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

T-monelle-paroles-R04-v1 — Marcel Schwob, «Paroles de Monelle» (1894), the four litanies

Regime R04 (lead close translation, source-only). Self-revision of T-monelle-paroles-R06-v1, which was written out and committed first per R04 §Procedure 2a. In the experiment this artifact is arm CC (form carried, no unlicensed strangeness) and it is used verbatim, unedited.

• Source. Marcel Schwob, Le Livre de Monelle (Paris, 1894), I «Paroles de Monelle», the four litanies de la destruction / de la formation / des dieux / des moments. Public domain; Project Gutenberg #53374. Segmented at ../source-fr-segments.txt — 6 segments, 500 French words.
• Translator. Lead agent, in session. Cost $0; never ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Contamination: suspected. Declared basis and measurement: ../contamination.md.
• Lineage. R06-v1 (frozen draft) → this. No published rendering of the passage was read before either was frozen; nine fragmentary OCR lines of the Meloney 1929 English were seen incidentally and are declared in ../contamination.md §1.
• Language read. French, in the original (charter §4, A2).

The translation

S1

Here is the word: Destroy, destroy, destroy. Destroy within yourself, destroy around you. Make room for your soul and for the other souls.

Destroy all good and all evil. The rubble is alike.

Destroy the old dwellings of men and the old dwellings of souls; dead things are mirrors that distort.

Destroy, for all creation comes of destruction.

S2

And for the higher goodness the lower goodness must be annihilated. And so the new good appears saturated with evil.

And to imagine a new art, the old art must be broken. And so the new art seems a kind of iconoclasm.

For all construction is made of debris, and nothing is new in this world but the forms.

But the forms must be destroyed.

S3

And Monelle said again: I will speak to you of formation.

The very desire for the new is nothing but the appetency of the soul that wishes to form itself.

And souls cast off the old forms as serpents their old skins.

And the patient collectors of old serpent-skins sadden the young serpents, because they have a magic power over them.

For he who owns the old serpent-skins prevents the young serpents from transforming themselves.

That is why serpents strip their bodies in the green conduit of a deep thicket; and once a year the young gather in a circle to burn the old skins.

S4

Be therefore like the destroying and the forming seasons.

Build your house yourself and burn it yourself.

Cast no rubble behind you; let each man use his own ruins.

Build not in the night that is past. Let your buildings run off adrift.

Contemplate new buildings at the least stirrings of your soul.

For every new desire make new gods.

S5

And Monelle said again: I will speak to you of the gods.

Let the old gods die; do not remain seated, like a mourning woman, beside their tombs;

For the old gods fly out of their sepulchres;

And guard not the young gods by winding them in grave-bands;

Let every god fly away, as soon as created;

Let every creation perish, as soon as created;

Let the old god offer his creation to the young god that it may be crushed by him;

Let every god be a god of the moment.

S6

And Monelle said again: I will speak to you of the moments.

Look at all things under the aspect of the moment.

Let your self go at the pleasure of the moment.

Think in the moment. Every thought that lasts is contradiction.

Love the moment. Every love that lasts is hatred.

Be sincere with the moment. Every sincerity that lasts is falsehood.

Be just toward the moment. Every justice that lasts is injustice.

Act toward the moment. Every action that lasts is a defunct reign.

Be happy with the moment. Every happiness that lasts is unhappiness.

Have respect for all the moments, and make no ties between things.

Do not detain the moment: you would weary a death-agony.

See: every moment is a cradle and a coffin: let all life and all death seem to you strange and new.

Translator's log

Written at translation time and frozen before the evaluation was designed. The draft's log (R06-v1) carries the device catalogue and the drafting decisions and is not repeated here. This log records only what the revision changed and why, which is what R04 is for.

Six changes, all of them formal, none propositional.

1. S2, débris → debris, was rubble. The draft used rubble for both décombres (S1 ¶2, S4 ¶3) and débris (S2 ¶3). The French keeps them apart, and décombres is a consistency item in this passage because it recurs. Two words in, two words out.
2. S6, est mensonge → is falsehood, was is a lie. Five of the six predicates in the S6 litany are bare abstract nouns (contradiction, haine, injustice, malheur — and mensonge); a lie supplies an article the template does not have, and breaks the one device the segment is built out of. Falsehood is bare and is the same proposition.
3. S6, un règne défunt keeps its article — checked rather than changed. The source itself supplies an article at exactly this one member of the six, and the revision confirmed the draft was right to keep it. Recorded because it looks like an inconsistency and is not.
4. S6, N'attarde pas le moment → Do not detain the moment, was Do not delay the moment. attarder is transitive here — to make something linger — and delay in English reads as postpone, which is the wrong action.
5. S5, ne reste pas assis → do not remain seated, was do not sit. The French is durative: the instruction is against staying, not against sitting down.
6. S4, aux moindres élans → at the least stirrings, was stirring. Plural in the French; the plural is the point, since the sentence is about every smallest impulse and not one.

One thing the revision looked at and did not change. le conduit vert d'un fourré profond stayed as the green conduit of a deep thicket. Conduit is a strange word in the French sentence and I could not persuade myself that removing the strangeness was translating it.

One thing the revision could not repair. sitôt créé / sitôt créée rhymes grammatically in French across two consecutive versets. English marks neither, and both versets came out identical in their tails. Nothing was attempted and the loss stands.

A note on what this passage cost, which is unusual. Nothing here was hard to construe. Every decision in both logs is about carrying a shape, and the two places where I had to give something up — the grammatical rhyme, the masculine/feminine pair — are places where English has no morphology, not places where I misread anything. internal-judgment-only: it is the first passage in this project I have translated where I could not name a single site at which the difficulty was about meaning.

Evaluation — first blind panel scores (RS-20260907-panel-judging-2, S253)

provisional and internal-judgment-only: Tier D is EXHAUSTED, permanently (config/models.md, S250), 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.

Instrument floor for comparison: 0.222-0.230 scale points (this session's own retest floor, RS-20260907-panel-judging-2 §2). One of the three jurors (P2) was flagged degenerate this run (near-ceiling on 90% of its cells) — see that page §3 for what this does and does not affect. Lowest cell: 3.500. Full account, the W3-since-S099 selection criteria, and the contamination caveat on this score: RS-20260907-panel-judging-2 §5.