Repository path: workshop/translations/malavoglia-i/R22-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-malavoglia-i-R22-v1 — Verga, «I Malavoglia», opening of Chapter I, under placeless low

Source. As T-malavoglia-i-R06-v1 and -R21-v1: I Malavoglia (1881), Capitolo Primo, opening through «chi comanda ha da dar conto», same copy-text file (workshop/experiments/E-20260808e-low-pole/arms/source_it.txt).

Regime. R22 — placeless low, frozen this session. Eight numbered rules, cited by number below. W5 removes every locatable means from the low pole; W6 forbids adding anything the source does not have; W3 is numerical.

Token count: 595 English against 595 Italian. Ratio 1.000. W3 holds.

The counting rule, stated because R21's page did not state its own: whitespace-separated tokens containing a word character, after replacing — « » – with spaces. Under this rule the Italian span is 595 and T-malavoglia-i-R21-v1 is 603; that artifact's page reports 609 and 607 under a tokenizer it does not name. The discrepancy is recorded here and not chased — it changes no published figure and the subject rule (continue-prompt.md §4.5) puts it in a limits line, not in an arm. All three counts in this file use the rule above.

No return pass was needed for content. The first draft came out at 610; fifteen tokens were cut in a second pass whose every cut is named in §W3 below. Nothing propositional was lost by any of them.

Contamination: high, and one rule was broken to get here

This artifact was written after the lead had seen Mary A. Craig's 1890 English at all seventeen of this cell's census sites. Those strings sit in runs/voted_sites.json as the pub field, and the lead read them while orienting in the prior session's data, before deciding to translate. continue-prompt.md §5.2 — never prime a workshop translation with a stored published rendering of the same source — was therefore violated, not by design but by reading order, and it is recorded as a violation rather than as a caveat.

The priming ran in both directions and both are declared:

• Toward Craig, unquantified until the dependence check below.
• Away from Craig, deliberately: four of Craig's renderings were in mind while writing and were avoided — his grandfather all over (IT-08), neither fish nor flesh (IT-09), Without a pilot the boat won't go (IT-15), He who has the management of a house cannot sleep when he likes (IT-14). Steering away from a remembered rendering is contamination too, and at IT-09 it plainly cost the better English.

Consequence, fixed here and not revisited after any measurement: R22 is a labelled exhibit and never a licensed arm. No claim about what English can or cannot reach is read off this artifact. The licensed test of the same question is LOW-P in E-20260808f, written by a non-panel model from the source sites alone, which has seen no published English and does not know the hypothesis. R22's job is the log — what a translator has to give up to stay placeless — and a log is not a score.

(Second, smaller basis, as for R21: «I Malavoglia» is canonical and English renderings of it are plausibly in the lead's training data.)

The measurement, run immediately after the draft was fixed and before the design existed

tools/dependence_check.py (CLAUDE.md, measure before choosing: a contamination: declaration without a measurement is a placeholder that can hide either end of the range):

The declared priming does not show up as measurable overlap with Craig — 9 sevens, no twelves, longest run 8 tokens, below every threshold the project uses. The declaration stands as declared (the rule was broken and the record says so), but the quantity it was feared to hide is measured and is small. This is the third time the project has found that a contamination: label and a measurement point different ways, and the rule that survives is the one already written: report the number, not the fear.

Two things follow that the design must obey.

1. R22 and R21 are one translator's two passes, not two renderings. 43 contiguous identical tokens — the parish book had them down as Toscano … now the only — which is above note (bhb)'s standing figure of 37 for the lead against itself, and the new high-water mark. The V~W contrast is therefore a single-variable within-translator manipulation, which is what it is for, and is never read as two hands.
2. Nothing about English's reach may be read off R22 at all, per the consequence fixed above. LOW-P carries that.

Freeze. This file, including the log, was committed before E-20260808f/design.md existed.

