga's Italian here is not standard literary Italian and is not dialect either. It is Italian bent toward Sicilian speech: proverbs quoted straight («Era piovuto dal cielo, e la terra l'aveva raccolto»), the narrator sliding into the community's own idiom without warning (figlio di cagna delivered as reported speech but in the narrator's own breath), heavy parataxis, sentences that accumulate by e rather than subordinate. Three strategies were live:

(a) an English rural dialect — Dorset, Cumbrian, Appalachian — which would reproduce the fact of a marked speech but attach it to the wrong geography, and which the project's own A-beowulf-ingeld finding about archaism-as-inheritability suggests would buy voice at a real cost elsewhere; (b) standard literary English, which flattens exactly what verismo is doing; (c) plain unliterary modern English with a rural lexicon, keeping the parataxis and the proverbs undomesticated, and marking the speech as not-bookish by word choice and sentence shape rather than by spelling.

I chose (c) and declared it in the front matter before drafting. What it costs: an English reader gets no signal that these people are speaking a language the narrator's own class does not speak; the whole diglossic dimension of Verga is not transmitted. What it buys: the sentence shapes survive, and no English region is imported. This decision binds spans 2–5 and is in the register.

D2 — Title: «Jeli il pastore» → "Jeli the Herdsman", and it is primed. Jeli keeps horses, not sheep. Italian pastore is denotatively "shepherd" and Verga is already stretching it to a horse-herd; the English word that stretches the same way is "herdsman". I had, however, already seen both published titles before choosing — Dole's "Jeli, the Shepherd" in the volume's table of contents, and Lawrence's "Jeli the Herdsman" in a search result — so the choice was made in sight of both options and my reasoning cannot be cleanly separated from having seen them. I have kept the reading I think is right rather than manufacturing a third title to escape the coincidence, and recorded the priming instead. It does not touch the body measurement, which is computed on prose only.

D3 — pastore in the body → "herdsman" throughout, consistently with D2, including gnà Lia's «Vedete Jeli il pastore?». pastorello (para 0) → "the herd-boy", the one place a diminutive is available in English without strain.

D4 — The Sicilian address terms are kept, the occupations are translated. don (don Alfonso, don Gesualdo), fra (Fra Cola), massaro (Massaro Agrippino), gnà (gnà Lia) are kept in Italian; campiere → "field-guard", vaccaro → "cowherd", lettighiere → "litter-man". The line is form of address versus job description: the first is what the community calls a person to their face and carries the social structure, the second is what they do. This is the realia fork the project has measured twice (A-beowulf-ingeld, A-yosano-yomogiu) and it is elective here, not forced — English could have taken "Master Agrippino" and "Brother Cola" for all four. Cost: four untranslated words a reader must absorb from context in the first two pages.

D5 — don stays lower-case, as Verga sets it, against English convention and against Dole. Verga's lower-case don makes it a clitic on the name rather than a title; capitalising it in English promotes it. Small, but it recurs on nearly every page of the story, so it goes in the register.

D6 — The horses have to be individuated and the source individuates them by coat. la Bianca is a name and stays Bianca. il puledro zaino — zaino is a solid dark coat with no white markings — became "the bay colt", and the same animal is "the bay colt" at its first mention twenty lines earlier, where a reader has no way yet to know it is the same horse. la cavalla vajata — dapple-grey — became "the dapple mare" and then "the Dapple" when Jeli addresses her as an individual, which is what the Italian article-plus-adjective does when it drops the noun («Lascia stare la vajata»). la cavalla mora → "the black mare". Alternative rejected: keeping zaino and vajata in Italian alongside don and massaro. Rejected because coat-colour is information the reader needs and address-terms are information the reader can do without; the fork in D4 is drawn there for that reason. All four go in the register, because a horse renamed in span 3 is exactly the failure the long form exists to expose.

D7 — mandra, armento, branco: three words, two English words. mandra and armento both → "herd"; branco → "drove". English has the vocabulary to keep three (herd / drove / band) but the distinction in the Italian is not a distinction of thing — Verga is varying the word, not the referent — and inventing a three-way English contrast would assert a difference the source does not make. Cost: a flattening, recorded as such.

D8 — sacca di tela and tasca di tela both → "canvas bag". Same object, two nouns in the source (para 3 and para 9); tasca normally means "pocket". I flattened to one English phrase. This is the same class of decision as D7 and I made it the same way, which is at least consistent; a translator who thought lexical variation in Verga was load-bearing would go the other way on both.

D9 — The proverbs are left undomesticated. «sa farsi la croce con le due mani» → "he can cross himself with both hands" — meaningless as English idiom, retained because the narrator is quoting the community and a substituted English proverb ("he can look after himself") would put the narrator back outside it. Same for «Era piovuto dal cielo, e la terra l'aveva raccolto» → "He had rained down from the sky, and the earth had taken him in", and «dove la malaria si poteva mietere» → "where you could reap the malaria". This is the main instrument left for carrying D1's diglossia after dialect was rejected, and it is a style-correspondence purchase paid for in naturalness, made knowingly and repeatedly.

D10 — The great lyric catalogue of paragraph 0 is kept as one sentence. «Ah! le belle scappate… e l'allagassero!» runs about 200 words in Italian through six il bel / i bei members and a semicolon chain. English can be broken there without loss of sense and with a large gain in ease. I did not break it. The unit of the paragraph is a single exhalation of remembered time, and dividing it into four sentences makes it a list of things rather than one act of remembering. Cost: the longest and least idiomatic sentence in the span, by some distance.

D11 — iuh! iuh! iuh! → "yuh! yuh! yuh!" The pipe's two notes. Options were to keep the Italian spelling (opaque to an English reader's ear), to use a conventional English pipe-noise ("tootle", "peep" — both comic, and this is elegiac), or to respell for an English reader. Respelled. It recurs and is in the register.

D12 — mi fa il signorino (of the bay colt) → "he's playing the young master on me". Jeli says the dawdling colt is acting the young gentleman, three lines after the narrator has introduced don Alfonso as il signorino. The joke only lands if signorino is the same English phrase in both places, so "the young master" is fixed for signorino throughout, in register.

D13 — le nerbate delle feste → "the holiday whip". Literally a beating with a nerbo (ox-sinew whip) of the kind reserved for feast days — i.e. a first-class thrashing. Every idiomatic English equivalent ("a proper hiding") deletes the festival. Kept literal and strange, under D9.

D14 — sei onze all'anno → "six onze a year". The Sicilian oncia, the Bourbon coin still current as a unit of account in Verga's Sicily. Not converted, not glossed in the text. A wage figure whose absolute value the English reader cannot compute is doing the same work in English as in Italian: what matters is that Jeli names a sum and thinks it distant.

D15 — il piano del lettighiere / il piano del lattigliere — the source spells the same place two ways (para 5 and para 19 of the 1881 text). This is a fact about the text, not a decision, but it forces one: I have used "the litter-man's flat" at both, silently regularising. A diplomatic edition would not. Recorded because the second spelling is the one Wikisource's proofreaders left standing against the scan, so it is probably Verga's or Treves's and not a transcription slip.

D16 — villeggiatura → "while he was in the country for the summer". No English noun does it; "on holiday" is wrong (the family owns the place), "at his country seat" over-elevates a Sicilian gentry family. Expanded into a clause, which is an explicitation and is the kind of thing the project's C1 line predicts.

D17 — non perse neppure la giornata → "did not even lose a day's pay". giornata is both the day and the day's wage; the sentence is only cruel if the wage reading is active, since the point is that Jeli's mother's death cost the estate nothing. English cannot hold both, so I took the wage and lost the day. The cruelty survives; the doubleness does not.

D18 — The free indirect discourse is left unmarked. «o che vuoi assaggiare le nerbate delle feste, figlio di cagna?» and «dove la malaria si poteva mietere» sit inside narration with no attributive frame in the Italian, and I have given them quotation marks in the first case (it is addressed speech) and inverted commas in the second (it is quoted community speech). Verga uses guillemets for the second class and nothing for the first. Open, and deliberately left open: the story's later movements have much more free indirect discourse than this span, and I do not want to fix a policy on the strength of two instances. Flagged in the register as unresolved; span 2 must settle it.

