Repository path: workshop/translations/monelle-paroles/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-monelle-paroles-R06-v1 — Marcel Schwob, «Paroles de Monelle» (1894), the four litanies

Regime R06 (lead single pass). This is the frozen draft required by R04 §Procedure 2a: it is written out and committed before the self-revision that produces R04-v1 begins. It is not a reconstruction.

• Source. Marcel Schwob, Le Livre de Monelle (Paris, 1894), I «Paroles de Monelle», the four consecutive litanies de la destruction / de la formation / des dieux / des moments. Public domain; text from Project Gutenberg #53374, segmented at workshop/translations/monelle-paroles/source-fr-segments.txt (6 segments, 500 French words).
• Translator. Lead agent, in session. Cost $0; never ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Contamination: suspected, and the basis is specific and unflattering — see ../contamination.md §1. A published English rendering exists and is freely reachable (Meloney 1929), and before translating, the lead saw nine fragmentary OCR lines of it in the output of a grep -i Destroy run made to establish that the comparator was reachable at all. Those lines cover parts of S1 and S2. This is declared rather than discovered, and the overlap is measured in ../contamination.md §2 rather than asserted.
• Language read. French, in the original, whole book scanned and the passage read closely (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 rubble, 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 hold a magical 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 away adrift.

Contemplate new buildings at the least stirring 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 sit, 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 a lie.

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 delay 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, frozen before the evaluation was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

The one thing this passage is. It is a litany built out of syntactic templates, and almost every difficulty in it is a difficulty about form, not about sense. The propositions are simple and there is nothing in the French I could not construe. That is unusual for this project and it is why the passage was chosen.

Devices I identified in the French before drafting. They are written out as this list at translation time and copied unchanged into ../device-census.md, which is the object an independent seat that sees no English is asked to reproduce (design §Controls, G5):

1. anaphora on Détruis (S1), on paragraph-initial Et / Car / Mais (S2, S3), on jussive Que + subjunctive (S5), on the imperative (S4, S6);
2. the fixed epigram template of S6 — [imperative] + le moment. Tout(e) [cognate abstract noun] qui dure est [antonym]. — six times, each pair a figura etymologica (Pense/pensée, Aime/amour, sincère/sincérité, juste/justice, Agis/action, heureux/bonheur);
3. verset paragraphing: one aphorism per paragraph, semicolon-linked inside S5;
4. exact phrase repetition where French could have reduced (les anciennes habitations d'hommes et les anciennes habitations d'âmes; anciennes peaux de serpent four times in S3);
5. the deliberate mixture of ne … pas and ne … point in adjacent sentences (S4, S5, S6);
6. gapping in the S3 simile (ainsi que les serpents leurs anciennes peaux, verb elided);
7. polyptoton Détruis … destruction, création périsse, sitôt créée, tout dieu … dieu du moment;
8. the destruction / formation pairing that binds the four litanies together and reappears inside S4 as saisons destructrices et formatrices.

Decisions taken in the draft, with the live alternatives.

• Détruis → Destroy. No alternative was live. The anaphora is kept at every occurrence, and the S1 tricolon Détruis, détruis, détruis is kept as three.
• la formation → formation, not forming or shaping. Forming reads better; formation keeps the cognate pairing with destruction that the four section-heads depend on, and keeps the tie to se former and formes. Form chosen over ease.
• il faut (S2, twice) → English passive. French il faut is agentless. You must annihilate supplies an agent the source withholds; the lower goodness must be annihilated does not. This is the compelled-specification problem in wiki/goodness-senses.md accuracy rule 2, and the passive is the mitigation.
• ainsi que les serpents leurs anciennes peaux → as serpents their old skins. English permits the same gapping and I took it, rather than repeating cast off.
• appétence → appetency. Rare in French, rare in English, same Latin root. Appetite is commoner and wrong in register.
• le conduit vert d'un fourré profond → the green conduit of a deep thicket. Conduit is as odd in French as in English; tunnel or run would domesticate an oddity the author chose.
• ne … point → the archaic English negative imperative (Build not, guard not), against ne … pas → the ordinary one (Cast no, do not sit). English's own archaic negation is the nearest functional equivalent of a register difference French carries morphologically.
• bandelettes → grave-bands. Undecidable between swaddling-bands (the gods are young) and mummy-wrappings (the sepulchres are two lines above). I closed it toward the mortuary reading and record that the French does not.
• sitôt créé / sitôt créée — the masculine/feminine agreement makes a grammatical rhyme across the two versets. English has no marker and it is simply lost. Nothing was attempted.
• un règne défunt is the one place in the S6 litany where the French supplies an article; every other predicate is a bare abstract noun. I kept the article there and bare nouns elsewhere, because the source breaks its own pattern at that point.
• agonie → death-agony, not agony. French agonie is the death-throes. You would weary an agony would be an English mistranslation of a false friend.
• berceau et cercueil → cradle and coffin. The French alliterates and so, by luck, does the English.

What I know I have not yet done, and what the revision is for. Three things were left standing in the draft and are the reason R04 exists: (i) décombres and débris are two different words in the French and the draft renders both as rubble; (ii) est mensonge came out is a lie, which breaks the bare-noun template the other five members of the litany keep; (iii) several small literalisms (at the least stirring for a French plural, do not sit for ne reste pas assis).