Repository path: workshop/translations/miserere/R08-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-miserere-R08-v1 — Bécquer, «El Miserere», the vision, under R08 (resistancy)

Source: Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, «El Miserere» (1862), the §II vision, 668 Spanish words in ten paragraphs. Copy-text and collation: provenance.md. Regime: R08-resistancy v1.0, rules R1–R10, frozen 2026-07-28.

Contamination: none. Basis: no published English of this tale was read before this rendering was written; the one bounded exposure to the Bates 1909 comparator is declared in provenance.md §5 and contains no English inside the span. The project has no prior rendering of this tale. The measurement against Bates is run after this file and its R07 partner are committed, per CLAUDE.md's standing order and note (bcd), and the figures are recorded in ../dependence.md.

Order of writing, declared. This rendering was written first, from the Spanish alone. Its R07 partner was written after it and is therefore the contaminated one of the pair; that direction is stated on both artifacts because it biases the two renderings toward each other, which works against every prediction the design registers.

Dialect: American English (declared, held; the same declaration governs the R07 partner, so dialect is not a difference between the arms).

The translation

[P1] Not yet had the last stroke of the bell expired, weakening from echo to echo; still its vibration was to be heard trembling in the air, when the granite canopies that sheltered the sculptures, the marble steps of the altars, the ashlars of the ogives, the fretted parapets of the choir, the trefoil festoons of the cornices, the black piers of the walls, the pavement, the vaults, the whole church, began to illuminate itself spontaneously, without a torch, a taper or a lamp being seen that might pour out that unwonted brightness.

[P2] It seemed like a skeleton, from whose yellow bones is given off that phosphoric gas which shines and smokes in the darkness like a light bluish, restless and fearful.

[P3] Everything seemed to quicken, but with that galvanic movement which imprints upon death contractions that parody life, an instantaneous movement, more horrible still than the inertia of the cadaver it agitates with its unknown force. The stones gathered themselves to the stones; the altar-stone, whose broken fragments were seen before scattered without order, raised itself intact, as though the artificer had but that moment given upon it his last stroke of the chisel, and at the altar-stone's side rose up the overthrown chapels, the broken capitals and the shattered and immense series of arches which, crossing and interlacing capriciously among themselves, formed with their columns a labyrinth of porphyry.

[P4] The temple once rebuilt, there began to be heard a distant chord that might be confounded with the humming of the air, but that was a conjunction of voices far off and grave, which seemed to issue from the bosom of the earth and to go rising little by little, making itself each time more perceptible.

[P5] The daring pilgrim was beginning to have fear; but with his fear there struggled still his fanaticism for everything unaccustomed and marvellous, and heartened by it he left the tomb upon which he was reposing, leaned out at the brink of the abyss among whose rocks the torrent leapt, hurling itself down with an incessant and frightful thunder, and his hairs bristled with horror.

[P6] Ill wrapped in the tatters of their habits, their cowls drawn close, beneath whose folds there contrasted with their fleshless jaws and their white teeth the dark cavities of the eyes of their skulls, he saw the skeletons of the monks who were flung from the parapet of the church into that precipice come out from the depth of the waters, and, gripping with the long fingers of their hands of bone at the fissures of the crags, climb by them until they touched the brink, saying in a voice low and sepulchral, but with a rending expression of pain, the first versicle of the psalm of David:

[P7] ¡Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam!

[P8] When the monks arrived at the peristyle of the temple, they ordered themselves in two files, and penetrating into it went to kneel in the choir, where with a voice more raised and solemn they proceeded to intone the versicles of the psalm. The music sounded to the measure of their voices: that music was the distant rumor of the thunder which, the tempest dissipated, went off murmuring; was the humming of the air that groaned in the concavity of the mountain; was the monotonous noise of the cascade that fell upon the rocks, and the drop of water that filtered through, and the cry of the hidden owl, and the rubbing of the restless reptiles. All this was the music, and something more that cannot be explained nor scarcely conceived, something more that seemed like the echo of an organ which accompanied the versicles of the giant hymn of contrition of the King Psalmist, with notes and chords as giant as his terrible words.

[P9] The ceremony followed on; the musician who was present at it, absorbed and terrified, believed himself to be outside the real world, to live in that fantastic region of dream in which all things clothe themselves in strange and phenomenal forms.

[P10] A terrible shaking came to draw him out of that stupor which impounded all the faculties of his spirit. His nerves leapt at the impulse of a most powerful emotion, his teeth struck together, agitating themselves with a tremor impossible to repress, and the cold penetrated to the marrow of his bones.

Translator's log

Frozen before any evaluation of this rendering was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Coverage codes per R08 §5 (D decided — a rule names the feature and exactly one live option survives; P permitted — rules bear and two or more options survive; S silent). INT marks a decision made on an interpretation of what the source means rather than by any rule (R08 §5a). A site is logged only where two or more renderings were live at the moment of writing.

28 logged sites. Strict D at 22 of 28 (78.6%); P at 5; S at 1. Mean live options per logged site: 2.18. One INT flag.

What R10 did. Nothing. No site in this span was rendered by exceeding the source, and no code above cites R10. That is worth recording because R08's own §Known limitations calls R10 the rule that can absorb anything: on this span it absorbed nothing, so the 78.6% is not inflated by it.

Where the rules did not reach. Three things decided themselves with no rule bearing and are not in the table because no second option was live at the moment of writing: paragraph division (followed the copy-text), the treatment of ¿/¡ (not applicable — the span has none outside the Latin), and capitalization of King Psalmist. A fourth is in the table as the single S.

One thing this rendering does that the rule set does not ask for, stated because it is the session's whole point. R6 asks for calque and R3 licenses archaism; on a Romance source those two rules produce Latinate English — peristyle, porphyry, sepulchral, contrition, versicle, ashlar, ogive. On the Germanic source this project ran the same rules over eleven days ago they produced the opposite: short compound English near the plain pole. The rule set did not change; the language family did. internal-judgment-only.