D19 — What I could not decide and have deferred. signorino is stable, don is stable, but Jeli's own speech register is not yet fixed: in this span he speaks eight times, all of it short, and I have used contractions ("he doesn't know what he's doing", "I've got a sweetheart") in his mouth and none in the narration. That is a defensible split — the narration is not a person and Jeli is — but it is a policy I adopted while drafting rather than one I chose, and it is now binding on 11,000 further words. Recorded as a decision made by drift, which the short units could not have caught, since no short unit has enough dialogue to notice.

Span 2 (paragraphs 28–61, 2,013 source words → 2,280 English words, 34 paragraphs to 34)

The marking policy applied here was derived and frozen before this prose existed, from Verga's own statement of method — ../../../wiki/base/sources/S-verga-farina.md — and pre-registered with a site inventory and three falsifiable predicted costs in span2-fid-prereg.md, committed at 99722ae. What the predictions did is reported in RS-20260727-jeli-fid, not here; this log records decisions.

Comparator discipline for this span (R05 §1, note (f), note (abm)): nothing of Dole 1896 or of any other rendering of «Jeli» into any language was fetched, opened, printed or grepped at any point in S039.* The only new text read was Verga's own Italian preface, which is not a rendering of this story. The span-1 priming declared in the front matter covers ¶0–27 only; span 2 is unprimed.***

D20 — U1 is settled, and it is settled from the author's method rather than from my ear. Span 1 left open how to mark free indirect discourse. Verga's letter to Farina says the story is retold «colle medesime parole semplici e pittoresche della narrazione popolare», that the reader is to meet the fact «senza … la lente dello scrittore», and that «la mano dell'artista rimarrà assolutamente invisibile». On that reading an attributive frame the Italian does not have is not a typographic nicety — it reinstates the lens. Four rules, now register rows V6–V9: P1 no added frame; P2 Verga's guillemets kept as one mark, no gloss; P3 dash-speech takes quotation marks with the tag left where Verga puts it; P4 a gnomic present or conditional outside the narrative sequence stays outside it. What it costs is D21–D23.

D21 — P2 against three bare noun phrases, and this is where the policy is least comfortable. Span 1's guillemets were whole proverbs, where English inverted commas read as quoting. All three of span 2's are the community's word for a thing: «nel fatto suo» → 'on her own ground', «alle case» → 'the houses', «case grandi» → 'big houses'. English inverted commas round a bare noun phrase read as scare-quotes — ironic distance — which is the reverse of what Verga is doing, and 'the houses' is the worst of the three: it comes out meaning the so-called houses. The alternative was to drop the marks and let the phrases run bare, which would have been more comfortable English and would have destroyed the marked/unmarked contrast Verga actually draws (8 guillemeted phrases in 11,474 words, against far more community idiom left bare). I kept the marks. style-correspondence bought, naturalness paid, at three sites. On «nel fatto suo» specifically: the phrase carries both in the right and on her father's land — her father is field-guard of these fields — and 'on her own ground' was chosen because it is the one English phrase that keeps both; 'within her rights' loses the land, and the land is why she is within them.

D22 — P4 works on half of what it was written for, and fails silently on the rest. Nine sites step outside the narrative past. Five are gnomic presents (come fa il bottaio, come fanno le foglie, come fa un cagnuolo di latte, di quelle che ammazzano, che destano le cose spaventose) and English keeps the step exactly — the way the cooper does, the way the leaves do in November — because English narration also admits a gnomic present. One more, doveva esser cresciuta → must have grown up, keeps it through the modal. The other three are conditionals — saprebbe curarla, si sarebbe guarita, avrebbe saputo aiutarsi — and here the English would is the ordinary unmarked form, so the Italian's out-of-sequence marking simply does not appear: nothing is lost that a reader can see, and nothing is carried. I did not notice this until the sentences were written, and I have not repaired it, because there is nothing to repair with — English has no marked conditional to reach for. Six of nine carried; three of nine flattened with no available alternative.

D23 — P1 at the sharpest site: «Dio ne scampi» → "God save us", unframed. The story's last clause before the fair-day movement ends with the community's own apotropaic phrase sitting in the narrator's sentence with nothing round it. The English options were a frame (as they would say), quotation marks, or nothing. P1 says nothing, and nothing is what it has. The consequence is that in English the narrator appears to say it himself — English narration defaults to narratorial authority harder than Verga's does — where the Italian reads as the community's voice passing through. Same at «ma erano tutti denari buttati via» → but it was all money thrown away. This is the predicted cost and it is real: voice and style-correspondence bought with accuracy about who is speaking.

D24 — U2 is settled: V4 survives a scene of sustained dialogue, unchanged. Span 2 has 24 dash-set speech turns across ¶29–59 (28 em-dashes; four of them close a turn rather than open one — the prereg's §5 figure was the dash count, corrected here, note (g)), including the death-bed reckoning and the leave-taking. Contractions in speech throughout (there's lots, it's only 2 onze, we'll have a nicer room, I'm staying with the colts), none in narration, and the split never strained: no line of speech wanted a full form and no narrative sentence wanted a contraction. Two speech sites took full forms for a different reason — "When I am dead" and "Now I am really alone in the world" — where the contraction would have lightened a sentence that is the gravest thing the speaker says. That is a rhetorical exception inside V4, not a breach of it, and it is recorded so a later span does not read it as drift. V4 moves from adopted by drift, flagged to tested and kept.

D25 — The anacoluthon at ¶35 is kept. «Jeli osservando attentamente l'intricato lavorio della calza … oppure costei gli vedeva intagliare i bei zig zag» — a gerund with no finite verb, the sentence never resolving, then a different subject. I have kept it: Jeli watching closely the tangled business of the stocking … or else she would watch him cut the fine zigzags. Any English copy-editor repairs this. Under D1 and P1 it is not a fault to repair: broken syntax is what speech does, and the whole method is that the telling should sound gathered rather than composed.

D26 — ¶30 is a paragraph ending in a comma, and it stays one. «E come Jeli, più salvatico, non diceva chi fosse,» stands alone as its own paragraph and its sentence is completed by the speech in the next. Verified in the Wikisource markup as a separate <p> — this is Verga's or Treves's setting, not an extraction artefact (compare E2, which is an artefact). English typography has no such thing. Kept.

D27 — The comma splice at ¶50 is kept. «— Vedi come son rimasto? le disse Jeli, la ragazzetta si tirò indietro sbigottita» — Verga runs the speech-tag straight into the next independent clause on a comma. I kept the comma: "You see how I am left?" Jeli said to her, the girl drew back dismayed. It reads as an error in English. V2 says comma-chains are not converted, and a semicolon here would be a conversion, so the register decides it against comfort.

D28 — ecalibbiso / eucaliptus → ecalibus / eucalyptus. Verga puts the peasants' mispronunciation in Massaro Agrippino's mouth (¶42, and again in compare Menu's, ¶43) and the correct form in the narrator's own sentence two lines later. Losing the pair would delete a whole social geometry — the narrator knows the right word and the people do not, and Verga shows it without a syllable of comment. ecalibus is a deformation an English ear can hear as eucalyptus. This is not a breach of V1's ban on dialect spelling: V1 forbids a system of respelt English regional speech; this is one word the source itself spells two ways, and the translation reproduces the source's own contrast rather than importing a convention.

D29 — campaio (¶31) and campiere (¶55) both → "field-guard". Two Italian words, one job, one English word — the same call as D7 (mandra/armento) and D8 (sacca/tasca), made the same way. Register row N5 extended rather than a new row added, because it is not a new referent.

D30 — tumoli → "tumoli", untranslated and unglossed, following N20's treatment of onze and for the same reason: what matters is that a sum is named in units the reader cannot compute, which is also true for the Italian reader of 1881.

D31 — compare, zia, zio kept, and the case follows Verga. Three more address terms on D4's fork, all kept: compare Menu, zia Agata, zio Cosimo. Their case is set the way D5 set don — as Verga sets it — which across the whole story gives lower-case don, gnà, compare, zia, zio and capitalised Fra, Massaro. That is not English convention and it is not tidy, but it is one rule.

