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

T-la-nuit-R04-v1 — Guy de Maupassant, «La Nuit (cauchemar)» (1887), French → English

The translation limb of ARM-framework-v01 step 3 (T5). The whole story, 38 paragraphs, 1,873 French words, translated close from the source alone under R04. The single-pass draft was written first, committed as T-la-nuit-R06-v1 at effc944, and only then revised; this file is the revised text and the frozen log.

French → English is a pair framework/v0.1 declares untested (§7). That is why this text was chosen: the release's registered prediction 1 is about fresh Class A sites in a new pair, and the project had never translated French narrative prose into English under an experiment.

Source

Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893), «La Nuit (cauchemar)». First printed in Gil Blas, 14 June 1887; collected in Clair de lune from the Ollendorff augmented edition. Public domain.

Copy-text: French Wikisource, Clair de lune (recueil, 1905)/La Nuit, fetched 2026-08-04 through the MediaWiki action=parse API, which serves the page as transcluded from the proofread Page: layer of Maupassant — Clair de lune, 1905.djvu (Ollendorff, Œuvres complètes vol. 15, pp. 277–291). Stored as ../source-fr.txt with paragraph indices [1]–[38] added, SHA-256 a2f61e673f816a57c0588963f1ca2a23fbea98cabf82add4d29438e9fbb0edaf.

The copy-text is a posthumous reprint, and after S100 that is not something to pass over. It was therefore collated word-for-word against two independent online transcriptions before the revision was made. Four substantive variants and one copy-text error; the full record, the diff script and the emendation decisions are in ../collation.md. Two bear on the English:

• ¶10 ou → où. The copy-text prints «les Champs-Élysées ou les cafés-concerts semblaient…», which is not construable; one witness reads où. Emended, and the translation reads "where".
• ¶30 Je sommai / Je sonnai. Two witnesses read sommai ("I summoned"), one reads sonnai ("I rang"). The copy-text reading is kept and the variant is declared; see D26.

No published English translation of this story was reachable. Searches recorded in ../collation.md §4: Project Gutenberg's thirteen-volume Original Short Stories and six further English Maupassant volumes carry no rendering of it (checked by grepping the stored files for the story's fixed proper nouns), English Wikisource's Maupassant collection does not index it, and archive.org's full-text search is unreachable from this environment. The contamination gate could therefore not be run, and this is stated rather than passed over, per CLAUDE.md.

Contamination: suspected, unmeasured. Basis: Maupassant is among the most translated authors in French and English renderings of this story exist in print, so one may sit in the lead's training data; no comparator was reachable, so the measurement is unavailable rather than clean, and the declaration is a placeholder of exactly the kind CLAUDE.md warns can hide either end of the range. Note (bhb) cuts toward caution in the other direction and is recorded here for whatever uses this text next: the lead matches itself at up to 37 contiguous tokens across sessions.

Senses in play

accuracy, style-correspondence, voice, naturalness, cultural-mediation. The two that collided most often are style-correspondence and naturalness: Maupassant's sentences are paratactic to the point of listing, and English resists the bare comma-chain longer than French does.

The Night: a nightmare

[1] I love the night with a passion. I love it the way one loves one's country or one's mistress, with an instinctive, deep, unconquerable love. I love it with all my senses: with my eyes, which see it; with my sense of smell, which breathes it in; with my ears, which listen to its silence; with the whole of my flesh, which the darkness caresses. Larks sing in the sun, in the blue air, in the warm air, in the light air of clear mornings. The owl flees through the night, a black stain crossing black space, and, made glad, made drunk by the black immensity, it lets out its vibrating, sinister cry.

[2] Daylight tires me and bores me. It is brutal and loud. I get up with difficulty, I dress with weariness, I go out with regret, and every step, every movement, every gesture, every word, every thought tires me as if I were lifting a crushing burden.