Translation

Once there were Malavoglia thick as stones on the old Trezza road; some at Ognina and Aci Castello too, all of them good sea folk, just the opposite of what the name says, as it should be. The parish book had them down as Toscano, but that meant nothing, because since forever, at Ognina and Trezza and Aci Castello, they'd been the Malavoglia, father to son, always with boats in the water and tiles in the sun. Now the only Malavoglia left in Trezza were skipper 'Ntoni's, the medlar-tree house ones, with the Provvidenza tied up on the stones under the wash-house, next to Cola's Concetta and skipper Fortunato Cipolla's boat.

The storms that blew the other Malavoglia this way and that went over the medlar-tree house and the boat under the wash-house without doing much. Skipper 'Ntoni, to explain it, would hold up his shut fist — a fist that looked made of walnut wood — and say: there's no rowing unless the five fingers help each other.

He'd say too: people are made like the fingers on a hand. The thumb has to do the thumb's work and the little finger the little finger's.

And skipper 'Ntoni's people really were set out like fingers on a hand. Him first, the thumb, who called the feast days and the forty-hour prayers; then his son Bastiano, Bastianazzo, because he was as big and heavy as the St Christopher painted under the town fish-market arch; and big as he was he jumped to whatever he was told, and wouldn't have blown his nose if his father hadn't said blow your nose, so he married the Longa when they said marry her. Then the Longa, a small thing who kept to weaving, salting anchovies and having kids, a good housekeeper. Then the grandchildren by age: 'Ntoni the oldest, twenty and a loafer, still getting a smack on the head from his grandfather now and then, and a kick lower down to even things up when the smack had been too hard; Luca, who has more sense than the big one, the grandfather kept saying; Mena — Filomena — called Saint Agatha because she was always at the loom, and they say woman at the loom, hen in the coop, mullet in January; Alessi, a snot-nosed kid, the spitting image of his grandfather, that one; and Lia, still neither one thing nor the other. Sundays, going into church one behind the other, they looked like a procession.

Skipper 'Ntoni also had sayings and proverbs he'd heard from the old people, because the old people's saying never lied: without a pilot no boat goes. To play pope you must know how to play sexton. Or: do the work you know; you won't get rich but you'll eat. Or: settle for what your father made you; at least you won't turn out a crook. And other sensible sayings.

That's why the medlar-tree house did well, and skipper 'Ntoni was taken for a man with a good head, so much so Trezza would have made him a councillor, only Silvestro the clerk, who was nobody's fool, went round saying he was a rotten old throwback, one of those that stick up for the Bourbons, plotting to bring Franceschello back so he could throw his weight around the village the way he threw it around at home.

Skipper 'Ntoni had never even set eyes on Franceschello, and he minded his own business, and he'd say: a man with a house on him can't sleep when he wants, because whoever gives orders has to answer for it.

Translator's log

Frozen with the draft, before E-20260808f existed. Coverage codes per R22 §Procedure: P predicted by the rule set · D deviation with reason · INT decided by interpretation · L a loss the rule set caused.

1. The thing the constraint made visible, before any measurement

R21's log claimed that going low in English is dialect-shaped, not merely register-shaped, and marked the claim INT because the rule set could not settle it. R22 was built to settle it by subtraction, and what subtraction turns up is narrower and more specific than the claim:

The placeless low idioms of English exist, and there are not many of them, and almost all of them are dead. Nobody's fool, the spitting image of, stick up for, throw his weight around, minded his own business, get by, set eyes on, thick as: every one of these is available in Auckland and in Ohio, and every one of them is a worn coin. The live ones are the located ones. A wrong 'un, dead spit, a waster, off his grandad, when he fancies it still sound like somebody talking; their placeless equivalents sound like writing that is trying not to be noticed.

So the honest form of the R21 claim is not English has no low register without a dialect. It is: English has a placeless low register, and it is a register of worn idiom and short words — it can be plain but it cannot be fresh. A translator who refuses to relocate the book is not left with nothing; he is left with the flattest half of the shelf, and freshness is the thing he pays with. internal-judgment-only, and E-20260808f's LOW-P arm is where a hand that does not know this sentence gets asked the same question.

