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

T-mare-au-diable-R04-v1 — from George Sand, La Mare au Diable, ch. II «Le labour»

Regime. R04-lead-close: one drafting pass and one self-revision against the French. No English rendering of this work was opened, in any form, before this file and its log were committed. Two published English translations were downloaded to a scratch directory before translating (so that the contamination measurement could run immediately afterwards) and were not read; the measurement in §Contamination is the check on that claim, and it is a check the claim could have failed.

Source. George Sand, La Mare au Diable (1846), chapter II, «Le labour». Public domain (Sand d. 1876). Text: Project Gutenberg eBook #23582 (French), produced by Daniel Fromont. The excerpt as given to the translator is source-fr.txt in this directory — three paragraphs, 542 whitespace-delimited tokens, running from «Mes pensées avaient pris ce cours…» to «…ses huit animaux quasi indomptés.»

On that count. 542 is the figure python3 -c "len(open(f).read().split())" and awk '{n+=NF}END{print n}' both return. wc -w (GNU coreutils 9.4) returns 533 on the same file in this container and is wrong: under LC_CTYPE=POSIX it undercounts across non-ASCII characters — printf 'b\xc5\x93ufs tranquilles, \xc3\xa0 la robe' gives wc -w 4 against the correct 5. Recorded because wc -w is the count this project has reached for by habit and it is not safe on non-ASCII text (method note abl).

Pair. French → English. This is the project's first FR→EN translation and its first lead translation in either direction on the French pair; A-baudelaire-chat-noir runs EN→FR, and its style-correspondence finding was partly retracted in RS-20260725-anchor-verification. Structurally near, culturally near — the same cell of TH-20260724-translation-distance-axes as the Baudelaire anchor, entered from the other side.

Declared purpose (purpose-fit, and it re-weights everything below). A general reading edition in modern literary English: unmarked for period, not modernised into contemporary colloquial, and not archaised. Neither of the two documented naturalness poles (A-mansfield-garden-party, period-idiomatic 1922; A-doctorow-little-brother, contemporary-vernacular 2008) is the target register here — see §Log decision 1, which is a decision the project's anchor shelf could not settle.

Contamination: none, and measured rather than declared. Longest common run against both freely available published English translations — Ellery Sedgwick (Gutenberg #21993) and George Burnham Ives (Gutenberg #12816) — computed after this file's text and log were written, per the standing rule of ARM-overlap-dependence (method note bcd). Result and method: RS-20260726e-framework-coverage.md §2. Sand is not Turgenev: no English Mare au Diable is canonical, three competing versions sit on Gutenberg, and the measured runs are at the low end of the project's range.

The translation

My thoughts had taken this turn, and I did not notice that my confidence in the educability of man was being strengthened in me by influences from without. I was walking along the edge of a field that some peasants were preparing for the coming sowing. The arena was as broad as the one in Holbein's picture. The landscape was broad too, framing with great lines of greenery — a little reddened as autumn came on — that wide stretch of strong brown earth, where recent rains had left, in a few of the furrows, lines of water that the sun made shine like slender threads of silver. The day was clear and mild, and the earth, freshly opened by the cutting edge of the ploughs, breathed out a light vapour. At the top of the field an old man, whose broad back and severe face recalled Holbein's ploughman, but whose clothes did not announce poverty, was gravely pushing his swing-plough of ancient pattern, drawn by two quiet oxen with pale yellow coats — true patriarchs of the meadow, tall, a little lean, their horns long and turned down, two of those old workers whom long habit has made brothers, as we call them in our country districts, and who, once parted, refuse to work with a new companion and let themselves die of grief. People who do not know the country set down as a fable the friendship of an ox for his yoke-fellow. Let them come and see, at the back of the cattle-shed, a poor beast, thin and worn out, beating his wasted flanks with his restless tail, blowing with terror and disdain at the food set before him, his eyes forever turned to the door, pawing at the empty place beside him, sniffing the yokes and chains his companion wore, and calling him endlessly with piteous bellowing. The oxherd will tell you: "There's a pair of oxen lost; his brother is dead, and this one will work no more. We ought to be able to fatten him for slaughter; but he will not eat, and soon he will be dead of hunger."

The old ploughman worked slowly, in silence, without wasted effort. His docile team hurried no more than he did; but thanks to the continuity of an undistracted toil and an expenditure of tried and sustained strength, his furrow was cut as fast as that of his son, who was driving, some distance off, four less powerful oxen through a vein of heavier and stonier ground.

But what drew my attention next was truly a fine sight, a noble subject for a painter. At the far end of the ploughland a good-looking young man was driving a magnificent team: four pairs of young animals with dark coats mingled with tawny black and glints of fire, with those short curly heads that still smack of the wild bull, those big fierce eyes, those abrupt movements, that nervous, jerky way of working which still chafes at the yoke and the goad and obeys the newly imposed mastery only with a shudder of anger. These are what are known as freshly bound oxen. The man who was managing them had to break up a corner not long since left to pasture and full of stumps centuries old — an athlete's labour, for which his energy, his youth and his eight all but untamed beasts were barely enough.