D32 — Four places where the 1881 text is internally inconsistent, and what I did. (A fact about the text that forces a decision, as D15 was.) «massaro Agrippino» lower-case at ¶52 against «Massaro Agrippino» elsewhere — regularised to N3. «valle del Iacitano» at ¶51 against «Jacitano» in span 1 — regularised to J. «il campanaccio della bianca» lower-case at ¶60, where the mare is the named Bianca of ¶0 who carries the herd's big bell — rendered "Bianca's big bell", i.e. read as the name. «di tanto il tanto» at ¶32 for di tanto in tanto — read as a slip and translated as the idiom. All four silently regularised, all four recorded; a diplomatic edition would keep every one of them.

D33 — The reduplications are kept where English has room and lost where it has not. adagio adagio → slowly, slowly (as in span 1), lesta lesta → quick, quick, bianco bianco → white, white, lontan lontano → far, far off: four kept. quatto quatto (¶34) is the one lost — English has no doublable word for crouching-and-silent — and became low and quiet, which keeps the sense and drops the pattern. One of five.

D34 — non sembrono (¶52) is Jeli's, and English cannot carry it. Verga writes the non-standard form in Jeli's mouth for standard sembrano. Marking it in English would need exactly the respelt-dialect system V1 rules out, so the line goes into plain English and the one grammatical sign that Jeli speaks a different Italian from the narrator is gone. This is the cost of D1 arriving at a specific, countable site rather than as a general concession, which is what a long work does that a passage does not.

D35 — 2 onze e quindici keeps the digit. The source sets the numeral as a figure inside speech and spells out tre onze and dodici tumoli in the line before. Kept as set. It is very likely a compositor's choice rather than Verga's, but it is what the proofread text has, and normalising it would be a silent edit of the source in a work whose whole point is serial fidelity to a fixed text.

D36 — Pudda la rossa → "Pudda the redhead". Pudda is Sicilian for Giuseppa and stays; the colour-epithet is translated, on the reasoning of D6 — an identifying attribute is information the reader needs, a form of address is not.

D37 — The pleonastic non at ¶50 is gone. «per paura che non la facesse entrare» — the expletive negative after a verb of fearing, which colours the clause as spoken rather than written Italian. Standard English has no expletive negative; for fear he would make her go is all there is. Recorded because it is a second instance of D34's pattern: the marks of speech that live in syntax are the ones this pair cannot carry, while the ones that live in lexis (the proverbs, D9) mostly survive.

D38 — And one site the pre-registration missed, recorded as missed. ¶61 opens a sentence «Adesso non aveva poi motivo alcuno per calar nella valle» — a present-deictic adverb inside past narration, which is a classic free-indirect marker and which English keeps freely (Now he had no reason at all). It is not in the frozen inventory because the inventory's criterion (ii) was written for tense and did not think of deixis. It was found while translating, and the honest consequence is that the frozen site count is a floor, not a census — which is what RS-20260727-jeli-fid reports it as.

Span 3 (paragraphs 62–92, 2,093 source words → 2,429 English words, 31 paragraphs to 31)

Written against span3-fid-prereg.md, frozen at bc1a080 before a word of this English existed. That page had itself been rewritten after an independent critic pass; what it left standing is one prediction (P-1) and four declared process notes (N-2 … N-5), and the log reports them as what they are.

D39 — il fattore → "the overseer", and it needs a register row because the estate has three ranks and English is running out of words. fattore is the man who runs the estate for the absentee padrone: he holds the lease money, hires and fires, and in this span he does the killing. Register row N5 already gives campiere/campaio → field-guard, a junior job (Mara's father holds it, and at ¶79 Jeli says he is "nearly the overseer" at Marineo, which only means anything if the two ranks are distinct in English too). Alternatives rejected: steward (right rank, but it is a manor word and V1 forbids the English-estate colouring), bailiff (same problem, plus a legal sense), manager (right rank, no rural texture at all). Overseer carries an unwanted plantation association in American English, which is the cost, and it is the only plain word that keeps the rank and the menace together.

D40 — lo stellato → "the star colt", il morellino → "the little black", following D6 rather than deciding again. D6's fork is that coat-colour is information the reader needs and a form of address is information the reader can do without, so coats are translated and address-terms are kept. stellato is a horse with a white blaze on the forehead; morellino a small black one. In direct address they become individuals, as la vajata became the Dapple at D6: "Hey there, my fine little black! … and you too, Star!" The long form is what makes this a rule instead of a choice — the star colt is named eleven times in this span and is the span's whole event; a horse renamed between spans is exactly the failure ARM-longwork exists to expose.

D41 — P6 held at both historic-present sites, and process note N-2 is falsified. N-2 said P6 would hold at H1 (the attributive tag «seguita a gridare») and be defeated at H2 (the narrative sentence «Finalmente si vede venire a cavallo il fattore»), on the reasoning that an English narrative present inside a past paragraph reads as an error rather than a device. At the desk it did not. "At last the overseer comes riding up, making a racket and swearing from a long way off as he hurries, at the sight of the animals standing still on the road, so that Alfio himself took to his heels up the hill" is readable, because English has a vernacular narrative present of its own — the oral teller's so finally he comes riding up — and that register is precisely what S-verga-farina names as the manner and what V1's plain, unliterary already commits this translation to. Two things bought it: the finite-tense clash was moved out of the predicate into participles (making, as he hurries), and the shift back to past is allowed to happen at a clause boundary, which is where English tolerates it and where Verga puts it anyway. The cost is real and is not the predicted one: the English present is more conspicuous than the Italian, so the device is louder here than there — a gain in voice paid for in style-correspondence. And the self-check has to be recorded, because the hazard runs both ways. N-2 predicted my own decision; having written that a falsified self-prediction would be the stronger outcome — a claim the critic's finding 11 correctly demolished and the frozen page withdraws — I had a live motive to break my own prediction. So the two renderings were written out and compared as translations, not as outcomes, and the harmonised version ("came riding up") is simply flatter: it loses the pull into the scene's present at the exact moment the disaster becomes irreversible. That reasoning is the evidence, such as it is, and it is one translator's report about his own prose.

D42 — P-1 confirmed: all three deixis sites took a present-oriented adverb. D1 ¶84 «Ora il cielo s'era fatto bianchiccio» → "Now the sky had turned whitish"; D2 ¶91 «ora che aveva visto» → "now that he had seen"; D3 ¶92 «Adesso poteva andarsene a spasso» → "Now he could go off and take a walk". None came out as then / by then / at that time / nothing, so the one falsifiable prediction on the frozen page holds. It is also the cheapest prediction on the page, and that is the finding. English takes a character-anchored now in past narration without any strain at all; P5 never had to overrule anything, at the strict site or at either disputed one. The disputed pair stayed disputed and the choice did not turn on resolving it: Now the sky had turned whitish is the same six words whether Ora is Jeli's now or the narrator's by then, which is why the dispute was frozen as open rather than settled — the English is neutral between the two readings the Italian is ambiguous between, and that is a better outcome than picking one.

D43 — A1 took the marks without strain, U3 is settled, and V7 survives on its third class. «come San Giovanni fosse arrivato sotto l'olmo,» → 'when San Giovanni should have come under the elm,' the contract said. Process note N-3 holds and the mechanism is the one it named: Verga's frame does the framing, so the marks are free to be ordinary quotation. Span 2's three bare noun phrases had to frame themselves and came out as scare-quotes; here the contract said supplies the speaker and the inverted commas simply quote a document. U3 is settled in V7's favour — but narrowly, and the register row must say so: V7 is now tested on proverb-clauses (span 1, held), bare noun phrases (span 2, strains), and a framed clause (span 3, holds). The class that strains is still the unframed one, and two of the eight guillemet sites remain unreached.

D44 — paneperso → "bread-waster", because the bread is the span's spine. A one-word compound insult, roughly good-for-nothing, literally lost-bread. The obvious English renderings all throw the bread away, and this span cannot afford that: it opens with the overseer about to lose the rent, turns on «Jeli … perdette il pane» (lost his bread), has Alfio eating his bread through the catastrophe, and closes on «non aveva più nè pane, nè tetto». Verga's ¶61 had already put "made the bread fall out of his mouth" into span 2 as the promise of it. Four occurrences of one word carrying a man's whole livelihood, and paneperso is the fifth, spoken by the man who is destroying it. "Bread-waster" is not idiomatic English and is not meant to be; V3 keeps community idiom literal and strange.