2. What W5 actually cost, site by site

Every site where a locatable option was live and was rejected. The rejected option is R21's own choice at that site wherever R21 had one, which makes the pair readable as a single-variable contrast.

P throughout: W5 predicts every one of these. Nine of the ten replacements are flatter than what they replaced, and the tenth is flatter and more accurate. That is the finding of §1 in its evidence form.

The one site where the constraint bought something. IT — da buona massaia. R21's V5 reached for a domestic idiom and produced a good sort, which praises the person and drops the role; R21 logged that as its loss L1. W5 forbids the idiom, so W3's pressure had to be met elsewhere and the site came out a good housekeeper — flatter, and the role is back. A rule that removes the translator's best moves also removes his temptations, and this is the one site in the passage where that mattered. P, and worth the note.

3. W6, the addition rule, and what it caught

RS-20260808e §6.2 measured a low-instructed model arm supplying an element the source lacks at 13 of 41 sites. W6 forbids it. Three places where the draft wanted to supply and did not:

• there's no rowing unless the five fingers help each other — the draft first had help each other out, and out is an emphatic the Italian does not have. Cut. P.
• a rotten old throwback — rotten old renders marcio; the draft briefly had rotten old nothing but a, which is supply. Cut. P.
• and other sensible sayings — the draft had and plenty more sensible sayings; plenty is not in ed altre. Cut. P.

W6 is cheap to obey for a human translator and it was expensive for the model arm. That asymmetry is worth a measurement and is one of E-20260808f's questions.

4. W3 — the fifteen cuts

Draft 610 → 595, all in one pass, none propositional: as many … as → thick as; the way it's supposed to be → as it should be; the ones from the medlar-tree house → the medlar-tree house ones; made out of walnut wood → made of walnut wood; like the fingers on a hand → like fingers on a hand (second instance only); the fish-market arch in town → the town fish-market arch; so that he married → so he married; he'd heard off → he'd heard from (this one is W5, not W3); a boat without a pilot doesn't go → without a pilot no boat goes; you have to know → you must know; you'll get by → you'll eat; be happy with what your father made you → settle for what your father made you; so much so that Trezza → so much so Trezza; a man with a house on him can't sleep when he wants to → …when he wants; whoever gives the orders → whoever gives orders.

One of these is a W1 cost and is not hidden: you must know how to play sexton is a shade above you have to know, and it is there because W3 is numerical and W1 is not. Where two rules pull, R22 has no priority order, which is a gap in the rule set. D.

5. INT — the judgement the rule set does not settle

W5's operational test is mine to apply and I applied it alone. Thick as, nobody's fool, the spitting image of, stick up for, throw his weight around, snot-nosed, loafer, crook, get by are all called placeless here. I am reasonably confident of most and not of snot-nosed (which may read American) or thick as in this construction (which may read British). An independent locatability audit of every arm is a stage of E-20260808f precisely because this paragraph is a judgement by the party with a hypothesis. INT.

6. Losses the rule set caused

• L1 — the register itself, at ten sites, §2. This is not a defect of the execution; it is what R22 was built to measure.
• L2 — la paranza → boat. The two-boat pair-trawling rig is lost as a fact about the vessel. As R21, as R06.
• L3 — the doubled reazionario, absorbed into throwback rather than said twice. As R21.
• L4 — the mullet proverb's rhyme. Not repairable in any regime so far.
• L5 — every trace of Sicily, by W2. As R21, and the thing Berman is complaining about.
• L6 — the proverbs are not English proverbs. R21 logged this as its gap between V5 as written and what V5 can get. Under W5 the gap is wider and cleaner: without a pilot no boat goes is not an English proverb and is not trying to be one; it is the Italian proverb said plainly in English. W5 turns R21's « pseudo-argot » problem into an honest calque, which may be the better answer and is certainly the flatter one. INT.