Translator's log

Written at translation time, frozen before the study limb was designed and before either published English version was opened. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only — which the front matter asserts for the page as a whole.

How this list was made, because the study limb depends on it. Every decision I was actually conscious of making is entered, in the order I met it, before I knew what the inventory of project evidence would contain. I did not filter for decisions I expected the project to have something to say about, and I have not added any afterwards. The list is therefore a fair denominator for a coverage measure and an unfair one for anything flattering: decisions I made without noticing are not here, so the true denominator is larger than 21 and the coverage figure in RS-20260726e-framework-coverage is an over-estimate, not an under-estimate.

D1 — Target register, and nothing in the project could settle it. Sand 1846: an essayistic narrator, formal but not ornate, addressing a general reader. The project's naturalness sense is anchored at exactly two poles, 1922 period-idiomatic and 2008 contemporary-vernacular, and this text belongs at neither. I chose an unmarked modern literary English — no contractions in the narration, no deliberate archaism, "byre" and "kine" rejected as importing a British-dialect colour the French has not got. Alternatives live: a period-1846 English (Trollope-adjacent), which would have made the long periods easier and the argumentative passages heavier; a plain contemporary register, which would have cost the sentence shapes. Declared under purpose-fit above.

D2 — éducatibilité → "educability." Marked, faintly technical in French; "educability" is marked and faintly technical in English. Rejected: "perfectibility" (a different eighteenth-century doctrine Sand is not invoking), and the paraphrase "man's capacity to be educated" (loses the abstract noun that the sentence is about).

D3 — l'homme → "man." Generic masculine singular. "Human beings" would modernise the argument's shape; the surrounding chapter is about the labouring man as a class, and Sand's own generic is masculine. Cost: the English generic "man" now reads as a period marker in a translation I have otherwise declared unmarked, so D1 and D3 pull against each other and I let D3 win locally.

D4 — arène → "arena." Sand calls a ploughed field an arena because she is still looking at Holbein's Dance of Death, where the ploughman's field is a stage. Flattening to "expanse" or "field" would remove the figure. Kept, at the cost of a momentary oddity in English.

D5 — tableau → "picture." Holbein's ploughman is a woodcut, not a painting; "painting" would be an error of fact introduced by the translation, "engraving" an over-precision the French declines. "Picture" holds the same width as tableau.

D6 — The suspended direct object in the landscape sentence. French: le paysage … encadrait de grandes lignes de verdure … ce large terrain. The object arrives after the instrument. English wants "framed that wide stretch … with great lines of greenery." I kept the French order ("framing with great lines of greenery — … — that wide stretch of strong brown earth"), which is strained English. Reason: the alternative "was framed by" reverses the agency Sand gives the landscape, and the natural reordering loses the delay. This is a style-correspondence purchase paid for in naturalness, made knowingly.

D7 — tiède → "mild." No English adjective is simultaneously weather-neutral and tactile: "tepid" and "lukewarm" are pejorative in English and neutral in French; "warm" overshoots; "soft" is a different sensation. "Mild" is the idiomatic collocation for a day and is the flattest of the options. Loss recorded: the skin-level warmth tiède carries.

D8 — exhalait → "breathed out." Chapter II sustains a personification of the earth as a body (fendre le sein de cette terre jalouse, just before this excerpt). "Gave off" or "emitted" would be the unmarked choices and would break the figure at its second occurrence. Kept the bodily verb.

D9 — celui d'Holbein → "Holbein's ploughman." The pronoun's antecedent (le laboureur d'Holbein) is outside the excerpt. Supplying the noun is an addition to the text, made solely because the passage is excerpted; in a whole-work translation the pronoun would stand. Flagged as an artefact of excerpting rather than of the pair.

D10 — areau → "swing-plough of ancient pattern," and this was the hardest decision in the passage. areau is the Berry regional form of araire, a wheelless swing-plough, and Sand has used charrues (wheeled ploughs) two sentences earlier for the other men's implements. The contrast is doing work: the old man's tool is archaic where his neighbours' is not. Four live options: (a) copy-opaque "areau", which manufactures an opacity for the English reader that Sand's reader did not have, since her word is glossed on the spot by de forme antique; (b) "ard", the exact English term, which is archaeologists' vocabulary and would read as a misprint; (c) "plough of ancient form", which loses the noun and therefore the charrue/areau contrast entirely; (d) "swing-plough," the standard English agricultural term for the wheelless implement, which preserves the contrast. Chose (d), and kept "of ancient pattern" so that Sand's own gloss survives. Cost, and it is the real one: areau is regionally marked in French and "swing-plough" is not marked at all in English. The regional colour is gone; only the technical contrast is saved.

D11 — de ces vieux travailleurs → "those old workers." Sand applies a human-labour noun to the oxen, in a chapter arguing about human labour. "Beasts", "creatures", or "that old working kind" would each remove the crossing. Kept the noun even though "workers" for oxen is odder in English than travailleurs is in French.

D12 — frères → brothers, italics kept. Transparent calque. The French is a regionalism, italicised and glossed by Sand herself (comme on les appelle dans nos campagnes); the calque is fully transparent, so retaining the French string would add opacity the source does not have. The italic is retained because it marks the word as quoted local usage, not as foreign.