[3] But when the sun goes down, a confused joy, a joy of my whole body, floods me. I wake, I quicken. As the shadow grows I feel myself quite another man, younger, stronger, more alert, happier. I watch it thicken, the great soft shadow fallen from the sky: it drowns the city like a wave, ungraspable and impenetrable; it hides, erases, destroys colours and shapes, grips houses, living things, monuments in its imperceptible touch.

[4] Then I want to cry out with pleasure like the owls, to run over the roofs like the cats; and an impetuous, an unconquerable desire to love lights up in my veins.

[5] I go, I walk, now through the darkened outskirts, now through the woods near Paris, where I hear my sisters the beasts and my brothers the poachers prowling.

[6] What one loves violently always ends by killing you. But how am I to explain what is happening to me? How even to make it understood that I am able to tell it at all? I do not know, I no longer know, I know only that it is. — There.

[7] So yesterday — was it yesterday? — yes, surely, unless it was earlier, another day, another month, another year — I do not know. It must be yesterday, though, since the day has not risen again, since the sun has not come back. But how long has the night been going on? How long?… Who will say? who will ever know?

[8] So yesterday I went out, as I do every evening, after my dinner. It was very fine, very mild, very warm. Going down toward the boulevards, I looked up over my head at the black river full of stars cut out of the sky by the roofs of the street, which curved and set undulating, like a real river, that brook rolling with stars.

[9] Everything was clear in the light air, from the planets down to the gas jets. So many fires were shining up there and in the city that the darkness seemed luminous with them. Shining nights are more joyful than great days of sun.

[10] On the boulevard the cafés were blazing; people laughed, people passed, people drank. I went into a theatre for a few moments — which theatre? I no longer know. It was so bright in there that it saddened me, and I came out again with my heart a little darkened by that shock of brutal light on the gilding of the balcony, by the artificial glitter of the enormous crystal chandelier, by the barrier of fire at the footlights, by the melancholy of that false, raw brightness. I made my way to the Champs-Élysées, where the café-concerts looked like the seats of a blaze among the leaves. The chestnut trees, rubbed with yellow light, had the air of painted things, the air of phosphorescent trees. And the electric globes, like brilliant pale moons, like moon-eggs fallen from the sky, like monstrous living pearls, made the threads of gas — of ugly dirty gas — and the garlands of coloured glass turn pale beneath their pearly, mysterious, royal brightness.

[11] I stopped under the Arc de Triomphe to look at the avenue, the long and admirable starred avenue going toward Paris between two lines of fire, and the stars! The stars up there, the unknown stars flung at random into the immensity where they trace those strange figures that set one dreaming so, that set one musing so.

[12] I went into the Bois de Boulogne and stayed there a long time, a long time. A strange shudder had seized me, an unforeseen and powerful emotion, an exaltation of my thought that verged on madness.

[13] I walked a long time, a long time. Then I came back.

[14] What time was it when I passed under the Arc de Triomphe again? I do not know. The city was falling asleep, and clouds, great black clouds, were spreading slowly over the sky.

[15] For the first time I felt that something strange, something new, was going to happen. It seemed to me that it had turned cold, that the air was thickening, that the night, that my beloved night, was growing heavy on my heart. The avenue was deserted now. Two policemen alone were strolling by the cab stand, and on the roadway, barely lit by gas jets that looked to be dying, a line of vegetable carts was going to the Halles. They went slowly, loaded with carrots, with turnips and with cabbages. The drivers slept, invisible; the horses walked at an even pace, following the cart in front, without a sound, over the wooden paving. In front of each light on the pavement the carrots lit up red, the turnips lit up white, the cabbages lit up green; and they passed one behind another, those carts, red with a red of fire, white with a white of silver, green with a green of emerald. I followed them, then turned along the rue Royale and came back to the boulevards. Nobody now, no more lit cafés, only a few stragglers hurrying. I had never seen Paris so dead, so deserted. I drew out my watch: it was two o'clock.

[16] A force was driving me on, a need to walk. So I went as far as the Bastille. There I realised that I had never seen a night so dark, for I could not even make out the July Column, whose golden Genius was lost in the impenetrable obscurity. A vault of cloud, thick as immensity itself, had drowned the stars and seemed to be sinking down onto the earth to annihilate it.