D45 — V5 has a boundary, and this span found it: it covers imitative sounds, not calls. V5 ("onomatopoeia respelled for an English ear: iuh! → yuh!") came from span 1's pipe. Span 3 has two more sounds and neither is respelled: «ohi! ohi! ohi!», the driving-cries as the colts scatter, and «ahu! ahu! ahu!», Jeli calling into the ravine. The reason is not that respelling is hard but that every available English respelling imports a culture that is not there — oy! is Yiddish to a contemporary English ear, oi! is British street-hailing, hi! hi! hi! is an English herding call and therefore an English farm. A pipe's two notes belong to nobody; a shout belongs to whoever shouts it. So both are kept as Verga sets them, and V5 gains a scope clause rather than an exception. This is the third register row the long form has forced open on a feature that a short unit had settled on one instance — after V4 (D19/D24) and V7 (D21/D43).

D46 — la puddara is kept. Sicilian for the Pleiades, and Verga uses the dialect form inside Jeli's speech where the narrator would have le Pleiadi. Translating it ("the seven sisters", "the Pleiades") would put a book-word in the mouth of a boy who cannot read — the whole point of D-span1's signorino reasoning. Kept unglossed, with onze and tumoli (N20, N22), and it goes in the register.

D47 — «non voleva che le dessi più del tu» → "didn't want me to say tu to Mara any more". The T/V distinction, and English has no form for it. Thou is available and V1 forbids archaism outright. The register's own logic decides it: address-terms are kept in Italian (don, gnà, compare, zia, zio — N1, N4, N21), and tu is an address-term. Italicised, as span 1 italicised excellency for vossignoria. The cost is that an English reader who does not know Italian gets the shape of the rule and not its content — they learn there was a familiar form and that gnà Lia forbade it, which is what the sentence is for.

D48 — Speech inside speech takes single quotes inside V8's double ones, in ¶79's long turn where Jeli quotes Mara quoting herself and then quotes himself. Verga sets the inner turns with the same em-dash as the outer ones, which Italian can do and English cannot: three levels of dash would be unreadable. This is a typographic consequence of V8 rather than a new decision, recorded because ¶79 is the first place in 6,394 words where the nesting goes two deep and because it is the kind of thing that will differ silently between spans if it is not written down.

D49 — N-4 holds, and the mechanism is the one it named. X1 «Viva San Giovanni!», closing a paragraph of narration with no frame, does not read as the narrator's: the paragraph is full of a shouting crowd and the crowd supplies the speaker. X2 «povera bestia!», sitting inside a narrative sentence about a single dying horse, does — "as if he had had the power of speech, poor beast!" is the narrator's pity in English in a way it need not be in Italian. P1 bought voice and paid in accuracy about who is speaking, at the site where the context could not carry the attribution and not at the site where it could. Same finding as span 2's confirmed prediction 1, now with the discriminating variable named.

D50 — «che pareva un cristiano» → "that sounded like a Christian", kept literal under V3. In Sicilian usage cristiano means simply a human being, and the idiomatic English is sounded like a human. Keeping Christian is strange in English and the strangeness is the right kind: it is the community's own word for what a person is, in a story whose narrator has no vocabulary but theirs. The same rule that keeps «tirava pei piedi gli angeli e i santi del paradiso» as "pulled the angels and the saints of paradise down by their feet" rather than "swore blue murder".

D51 — «luccicavano sul monte Arturo» is left as the text has it, and the uncertainty is declared. The three kings are Orion's belt; Arturo is Arcturus, which is not a mountain, so the phrase is either a place-name (Monte Arturo) or an elliptical "over the hill, [and] Arcturus". The stored text gives no comma and no capital on monte. Rendered as a place-name, "over Monte Arturo", on the principle that governs every other name in this work — kept as in the source, not resolved by the translator (N-policy, §Place-names). Recorded as a real doubt, not a solved one; a later reader with an annotated edition can correct it, and if they do it is an erratum here.

D52 — And the site the widened criterion still does not cover, logged under the frozen page's own rule for it (N-5). ¶80 opens «In tal modo Jeli, il guardiano dei cavalli, perdette il pane», and ¶89 opens «In tal modo il fattore uccise sul luogo lo stellato». It is not guillemets, not a tense outside the narrative sequence, not deixis, not a historic present: it is the oral teller's summative connective, that was how — a claim on the reader's attention that a written narrator does not need to make. It falls under no class of criterion (ii′), and under N-5 that is all that may be said about it. The frozen page forbids reporting this as a measurement of the criterion's completeness in either direction, and it is not reported as one. Two further things are worth the ink because they are facts about the text rather than about the instrument: the formula occurs twice in thirty-one paragraphs and nowhere else in the 6,394 words translated so far, and the two occurrences are the two catastrophes — the loss of the job and the killing of the horse. Both are rendered "That was how …".

D53 — duro duro → "hard, hard", following span 1's adagio adagio → "slowly, slowly". Verga's intensifying reduplication is kept as reduplication rather than converted to an English intensifier ("quite still", "stony-faced"), on V2's reasoning: the figure is in the syntax, and English will take it.

D54 — «e mi lascia i puledri sulla pancia» → "and leaves me the colts on my belly", under V3. To be left with something on one's belly is to be stuck with unsold stock. The idiomatic English ("leaves me with the colts on my hands") exists and is close enough to be tempting, and it is refused for the same reason as D50: the body part is the community's own way of saying it, and hands is ours.

Span 4 (paragraphs 93–125, 2,274 source words → 2,572 English words, 33 paragraphs to 33)

No pre-registration was owed for this span (ARM-longwork step 4), and none was written. What the span was owed is U5 — the guillemet site at ¶125 — and it is discharged at D62. The span's other business turned out to be three register rows breaking on referents they were never tested against, which is the shape of finding the arm exists to produce and which no span could have produced on its own.

D55 — pecoraio → "shepherd", and span 1's title decision is validated 6,000 words later by the source itself. D2 rendered «Jeli il pastore» as "Jeli the Herdsman" and not "Jeli the Shepherd", on the ground that Jeli keeps horses and that English shepherd would be simply wrong. In this span the story makes him a shepherd — «Massaro Agrippino gli trovò da allogarlo come pecoraio alla Salonia» — and Verga reaches for a different Italian word to say it. Had D2 spent shepherd on the title, the English would now have to spend it again on the job, and the fall from horses to sheep — which is the whole social event of the span, and costs Jeli most of his wages in the next clause — would read as no change at all. The title and the job stay two words in English because they are two words in Italian. This is the first decision in this work that a later span has confirmed rather than complicated, and it is worth recording as such: the register's value has so far shown up as rows breaking, and this is a row holding under a load it was not designed for.

D56 — mandra breaks on sheep, and N15 is revised rather than obeyed (erratum E5). N15 fixed mandra and armento both → herd at D7, when every referent in the story was horses. Span 4 puts Jeli among sheep, and the same Italian noun now denotes a flock: «ogni altro frutto di mandra», «la mandra prosperava», «come tante ce ne furono nelle mandre vicine». English does not let herd cover sheep — a herd of sheep is not a stylistic roughness, it is a mistake a reader stops on. So N15 becomes referent-sensitive: mandra → herd of horses and cattle, flock of sheep. The register caught this and nothing else would have. The row was set 8,600 words earlier, on a page nobody would reread while translating; the collision is silent, it happens once, and a reader would only see the wrong word. What it costs: the register now contains a row whose English depends on the scene, which is exactly the kind of row that drifts — so the revision is written into §Revisions with its erratum, per the register's own rule.

D57 — The T/V switch across ¶113–116, and the address term carries what the verb ending cannot. This is the largest thing English loses in the span, and it happens in four lines. Jeli, who has said tu to Mara since they were children, now addresses her with voi («come li scordate gli amici», «Gli volete bene almeno»); Mara answers him with tu («sei tu Jeli?… io non ti ho scordato»), which is warmth and also condescension; and when he presses her she switches to voi to shut him out («Che discorsi andate facendo!»). The narrator, in the same breath, promotes her from Mara to la gnà Mara. Four moves in a quarrel about whether she still knows him, and all of them are carried by inflection English does not have. Rejected: thou (V1 forbids archaism, and it inverts the politeness anyway); a translator's note (this text has no apparatus); leaving it entirely. What is done instead is the one thing the register had already paid for: N4 and N21 keep gnà in Italian, so Jeli's "Oh, gnà Mara!" — where six thousand words of this translation have had him say plain Mara — is a visible change of address at exactly the right moment, and the narrator's "gnà Mara answered sharply" is a second one. The verb endings are gone and the two ends of the movement survive. A decision taken in span 1 for a different reason turned out to be the only instrument available here, which is an argument for the register as such and not for any row in it. Cost, stated plainly: the middle of the movement — Mara's tu, the intimacy she keeps while refusing him — is not in the English at all, and D47's italicised tu cannot help, because there the Italian names the form and here it merely uses it.