D13 — comme on les appelle dans nos campagnes → "as we call them in our country districts." French on + nos makes the narrator an insider to the region. English "as they are called" would lose it; "we" keeps it. See D19, where the same on occurs without the possessive and I decided the other way — the inconsistency is deliberate and is the closest thing in this log to a consistency fault I chose to commit.

D14 — Animal pronouns: "he/his" throughout, never "it." French grammatical gender forces nothing here (bœuf is masculine, which is grammar, not personification), but the passage's entire argument is that the ox has a friendship and a grief. English "it" would silently refute the paragraph. Held across all seven references.

D15 — camarade d'attelage → "yoke-fellow." English has a settled idiom with the same affective colour, and it re-sounds the yoke, which recurs twice more. Rejected "harness-mate", "team-mate" (modern sporting sense).

D16 — étable → "cattle-shed." étable is specifically for cattle (as against écurie for horses), so "stable" is inexact. "Byre" is exact but pulls a British-regional register the French does not have (see D1). "Cow-house" is exact and reads as a gloss. "Cattle-shed" is precise, unmarked, and slightly duller than the French.

D17 — déplorables mugissements → "piteous bellowing." False friend: déplorable here is lamentable / to be wept over, not English "deplorable" (= reprehensible). One of two false friends in the passage.

D18 — terres plus fortes → "heavier … ground." The second false friend, and an agricultural one: terre forte is the technical term for heavy, clayey soil. "Stronger soil" would be a plain mistranslation that reads perfectly well in English, which is what makes it dangerous.

D19 — Le bouvier dira and the register of the quoted speech. The future is gnomic — the oxherd will tell you, i.e. this is what oxherds say — and English "will tell you" carries it. More consequential: Sand does not mark this speech dialectally, though she marks peasant speech elsewhere in the book. I rendered it plain. The temptation was to supply rustic colour ("There's a pair o' bullocks gone"), on the model of a cultural-mediation handling that translators demonstrably use; I declined, because there is nothing in the source to repay and the addition would be invention. Also within this decision: paire de bœufs → "a pair of oxen", not "a yoke of oxen", which is the English farming idiom but would sound the yoke motif a third time where Sand does not.

D20 — c'est ce qu'on appelle → "these are what are known as." Impersonal on with no possessive, unlike D13, so I kept it impersonal at a cost in fluency. fraîchement liés → freshly bound, italics kept, transparent calque again. Rejected: "newly broken", which is the English farming idiom but names a different operation — breaking is subduing an animal, lier is tying animals into a team. Substituting it would have been fluent and wrong.

D21 — conduisait / gouvernait kept distinct: "was driving" / "was managing." Sand uses two verbs for handling a team within four sentences and uses gouverner again later in the chapter for the child. English could level both to "drove"; I held the distinction on the chance that it is deliberate, knowing I cannot tell from the excerpt whether it is.

Two things I know I did not resolve. (i) travail d'athlète came out "an athlete's labour", where I had also wanted the sense a labour fit for an athlete; the English possessive says whose it is, not what scale it is. (ii) The single sentence of D6/D10 runs to 118 words in my English against 104 in Sand's French, and I did not test whether an English reader can hold it; I decided to keep the period intact and let the evaluation, if any ever runs, say what that cost.

Evaluation — first blind panel scores (RS-20260803-a4-set, S094)

provisional and internal-judgment-only: Tier D is NOT PASSED (RS-20260802-tierD-verdict), so these scores carry no evidential weight and may not support a framework recommendation. Three non-Anthropic jurors (P1, P2, P5), blind, authorship-stripped, rating this text alone against its source on a 1–7 scale, twice each; the figure is the mean over three jurors and two passes. Scored span: Sand ch. II, the whole filed span.

Instrument floor for comparison: 0.233 scale points (same juror, same text, independent repeat). Two of the three jurors sit at the top of the scale on ~72% of all cells, so these figures are compressed upward and the compression is unequal across jurors.

From this page's frozen translator's log alone, an independent seat that had seen neither the source nor the translation predicted the lowest-scoring sense would be naturalness; the sense that actually scored lowest was naturalness. The full test, and the benchmark that deflates it, are in RS-20260803-a4-set §5.

Re-judged — cross-session stability check (RS-20260907-panel-judging-2, S253)

provisional and internal-judgment-only: Tier D is EXHAUSTED, permanently (config/models.md, S250) — these scores carry no evidential weight. Re-judged 159 sessions after the first scoring above, on the byte-identical text, same three non-Anthropic jurors, blind, order-swapped, twice each.

Cross-session shift from the S094 scores above: mean absolute 0.127 scale points overall (this item's own deltas are in RS-20260907-panel-judging-2 §2), against a within-session retest floor of 0.222 — the panel reads this text the same way five weeks and 159 sessions later. One juror (P2) was flagged degenerate this run (near-ceiling on 90% of its cells, SD > 0.30 on only 2 of 6 senses) — see RS-20260907-panel-judging-2 §3 for what that does and does not affect.