[17] I came back. There was no one left around me. In the place du Château-d'Eau, though, a drunk nearly ran into me, then he vanished. For a while I heard his uneven, ringing step. I walked on. Level with the faubourg Montmartre a cab passed, going down toward the Seine. I called to it. The driver did not answer. A woman was prowling near the rue Drouot: "Monsieur, do listen." I quickened my step to avoid her outstretched hand. Then nothing more. In front of the Vaudeville a ragpicker was raking the gutter. His little lantern floated at ground level. I asked him: "What time is it, my good man?"

[18] He growled: "How should I know! I ain't got a watch."

[19] Then all at once I realised that the gas jets were out. I know they are put out early, before daylight, at this season, to save money; but the day was still far off, so far from appearing!

[20] "Let's go to the Halles," I thought; "there at least I shall find life."

[21] I set off, but I could not even see well enough to guide myself. I went forward slowly, the way one does in a wood, recognising the streets by counting them.

[22] In front of the Crédit Lyonnais a dog growled. I turned along the rue de Grammont, I lost my way; I wandered, then I recognised the Bourse by the iron railings that go round it. The whole of Paris was sleeping, a deep and frightening sleep. Far off, though, a cab was rolling, a single cab, the one perhaps that had passed me a while before. I was trying to reach it, going toward the sound of its wheels, through the solitary streets, black, black, black as death.

[23] I lost my way again. Where was I? What madness, to put the gas out so soon! Not a passer-by, not a straggler, not a prowler, not a mew from an amorous cat. Nothing.

[24] Where were the policemen, then? I said to myself: "I shall shout, and they will come." I shouted. No one answered.

[25] I called louder. My voice flew off, without an echo, weak, smothered, crushed by the night, by that impenetrable night.

[26] I screamed: "Help! help! help!"

[27] My desperate call went unanswered. What time was it, then? I drew out my watch, but I had no matches. I listened to the light tick-tock of the little mechanism with a strange, unfamiliar joy. It seemed to be alive. I was less alone. What a mystery! I set off again like a blind man, feeling the walls with my cane, and every moment I raised my eyes toward the sky, hoping the day would appear at last; but space was black, all black, more deeply black than the city.

[28] What time could it be? I had been walking, it seemed to me, for an infinity of time, for my legs were giving way under me, my chest was heaving, and I was horribly hungry.

[29] I made up my mind to ring at the first carriage door. I pulled the brass knob, and the bell rang out in the echoing house; it rang strangely, as if that vibrating noise had been alone in the house.

[30] I waited; no one answered, no one opened the door. I summoned again; I waited again — nothing!

[31] I was afraid! I ran to the next house, and twenty times over I made the bell sound in the dark passage where the concierge must have been sleeping. But he did not wake — and I went further on, pulling with all my strength at the rings or the knobs, striking with my feet, my cane and my hands at the obstinately closed doors.

[32] And all at once I realised that I was reaching the Halles. The Halles were deserted, without a sound, without a movement, without a cart, without a man, without a bunch of vegetables or flowers. — They were empty, motionless, abandoned, dead!

[33] A terror seized me — a horrible one. What was happening? Oh! my God! what was happening?

[34] I set off again. But the time? the time? who would tell me the time? Not one clock was striking in the belfries or in the public buildings. I thought: "I shall open the glass of my watch and feel the hand with my fingers." I drew out my watch… it was no longer beating… it had stopped. Nothing left, nothing left, not a shiver in the city, not a glimmer, not a brush of sound in the air. Nothing! nothing left! not even the distant rolling of the cab — nothing!

[35] I was on the quays, and an icy coolness was rising from the river.

[36] Was the Seine still flowing?

[37] I wanted to know; I found the steps, I went down… I could not hear the current boiling under the arches of the bridge… More steps… then sand… then mud… then water… I dipped my arm in it… it was flowing… it was flowing… cold… cold… cold… almost frozen… almost dried up… almost dead.