D58 — mogio mogio is not reduplicated, and D53's rule has a boundary. D53 kept duro duro → "hard, hard" and span 1 kept adagio adagio → "slowly, slowly", on V2's reasoning that the figure lives in the syntax and English will take it. «se ne andò mogio mogio» → "went off downhearted", unreduplicated. The difference is grammatical and it is worth naming, because otherwise the next span will guess: adagio and duro are adverbs of manner or degree, and English repeats those freely in speech (slowly, slowly, softly, softly); mogio is an adjective of mood predicated of the person, and "went off downhearted, downhearted" is not an English intensifier but a stammer. So D53 is scoped, not overturned — it covers manner and degree, not mood — and the cost is a small flattening recorded rather than hidden. This is the fourth register decision the long form has forced open on a feature a short unit had settled on one instance, after V4 (D19/D24), V7 (D21/D43) and V5 (D45).

D59 — il ron ron del contrabasso → "the thrum of the double bass", and V5 does not reach it. V5 governs utterances — sounds a creature makes — and D45 scoped it further to imitative sounds rather than calls. ron ron is neither: it is a lexicalised sound-noun, Italian's ready-made word for a low continuous drone, of the same class as tic-tac or English hum. A respelling on the iuh!→yuh! model ("the ron-ron") would import a foreign word where the Italian has an ordinary one, which is the opposite of what V5 is for. English has its own lexicalised sound-noun for a bowed string — thrum — and it is used. Recorded because it looks like a V5 case and is not, and because the general rule it implies is short: an utterance is respelled; a sound that has become a noun is translated by the corresponding noun.

D60 — un grano and quattro palmi are kept; dieci lire is not a decision. The coin grano joins onze (N20), tumoli (N22) and puddara (N28) under the rule that a Sicilian unit whose absolute value an English reader cannot compute is doing the same work in English as in Italian (D14). quattro palmi — a palm is a handbreadth — is kept as "four palms deep" for the same reason and with an extra one: it is a measure taken off the body, and converting it to "two and a half feet" would put a ruler into a story that has none. dieci lire is simply "ten lire", and it is listed here only so that the next span does not treat it as an open question: lira is an English word.

D61 — «Ma stava di casa verso Sant'Antonio» — an elliptical subject English must supply, and the choice is recorded as a choice. The Italian verb is third person singular with no expressed subject and no antecedent nearer than a paragraph away; the referent is either Mara or massaro Agrippino's household. I have written "But she lived over towards Sant'Antonio", because the sentence's work is to explain why Jeli has not the heart to go that way, and it is Mara he cannot face. "But they lived…" is equally available in the Italian and would collide with the they of "they had not wanted him even for minding pigs" two clauses later, which is the practical reason as against the interpretive one. Verga's ellipsis is a mark of the oral teller — the community knows whose house is meant — and English forces the translator to name what the Italian could leave to be understood. Recorded as a doubt, in the manner of D51.

D62 — U5 is settled, and with a third answer: what makes the marks work is prior attribution, not framing. «e il campanile «che sembrava un manico di saliera» fra gli aranci del giardino» → "and the bell-tower 'that looked like the handle of a salt-cellar' among the orange trees of the garden." This is an unframed guillemeted clause — no diceva, no il contratto, nothing — which is the class span 3 predicted would strain, since U5 was opened precisely to decide whether span 2's strain belongs to bare noun phrases or to unframedness. It does not strain, and the reason is neither of the two variables on the table. These exact words were spoken by Mara in span 3, inside Jeli's report of their conversation: "at Tebidi there was the bell with the bell-tower that looked like the handle of a salt-cellar." Verga marks them here because the reader has already heard whose they are, 3,900 words earlier, and the single inverted commas do not have to introduce a speaker — they only have to recall one. So the discriminating variable is neither bare-NP-ness nor unframedness but whether the marked words have been attributed anywhere in the text, and span 2's three failures were failures of first appearance, not of grammar. V7 is kept unchanged; U5 closes; the row records the third class and the new variable. This is a distinction no short unit could have drawn — it depends on a quotation and its echo being four thousand words apart in the same artifact, which is the one thing 2,000-word units structurally cannot contain, and it is the clearest instance so far of ARM-longwork's own question having an answer.

D63 — «delle corna in casa non le voleva altre che quelle dei suoi buoi» survives whole, and that is luck. Massaro Neri wants no horns in his house but his oxen's: the cuckold's horns and the ox's horns are the same word in Italian and the same word in English, so the joke crosses intact — "that of horns in the house he wanted none but his own oxen's" — with no gloss and no compensation. It is logged because V3 has been paying for its literalism at every proverb since D9 ("he can cross himself with both hands", "where you could reap the malaria", "bread-waster"), and here the same policy costs nothing at all. The policy is not what made this work; a shared metaphor in the two languages is. Worth having on the record so that the successes of V3 are not read as evidence for V3.

D64 — come un cane senza padrone returns, and it is now about Jeli. Span 1 had the hunters and travellers seeing Jeli out in the fields "like a dog with no master"; here he trails the party through the fair "like a dog with no master" — the same four Italian words, the second time on the night he has actually lost his master. English keeps it identical, which required no decision but did require noticing, and noticing is the thing the long form makes possible and the short unit makes irrelevant. Filed with D40's point about the star colt: a recurrence is only a recurrence if the earlier occurrence is in the same artifact.

D65 — The bread thread reaches the knife. D44 tracked pane from ¶61 through the loss of the job to paneperso. Span 4 adds two occurrences and the second one is placed: Jeli has "neither bread nor roof" at the fair, and at ¶124, at the moment he learns Mara has been Alfonso's, "just then he was slicing the bread. He said nothing, but his appetite went from him for that day." The English keeps pane as bread at every occurrence, which is now a binding decision rather than an obvious one — loaf, food, a living are each locally better and each would break the thread. Recorded, not claimed: what the placement is doing is the story's business and not the translator's.

D66 — comari kept, extending N21. comare is the feminine of compare, already kept at N21 along with zia and zio. "together with the comari and the neighbours". No new reasoning; recorded so the row covers both genders explicitly and the next span does not re-decide it.

D67 — galantuomini → "the gentry", and it was already decided by accident. Span 3's closing paragraph has Jeli free to "stay in the piazza all day watching the gentry in the café"; span 4 opens with the same men in the same café, ninety words later in the source and one session later at the desk. The word is a class term — the men who do not work with their hands — and "the gentlefolk", "the gentlemen", "the respectable people" were all live. It goes in the register now because the two occurrences are in different spans and would have diverged silently; that they did not is not evidence that the register is unnecessary, it is one lucky adjacency.

D68 — facendo la ruota → "spreading his tail in front of her". Literally making the wheel, which in Italian is unambiguously the peacock's display and in English is nothing at all. "Showing off in front of her" is the idiomatic rendering and deletes the bird. The bird is kept because the whole paragraph is animals — Massaro Neri's son "jumped like a colt" three clauses later, Mara "squatted down like a little dove on the roof-tiles", and the fair's people were "dressed for the feast, like the animals at the fair" on the first page of the span. Under V3 this is not a proverb and the literalism is elective, which is why it is logged: it is a style-correspondence purchase made where naturalness was cheap to keep.

D69 — una carneficina di cristiani → "a butchery of Christians", applying D50 to the harder case. D50 kept cristiano as Christian where the Italian means a human being — «un rantolo che pareva un cristiano». Here the word is on a fairground showman's painted sheet, and the English reader who takes Christians denotationally will read a martyrdom, which is a different picture from the massacre-of-people the Sicilian means. The idiomatic "a butchery of people" is available and is refused, on D50's ground and on one more: three paragraphs later the same word appears in its other sense in the same span — "never had so many Christians been seen at the fair" — and the two are the same word in Verga. Splitting them in English would tidy away the fact that this community has one word for a person and it is the name of their religion. Cost, and it is a real one: an English reader may briefly see the wrong painting.