[38] And I felt clearly that I would never again have the strength to climb back up… and that I was going to die there… I too, of hunger — of weariness — and of cold.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-04, before any evaluation of this translation was designed (charter §3, A4; R04 §Procedure 3). Decisions and alternatives; not quality claims. The front matter carries internal-judgment-only, which covers the few sentences here that shade evaluative.

Thirty-one decisions, D1–D31. Where a source marking is not carried into the English, the row says so in the ordinary way; nothing here is written to any classification scheme.

D1 — ¶1 «mon odorat qui la respire». Odorat is the faculty, not the organ. The draft had "my nose", which localises what Maupassant keeps abstract; the whole list is faculties (mes yeux, mes oreilles, ma chair). Revised to "my sense of smell, which breathes it in", accepting that four English words replace one French one and that the sentence's list rhythm suffers for it.

D2 — ¶1 «réjoui, grisé par la noire immensité». Grisé is "made tipsy". "Made glad, made drunk" keeps the participial pair and the escalation. Rejected: "delighted and intoxicated", which is two Latinate words where the French has one plain and one physical.

D3 — ¶1 «tache noire qui passe à travers l'espace noir». Kept the triple noir — black stain, black space, black immensity — rather than varying it. English prose style pressure is toward variation; Maupassant's paragraph is built on the repetition and it is the first announcement of the story's method.

D4 — ¶2 «un écrasant fardeau». Draft had "a crushing weight"; fardeau is a burden one carries, not a weight one lifts, and the verb is soulever. Revised to "a crushing burden".

D5 — ¶3 «Je la regarde s'épaissir la grande ombre douce». A right dislocation: the pronoun comes first and the noun phrase is added after, which in French is ordinary spoken syntax used here inside a literary period. English tolerates the same shape — "I watch it thicken, the great soft shadow" — and it was kept. This is one of the few French syntactic effects in the story that English can take directly.

D6 — ¶6 «Ce qu'on aime avec violence finit toujours par vous tuer». The sentence changes person mid-clause: on as subject, vous as object, because on has no object form. English has the same gap in a different place — "one" as object is stiff, "you" is not. I reproduced the switch: "What one loves violently always ends by killing you." Alternative rejected: "…ends by killing one", which is smoother and flattens an anacoluthon that is doing work — the sentence turns on the reader at exactly the moment it names the killing.

D7 — ¶6 «que je puisse le raconter». The subjunctive marks the ability as doubted rather than asserted; the indicative que je peux would have been available to Maupassant and is not what he wrote. English has no mood contrast to reach for here. The marking was carried lexically instead, by "at all": "that I am able to tell it at all." That is an addition of a word with no source counterpart, and it is a compensation in a different category — an adverbial for a mood.

D8 — ¶7 «à moins que ce ne soit auparavant». The ne here is expletive: it negates nothing, it is a grammatical trace of the clause's negative orientation, obligatory in careful French after à moins que and impossible to hear as negation. English has no expletive negator and no category of any kind that corresponds to it; nothing was carried and no compensation was attempted. "Unless it was earlier" is the whole of what survives. I record this as a complete loss because it is one: the reader of the English cannot know that the French sentence leans, grammatically, toward the thing it is denying.

D9 — ¶7 «depuis quand la nuit dure-t-elle ?» Draft: "how long has the night been lasting?" — a progressive English resists on last. Revised to "how long has the night been going on?".

D10 — ¶7 «Qui le dira ? qui le saura jamais ?» Simple future twice, where English idiom pulls toward the modal ("who can say?"). Kept the future — "Who will say? who will ever know?" — because the story is about a night that has not ended, and the future tense is the one that keeps it open.

D11 — ¶8 «la rue qui tournait et faisait onduler comme une vraie rivière ce ruisseau roulant des astres». The draft's word order made the object unrecoverable. Revised by moving the simile forward: "which curved and set undulating, like a real river, that brook rolling with stars." Ruisseau is a brook, and the diminution against fleuve two clauses earlier is the point of the image.