Span 5 (paragraphs 126–194, 2,806 source words → 3,202 English words, 69 paragraphs to 69)

The last span. The work is now translated whole: 11,474 Italian words in five sittings, 195 paragraphs to 195, log D1–D84. What this span was owed is U6 — the last guillemet site, D72 — and a pre-registration frozen before it was written (E-20260728d). What it in fact produced is two mechanical censuses that falsify a register row and expose a register gap, neither of them looked for.

D70 — «la lupa» → "the broomrape", and the wolf is lost knowingly. Mara's beans have failed: «la lupa le ha mangiate tutte questo anno». lupa here is not an animal: it is the Sicilian and southern name for Orobanche crenata, the chlorophyll-less parasite of broad beans, called sporchia, lupa, lupu or lupo di fave across the south. I checked the identification rather than assuming it — it is the one place in this span where the rendering turns on a lexical fact and not on the text — and the same sources record that the dialect names come from the animal's bad name, so the wolf in lupa is live, not a dead metaphor. Two rules meet here and they point opposite ways. V3 says community idiom is rendered literally and left strange, which gives "the wolf has eaten them all this year". D59 says a lexicalised noun is translated by the corresponding English noun — the rule that made ron ron a thrum rather than a respelling. lupa names a plant; English farmers name the same plant broomrape; so D59 governs and "the broomrape has eaten them all this year" is what stands. Second time these two rules have met, and D59 has won both. Cost, and it is exact: an Italian reader hears a wolf eating the beans and an English reader does not, and no rendering available to me keeps both the plant and the animal.

D71 — The reduplication census, and V10 is falsified by the prose it was written over. This span has seven reduplications, more than any other, so I enumerated the figure across the whole work mechanically rather than by memory: 24 sites in 11,474 words. The result is that V10, written at D58 in span 4, is contradicted by frozen prose from spans 1 and 2 that nobody checked it against.

V10 says reduplication is kept for adverbs of manner and degree and that "an adjective of mood predicated of a person is not reduplicated in English and is rendered singly" — mogio mogio → downhearted. But the frozen record treats reduplicated adjectives five different ways:

bianco bianco is exactly the class D58 says English will not take, doubled in frozen span-2 prose, three spans before D58 was written. The rule was drawn from one instance and stated as a grammatical fact about English, and the counter-evidence was already inside the artifact.

What I have done, and it is a revision, not an application (erratum E6). V10's boundary is redrawn where the frozen record actually puts it: the doubling is kept where the English word is short and doubles idiomatically, and dropped where it does not. So this span keeps cheta cheta → quiet, quiet, fredda fredda → cold, cold, pallido pallido → pale, pale, neri neri → black, black, subito subito → at once, at once, piccino piccino → small, small, minuta minuta → fine, fine; and mogio mogio stays downhearted, unchanged. The honest part is what this costs the row. D58's criterion was grammatical and would replicate; the replacement is euphonic and would not — it is the same defect U4 carries and the same defect an independent critic found in criterion (iii) at S042, and I am recording it as such rather than dressing it as a rule. The general finding is about the register and not about this row: its rows are drawn by two kinds of criterion, and D58 converted a judgment by ear into a claim about grammar, which is why the next span broke it in three places at once.

D72 — U6: the last guillemet site, written under V7 with its constraints declared in advance. «Jeli invece ci viveva beato e contento nel vituperio, e s'ingrassava come un majale, «chè le corna sono magre, ma mantengono la casa grassa!»» → "…and grew fat as a pig, 'for horns are lean, but they keep the house fat!'" This is site G8 of E-20260728d, and that pre-registration was frozen at a45c04f before this sentence existed. What binds the rendering, declared there before it was written: V3 (the proverb literal and strange, no English substitute), D63 (horns is a bound word in this text — Massaro Neri wanted none in his house but his oxen's), V7 (single inverted commas, one mark), V6 (no added frame), and no gloss. The proverb is a first appearance — nobody has said it earlier in the story — and it is the only site in 11,474 words where an unframed proverb carries the mark. I am not judging whether it works; the panel does that blind, and the design labels the result exploratory because I wrote this sentence knowing what had been predicted about it (critic finding G10).

D73 — roba, and it is the biggest hole in the register. Verga's great word — the title of another of his stories — occurs six times here, and the register has no row for it, because nobody noticed it: it is too ordinary to look like terminology. The frozen spans already render it two ways: ¶9 "the canvas bag that held everything he owned", ¶51 "keeping an eye on her things", ¶52 "once their things are taken away out of them". This span adds three occurrences in three further senses — ¶140 property lost ("now that we've lost everything we had"), ¶181 wealth ("he'd not be short of goods"), ¶187 provisions for a dinner ("the great lot of provisions"). One Italian word, four English words, five of the six occurrences carrying a different weight. I have not forced them together: goods at ¶187 and provisions at ¶140 are both wrong. The row goes into the register as N36, and it goes in as irreducible — a record of a loss rather than an instruction, which is the first row of that kind. The point for the arm: the register catches the words the translator notices, and roba is a word nobody notices, so five spans went by.

D74 — ballatojo: one Italian word, two places, and N15's shape a second time. ¶79 (span 3) has the bell rung "from the gallery" of a bell-tower; ¶158 and ¶177 have Mara waiting for Jeli on the ballatojo of a town house, which is an outside stair-landing. English has no word covering both, so it is the gallery in span 3 and the landing here. Identical in shape to N15 (mandra → herd of horses, flock of sheep, erratum E5), and identical in that the register is what makes the divergence visible instead of accidental. Row N37.

D75 — The T/V movement completes, and it reverses; his Mara is the one instrument English has. D57 recorded the span-4 quarrel — Jeli to voi, Mara answering tu, Mara switching to voi to shut him out — as the largest thing English lost. Span 5 finishes the figure and finishes it the other way round. In the courtship Mara comes back to tu («Ora ti dico addio», «Se vuoi un bacio adesso te lo dò») and Jeli follows her into it («E tu perchè non l'hai sposato»). After the marriage the movement inverts: Jeli stays at tu («È vero che te la intendi con don Alfonso?») and Mara goes to voi at the moment she is lying to him («Perchè volete farmi far peccato in questo giorno!»), and the flock-boy uses voi to Jeli as mockery two paragraphs earlier. So across the story Jeli climbs voi → tu and Mara withdraws tu → voi, and they cross. None of it is in the English, and D57's instrument — gnà, kept in Italian at D4 — is not available here, because the Italian never names the form. One thing English does have and I have used it: Verga writes «la sua Mara» twice in this span (¶177, ¶186) and nowhere before, at exactly the point where she has stopped being his — "as if they had changed his Mara on him", "when he had in front of him his Mara". The possessive crosses intact. A caution I am recording rather than suppressing: in Sicilian usage a wife addressing a husband as voi was ordinary, so the inversion may be conventional rather than expressive, and I cannot tell which from the text alone.

D76 — The story ends on a sentence with no main clause, and it is kept. «Più tardi, mentre lo conducevano dinanzi al giudice, legato, disfatto, senza che avesse osato opporre la menoma resistenza.» — a temporal clause, three participles, a full stop, and no verb for any of it. → "Later on, while they were taking him before the judge, bound, undone, without his having dared to put up the least resistance." Every English copy-editor completes this. D25 kept the anacoluthon at ¶35 and D27 the comma splice at ¶50, and this is the third and the largest: the narrator's last sentence about Jeli breaks off, and what finishes it is Jeli's own voice in the next paragraph. Completing it in English would hand the ending back to a narrator Verga has just removed — which is the whole of S-verga-farina and rows V6–V9. Cost: the last line of narration in the translation reads as a fragment, and is one.

D77 — Speech running into narration on a semicolon, ¶153. «— Io t'ho sempre voluto bene, anche quando volevi lasciarmi pel figlio di massaro Neri; ma non ebbe cuore di dirgli di quell'altro.» Verga opens a dash-speech and never closes it: the sentence changes from Jeli's mouth to the narrator's inside one clause. Under V8 the speech takes quotation marks, so the English closes the quotation where the Italian merely stops — "…for Massaro Neri's son"; but he had not the heart to tell her about the other one. The typography forces a boundary the Italian declines to draw, which is D23's cost in a new place: what Verga leaves continuous, English punctuation must cut.