D12 — ¶10 «on riait, on passait, on buvait». Three clauses whose subject is on: a subject slot filled by a form that names nobody. The alternatives in English are all worse than the problem. "People laughed, people passed, people drank" supplies a plural human subject the French withholds; "there was laughing, passing, drinking" turns three finite verbs into nouns and loses the boulevard's motion; the passive is not available for intransitives. I took the first. English has no impersonal personal pronoun and the grammatical anonymity is not carried — the English reader sees a crowd, where the French reader is given verbs with nobody in them.

D13 — ¶10 «des foyers d'incendie dans les feuillages». Foyer d'incendie is the seat of a fire, the place it starts from. Draft had "seats of a fire"; revised to "the seats of a blaze among the leaves".

D14 — ¶11 «ces figures bizarres, qui font tant rêver, qui font tant songer». Faire rêver with no expressed experiencer: French can leave the object of the causative unsaid. English cannot — "which make dream" is ungrammatical — so somebody must be inserted. The missing experiencer was supplied as "one": "that set one dreaming so, that set one musing so." A generic pronoun for a zero. Rêver and songer are near-synonyms and the pair is doing rhythm, not sense; "dreaming"/"musing" keeps the doubling.

D15 — ¶15 «les carottes s'éclairaient en rouge». The pronominal middle. Elles s'éclairaient is neither "they were lit" — which imports the lamp as an agent and makes the vegetables patients — nor "they lit up" in the English inchoative sense, which makes them agents of their own lighting. French holds the position open between the two. English has no middle voice and the distinction cannot be carried; I wrote "the carrots lit up red" and the choice imports agency the French does not assert. This is the loss I minded most in the passage, because the three colours are the one moment of beauty before the city dies.

D16 — ¶15 «Seuls, deux sergents de ville se promenaient». Sergent de ville is period-specific — the municipal constable of the Second Empire and after. "Policemen" flattens it; "constables" would Anglicise the Paris street. Took "policemen" and accepted the loss of period, on the ground that the story's realia elsewhere (Halles, Vaudeville, Crédit Lyonnais) are left in French and carry the period by themselves.

D17 — ¶15 «une file de voitures de légumes allait aux Halles». Left les Halles untranslated. "The central markets" explains and kills; the name is the destination of the whole night.

D18 — ¶17 «J'allais.» One word, one sentence, imperfect. The imperfect makes it durative and unbounded — the walking was going on, with no edge to it — and it sits alone between two passés simples precisely to slow the paragraph. English simple past "I walked on" has no aspectual marking at all; "I was walking" is a progressive that reads as background to something else and needs a clause after it to be idiomatic. The aspect is not carried; I wrote "I walked on" and the sentence's whole function, which was to stop the narrative moving, is gone.

D19 — ¶19 «Je sais qu'on les supprime de bonne heure». On again, this time institutional: the gas company, the city, somebody. English took the passive, "I know they are put out early", which deletes the agent altogether rather than leaving an anonymous one standing there. Recorded as the same loss as D12 in a different clause type — the passive is the nearest English construction and it does not have a subject at all, where the French has one that means nobody.

D20 — ¶21 «comme on fait dans un bois». Here on is generic rather than anonymous and "the way one does in a wood" is an exact match. Recorded because it is the counter-example to D12 and D19: the same French pronoun, three uses, and only this one transcodes.

D21 — ¶22 «Je cherchais à le joindre». The imperfect of an attempt carries the failure: in French, je cherchais à leaves the reaching unachieved without saying so. English "I was trying to reach it" does the same work with the progressive, which is one of the few places English aspect is richer. Carried, no loss.

D22 — ¶22 «noires, noires, noires comme la mort». Three feminine plurals agreeing with les rues, then la mort. The agreement chain is audible in French and inaudible in English; what survives is the repetition, which is most of the effect. Kept "black, black, black as death".