D78 — «non capiva nei panni nuovi», and V3's literalism earning its keep for once. Non capire nei panni is "to be beside oneself with joy" and literally "not to fit inside one's clothes"; Verga puts it two clauses after Jeli has been dressed in new cloth and velvet for the wedding, so the dead idiom is standing up again on the page. → "and he did not fit inside his new clothes for the contentment of seeing Mara about the house." The idiomatic English (beside himself) deletes the clothes. D63 warned that the successes of V3 should not be read as evidence for V3, because there a shared metaphor did the work; here nothing is shared and the literalism does the work, which is the counterweight that entry asked for.

D79 — Corna d'oro → "Golden Horns", under D30. A nickname that means something is translated, as paneperso → bread-waster was, and for the same reason: the horns run from D63's oxen through the flock-boy's insult and the ox-face at ¶173 to "even after he washed his horns in blood" in the same sentence that gives the nickname. Kept in Italian it would be a noise; translated it is the thread's name.

D80 — forbice is the simile and the weapon, and stays one English word. ¶187 has something working inside Jeli "come una forbice… minuta minuta", and ¶193 has him rise "colla lunga forbice in pugno" and cut don Alfonso's throat. Verga uses the same noun twice, six paragraphs apart, and the second is the first come true. English wants scissors for the simile and shears for the tool; I have used shears for both, at some cost to the simile's ease, because splitting them destroys the only preparation the murder gets. Same class as D64 — a recurrence is only a recurrence if you notice it, and the noticing is what five sittings make hard and a census makes possible.

D81 — The nose, three times, and the echo English loses. In the wedding paragraph Jeli "did not dare blow his nose with the red silk handkerchief, so as not to be noticed", and in the next clause the neighbours «gli ridevano sul naso» — laughed on his nose. At ¶182 he "did not dare lift his nose from his plate". English has laughed in his face and nothing else; laughed in his nose is not English. Two of the three noses survive and the middle one, which is the one that rhymes, does not. Recorded because it is the exact inverse of D80: there the repetition could be kept and was, here it could not.

D82 — pecoraia: the feminine N31 cannot carry. Mara «non era nata a far la pecoraia», twice in two paragraphs. N31 fixes pecoraio → shepherd, and it is load-bearing — it is the word that makes Jeli's demotion from horses visible. The feminine is shepherdess, and shepherdess in English is a pastoral word with shepherdesses and crooks in it, which V1 forbids outright. Rendered "she was not born to keep sheep" at both occurrences, identical to each other and losing the noun. The register's masculine/feminine pairs have held until now — compare/comare at N33 cost nothing — and this is the first that will not cross.

D83 — soldo kept (N35); «tre dita di erba» kept, extending D60. «di un soldo ne fai due» → "you make two soldi out of one": a coin whose value an English reader cannot compute is doing the same work in both languages, which is D14's rule and puts soldo with onze (N20), tumoli (N22), grano (N34) and puddara (N28). And «su tutta la Salonia non venne tre dita di erba» → "not three fingers of grass came up" — a measure taken off the body, kept for D60's reason, alongside four palms of snow. Two spans running, the Salonia has been measured in hands.

D84 — What closes, and it is not a decision so much as a report. Five threads run into the last three pages and every one of them was set in an earlier span, which is the whole of what ARM-longwork was constituted to find out. Bread (D44, D65): Jeli is praised for not eating "so as not to use up the bread", don Alfonso would never be short "of bread to eat", and don Alfonso as a boy brought him "white bread". Poison (span 4's feast that "turned to poison in him"): the dinner must not "turn to poison", and the thing working inside him at the shearing is "like a poison". Gold: the amber necklace, "all the gold of the Madonna" at the wedding, and then "all the gold she had on her clattered and glittered… so that she looked like the Madonna, exactly" as she dances away. Horns (D63, D79). And the kid: the kids "screaming under the knife" at the shearing, and don Alfonso's throat cut "just like a kid" eight paragraphs later. None of these needed a decision in this span; every one of them needed a decision three or four sittings ago, and the English is only carrying what the register and the log kept in view. consistency, which the arm was constituted to say something about, turns out to be almost entirely a property of what was written down early, and hardly at all of what the last sitting could see. internal-judgment-only.

Comparator discipline for this span (R05 §1, note (f), note (abm)): nothing of Dole 1896 or of any other rendering of «Jeli» into any language was fetched, opened, printed or grepped at any point before the freeze. The one external lookup made was on the botany of Orobanche crenata and its dialect names (D70); it touched no translation of this story.

Errata

Corrections to already-frozen spans go here, numbered and dated, never by silent edit.

E1 — 2026-07-27. The span 1 log heading gives the English length as "2,340 English words". The measured figure is 2,566. The 2,340 was an estimate written while drafting and never recomputed; the source figure (2,288) and the paragraph range are correct. Corrected here rather than in place, which is R05 §2 working on its first opportunity to be broken.

E2 — 2026-07-27 (S039). The stored source had a false paragraph boundary, and R05 §1 depends on the paragraph index being real. source-it-full.txt was cleaned from the paginated Wikisource HTML, and one page-break marker fell inside a <p> — at «dove l'erba era già alta sul terreno lasciato pel | maggese», the scan's page 43 — so a single sentence was stored as two paragraphs. The file therefore claimed 196 paragraphs where the source has 195.

The check that found it: every <p> in the parsed HTML was re-extracted, page-markers stripped inside the paragraph rather than at it, and the 195 results aligned against the 196 stored lines. Exactly one split, and the word total is identical either way — 11,474 both times, which is why nothing caught it at S036: a length check cannot see an invented boundary.

Repaired by joining the two lines; the file is now 195 paragraphs, 11,474 words. Span 1's range is unaffected — the defect is at index 51, well after ¶27 — so "paragraphs 0–27" still names exactly the same 2,288 words it named at S036, and no frozen prose changes. Span 2 is defined on the repaired file. The second candidate the same check flagged, ¶30, is genuine Verga (a lead-in paragraph ending in a comma, confirmed as its own <p> in the markup) and was not touched — see D26. Method note (bch).

E3 — 2026-07-27 (S039). Register revisions authorised by span 2, per register.md's rule that a row changes only by a numbered erratum here plus a dated line there:

• V4 — status only, from adopted by drift, binding but flagged to tested against 24 speech turns and kept, with the rhetorical exception named in D24. No change to what it binds.
• N5 — extended to cover campaio as well as campiere, both → "field-guard" (D29).

(New rows V6–V9 and N21–N24 are additions, not revisions, and need no erratum; they are listed here only so this page carries the whole change.) A small defect in R05 shows up here: §2's erratum mechanism is written for corrections to frozen prose, and the register borrows it for revisions to rows, which are a different thing — the first is an admission of error, the second is the instrument working as designed. Recorded, not repaired.

E4 — 2026-07-27 (S042). Register revision authorised by span 3, per register.md's rule.

• V5 — scoped, from "onomatopoeia respelled for an English ear" to "imitative sounds respelled; calls and cries kept as the source sets them" (D45). It narrows what the row binds and adds nothing: iuh! → yuh! stands, ohi! and ahu! are kept. The row's first substantive revision in three spans.

(New rows N25–N30 and unresolved row U5 are additions and need no erratum; U3 moves to Settled, U4 is restated. They are listed here only so this page carries the whole change.)

E5 — 2026-07-28 (S045). Register revision authorised by span 4, per register.md's rule.

• N15 — made referent-sensitive, from "mandra, armento → herd" to "mandra, armento → herd of horses and cattle, flock of sheep" (D56). The row was set at D7 when every referent in the story was horses; span 4 moves Jeli to sheep and the same Italian noun follows him. English does not permit a herd of sheep. Spans 1–3 are unaffected — every occurrence in them is equine — so this is a forward revision and no frozen English changes.

(New rows N31–N34, and the scope clauses on V5 and on the reduplication rule, are additions and need no erratum; U5 moves to Settled. Listed here so this page carries the whole change.)