D23 — ¶27 «Elle semblait vivre. J'étais moins seul.» La montre, la petite mécanique — feminine, so the pronoun is elle, and the sentence that follows says he was less alone. In French the watch that keeps him company is a she by the automatic operation of the gender system, not by any choice Maupassant made. English has no grammatical gender; "It seemed to be alive" is the only unmarked rendering, and the companionship the next sentence claims arrives with nothing to attach to. Nothing was carried. "She seemed to be alive" was live and was rejected: English she for an object is a marked authorial choice, and would assert what French merely permits.

D24 — ¶28 «Je marchais, me semblait-il, depuis un temps infini». Inverted parenthetical. The inversion is a register marker — written French, never spoken — and it hedges the claim at the same time. English "it seemed to me" hedges but is register-neutral, available to anybody. The hedging is carried and the register is not; there is no English parenthetical whose word order marks it as literary.

D25 — ¶29 «comme si ce bruit vibrant eût été seul dans cette maison». Pluperfect subjunctive, a form that by 1887 survived only in written French and marks the sentence as literary at the same time as it marks the clause as counterfactual. English has the counterfactual — "as if it had been" — and has no mood or tense that carries the register; that half of the marking is lost and I attempted no compensation for it, because every device that would raise the register in English (inversion, archaic lexis) would raise it in a place Maupassant left plain.

D26 — ¶30 «Je sommai de nouveau». The copy-text crux (see ../collation.md §3). Sommer used absolutely is odd French — it is the verb for a formal demand, a summons served — and one witness has the ordinary sonnai, "I rang". I kept the copy-text and rendered it oddly on purpose: "I summoned again." A reader who finds that strange is having the experience a reader of the 1905 text has.

D27 — ¶30 «on ne répondit pas, on n'ouvrit point la porte». The third and strongest on. Here the pronoun posits somebody: there is a household behind the door, and it is they who did not answer. "No one answered, no one opened the door" asserts that nobody was there, which is the opposite claim and is the one the story spends the next four paragraphs disproving. English has no way to keep a subject that is a person and no person at once; the loss is total, and it is the site in this translation where the grammar and the plot are the same thing.

D28 — ¶31 «J'eus peur !» and ¶37 «Je voulus savoir». The passé simple of a stative verb is inchoative: j'eus peur is fear arriving, je voulus savoir is the will forming at that instant, and neither is the state that j'avais peur / je voulais would name. English simple past is aspectually neutral, so "I was afraid" and "I wanted to know" both read as states. The inchoative reading is not carried at either site. "Fear took me" and "I determined to know" were both live and both rejected: the first competes with ¶33's «Une épouvante me saisit», which is the sentence that actually has a verb of seizing in it, and the second is a register the narrator does not use anywhere else.

D29 — ¶34 «elle ne battait plus… elle était arrêtée». Battre of a watch is the same verb as of a heart, and the paragraph before has the narrator taking comfort from it. "It was no longer beating" keeps the verb; the elle is gone for the reason given at D23.

D30 — ¶37 «presque gelée… presque tarie… presque morte». Feminine agreements on the Seine, and morte in final position; then ¶38's moi aussi, which makes the narrator's death the second of two. The chain of feminine endings is not reproducible; the sequence and the final placement are, and the "I too" was kept in that position — "I too, of hunger — of weariness — and of cold" — so that the English still has two deaths in the order the French puts them.

D31 — ¶38 «je sentais bien». Bien here is a modal particle, not an adverb of manner: it marks the knowledge as unwelcome and undeniable. English "clearly" is the nearest and is an adverb of manner doing a particle's job. Kept "I felt clearly", having rejected "I could feel perfectly well", which is conversational in a sentence that has no conversation left in it.

Draft-to-revision delta

Nineteen sites changed between R06-v1 and this text; the substantive ones are D1, D4, D9, D11, D12, D13, D18, D26 and the ¶10 emendation. The rest are punctuation and comma-splice repairs where the draft had carried a French comma-chain into English unbroken.

What this log is not

Process self-report. It records what I noticed deciding; decisions made without noticing do not appear, and nothing here is evidence that any of these choices was a good one (R04 §Known limitations).