E6 — 2026-07-28 (S047). Register revision authorised by span 5, and it is the first revision made because a row was found to be wrong about the frozen prose rather than because a later span outgrew it.

• V10 — re-scoped, from "kept as reduplication… scope: adverbs of manner and degree only; an adjective of mood predicated of a person is rendered singly" to "kept where the English word is short and doubles idiomatically; rendered singly where it does not" (D71). The row as written at D58 is contradicted by frozen prose it was written over: bianco bianco (¶41, span 2) is an adjective predicated of a face and is doubled — "white, white as a dead man's" — and lesta lesta / lesto lesto (¶36, ¶40) are adjectives and are doubled, while serio serio (¶17, span 1) and quatto quatto (¶34) are not. Six sites, five treatments, one rule describing none of them. No frozen prose changes: every rendering listed stands as written, and mogio mogio → downhearted is unchanged. What changes is the row's stated ground, and the row now carries an explicit flag that its criterion is euphonic and would not replicate for another reader — the defect U4 carries and the one an independent critic found in criterion (iii) at S042.
• N15, N31 — unchanged; noted here only because D82 records that N31 has a feminine (pecoraia) that English will not carry, and the row now says so.

(New rows N35 (soldo), N36 (roba, entered as irreducible) and N37 (ballatojo) are additions and need no erratum; U6 moves to Settled or to not settled by this instrument on the result of E-20260728d, which had not run when this entry was written. Listed here so this page carries the whole change.)

A second finding of the same shape, recorded here because it bears on frozen prose and no erratum repairs it. The two span-1 guillemet sites — ¶5 "He had rained down from the sky…" and ¶6 "where you could reap the malaria," — carry double quotation marks, the mark V8 gives to speech, and not the single inverted commas V7 requires. V7 was created at D20/D21 in span 2 and was never applied backwards; D18 states in writing that the malaria site was given "inverted commas", and the prose does not do it. The prose is not changed — this page is append-only and the divergence is now measured rather than tidied (E-20260728d §2, sites G1/G2 and the variants G1′/G2′). Two rows, V7 and V10, were each written in a late span and never checked against the earlier spans they describe; that is one failure mode, found twice in one session, and it is a property of the instrument rather than of either row.

E7 — 2026-07-28 (S052). D22's second clause is false, and it was tested twice rather than reconsidered.

D22 reads, of the three Class B conditional sites in span 2: "there is nothing to repair with — English has no marked conditional to reach for. Six of nine carried; three of nine flattened with no available alternative."

The first sentence stands. Nothing produced since marks by producing an English conditional. "No available alternative" is false. Under a forced brief, from the Italian alone and with the comparator unopened, all three sites took a marked rendering — saprebbe curarla → even a boy knows how to cure, si sarebbe guarita → sulphate cures it at once, quando fosse rimasto solo → were he left alone — and Dole 1896 marks two of the three, in the same two constructions ("a little quinine cures it quickly", "in case he were left alone in the world"). Every marking works by changing grammatical category: the answer to an Italian conditional is an English tense**, not an English mood, and a translator searching category-for-category will correctly find nothing.

No prose changes. This page is append-only and the three sites stand as translated; what is corrected is the log's stated reason, and the cost the marking would have carried is now measured rather than assumed — hypothetical → assertion, counterfactual → general truth, certainty → supposition. The frozen count "six of nine carried" is unaffected as a description of what this translation did. Full record: RS-20260728j-classb-marking, E-20260728j-classb-marking.

Contamination, span 5 and THE WHOLE WORK (S047) — the highest run of the five spans, and three tokens of it are an artefact of the metric

Run after the span 5 freeze commit 47dc151. tools/dependence_check.py and the S042 cell definitions unchanged; span5_contamination.py displays no Dole prose except the shared run itself (note (abm)). The work is now translated whole, so the whole-work cell exists for the first time.**

The series across five spans is 15 → 14 → 11 → 14 → 18, so span 5 is the highest and the "monotone trend" S042 read across the first three spans is now decisively a description of three spans. Zero shared 12-grams with names excluded at spans 2, 3, 4 and 5; the whole work's single one is a name-adjacent survivor of the primed span-1 opening.

And the 18 is inflated by three tokens, measured rather than suspected. The run is "…so that the poor fellow did not dare lift his nose from his plate | at last so that…" — and the bar is a paragraph boundary: the first thirteen tokens end ¶182 and the last four open ¶183. The frozen metric does not break runs at paragraph breaks, which has been a known defect since S036 and an unscheduled backlog row since. Recomputed paragraph-bounded, the longest run is 15 tokens — for span 5 and for the whole work alike — and the 15-token run is a different string entirely ("believe it because don alfonso and i were always together when we were boys and"). A three-token inflation on the largest figure this work has produced, against the one-token inflation measured at S036; the frozen metric is not changed (E-20260725c-contamination-sweep §4 freezes it), and the diagnostic is reported beside it as that row prescribed.

contamination: suspected stands, unchanged. It is about span 1's declared priming accident and nothing here touches it; Lawrence 1928 remains unreachable, and — noted because it is new information — every one of the thirty panel calls in E-20260728d named this story and several named Lawrence as its translator, which is a fact about the panel and not about this artifact, but it does mean the comparator the project could not obtain is one these models have.

Contamination, span 4 (S045) — measured, and for the first time the run was put to a forcing test

Run after the span 4 freeze commit c6f19d7. tools/dependence_check.py and the S042 cell definitions unchanged; span4_contamination.py displays no Dole prose except the shared run itself.

The monotone trend of spans 1–3 does not continue: 15 → 14 → 11 → 14. Span 3 was the low point, not the start of a slope, and S042's reading — "the trend across three spans is monotone" — is now a description of three spans and not of this work. Zero shared 12-grams once names are excluded, as at spans 2 and 3.

And the run itself was tested rather than declared. The 14-token run is Mara's line — "Mara, no, I haven't forgotten you, but I was so tired after the fireworks" — and it entered E-20260728b-forced-run-ru as locus L9, the one cell in that experiment whose prediction was registered before the number existed. All three panel models, given only the Italian, produced 13, 13 and 14 of the 14 tokens. The run is source-constrained; the pre-registered branch FB3 does not fire; contamination: suspected stands unchanged and is not raised for this span.

What that does not do. It does not clear the artifact — the header's suspected is about span 1's declared priming accident and stays — and it does not bear on Lawrence 1928, still unreachable. Full reading, including the limits: RS-20260728b-forced-run-ru §4.

Contamination, re-measured at the midpoint (S042)

ARM-longwork step 3 required this, because R05 names measure-once as a known limitation and the declaration on this artifact was set at S036 on a span that had been primed by accident. Run after span 3's freeze commit 0793e4b. tools/dependence_check.py as frozen; comparator Dole 1896 (12,865 words); null control 14,718 words of the same translator's other Verga stories in the same volume. No comparator text was displayed at any point — the S036 priming accident is exactly what that precaution exists to prevent.

Span 3 is clean by the project's own criteria — 0 shared 12-grams, longest run 11 tokens against a null floor of 5, and that run is "there were people on foot or on horseback going to vizzini", a near-forced rendering of «c'era gente a piedi o a cavallo che andava a Vizzini» containing a place-name. As a standalone unit it would be declared contamination: none.

Almost all of the apparent dependence is names. Span 1's ten shared 12-grams fall to one and span 2's nine to zero once name tokens are excluded; span 2's longest run is "who he was i am mara the daughter of massaro agrippino who is the", a name string in a fixed frame. Third work on which this shape has been measured, after Sōseki (RS-20260727c §8) and the Ovid cells.

The header's contamination: suspected stands and its scope is now known. The declaration is about the artifact, and span 1's primed region is part of the artifact. But the trend across three spans is monotone — 15 → 14 → 11 tokens, 10 → 9 → 0 shared 12-grams — and the drop within the two unprimed spans is as large as the primed-to-unprimed step, so RS-20260727-longwork-selection's figures describe one span of three rather than the work. Full reading: RS-20260727d-criterion-widening §5.

Lawrence 1928 is still unreachable, and the search was repeated this session rather than assumed: the freely available scan is Little Novels of Sicily (1925), Lawrence's Novelle rusticane, a different collection that does not contain «Jeli». Recorded so a later session does not repeat it blind.