Repository path: workshop/translations/mort-de-pan/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«La Mort de Pan» — the Thamus passage and the road to San-Pansi, R04 (lead close translation), v1

Source. Paul Arène, «La Mort de Pan», in La gueuse parfumée: récits provençaux, Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1876; Project Gutenberg #60680. Locus and omissions exactly as on the draft. 433 French words → 477 English words (the draft was 478; the revision is −1 word, −0.2%).

Regime. R04 v1.0 — source only, draft then self-revise against the source in the same session. The draft is T-mort-de-pan-R06-v1, frozen as its own artifact at commit 67a700b before this revision began (R04 §2a). The two are therefore a paired R06/R04 comparison by construction.

Lineage. T-mort-de-pan-R06-v1 → this. Seven revision decisions (R1–R7), appended below the draft's twelve.

Contamination: none, on the absence recorded in full on the draft — no English rendering of any work by Paul Arène was found in Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive, so there is no published English of this text for the translator to have remembered. This is an argument from absence, not a dependence_check figure, and the draft says so at length, along with the two French candidates whose gates fired and which were discarded.

Translated by the lead agent as a labeled subject, in session, at no API cost. The lead never judges its own translation (charter §5).

The translation

You know the strange story Plutarch tells in his book On the Oracles that have Ceased.

"The vessel of the pilot Thamus being one evening off certain islands of the Aegean sea, the wind suddenly dropped. The crew were wide awake, some drinking, some talking together, when a voice was heard coming from the islands and calling Thamus. Thamus answered only at the third call, and the voice ordered him, when he should be come to a certain place, to cry out that the great Pan was dead. They were seized with fright; they debated whether they should obey the voice. Thamus concluded that if there were wind enough to carry him past the place indicated, he would keep silent; but that if the wind should fail, he would discharge the order he had received. He was overtaken by a calm at the place where he was to cry out; he cried out; at once the calm ceased, and there were heard on every side wailings and groanings as of a great number of persons afflicted and taken by surprise."

Well, no! In spite of Thamus and Plutarch, and in spite of that fine story which, on Rabelais's word, drew from Pantagruel's eyen teares as bigge as ostriche egges — no, the great Pan was not dead. I know something about that, I who am speaking to you, having had the joy, in the very heart of Catholic Provence and eighteen centuries after Tiberius Cæsar, of offering the god a sacrifice upon his rustic and still venerated altar.

I hasten to add that, following the example of the Minerva of the Innocent Pagans, who hid herself in a blessed woman's robe under the olive trees of the Minervois, my poor goat-foot, when I discovered him, was concealing his horns beneath a halo, and was reduced to the humble condition of a country saint.

A singular saint, Saint Pansi — and what a merry pilgrimage!

To reach his chapel you climbed in the sun, for hours and hours, by a path traced out by goats and rubbed out by every storm. So we would lose it sometimes, that sacred road, among the pebbles of the dry torrent-beds and the loose stones of the slopes. Then the procession would halt; the boys would kiss the girls, and there was joy, there was laughter! But the path was soon found again, barely visible, ruling its thin line across the steepness of the ravines, or broadly marked, on more faithful ground, through flowering sage, marjoram and box.

Then at a turning, in a gap, between the barren rock of Peyrimpi and the snowy and sombre haunch of Lure, a hillock came into view, and on the hillock, right at the end, glittering like a splinter of glass in the sun, the white chapel of San-Pansi.

And zou! away, children, to San-Pansi!

Translator's log — revision pass

The draft's twelve decisions (D1–D12) stand on the draft and are not restated. What follows is the revision pass only, written at revision time and frozen before any evaluation of this translation was designed (charter §3, A4). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

Accuracy against the source — three

• R1 — «lorsqu'il serait entré en un certain lieu». The draft wrote when he should have come to a certain place, which in present-day English reads first as ought to have come — a modal the French does not have. Changed to when he should be come to a certain place: the should be come perfect is period-correct inside a quotation already pitched older (D2), and it is unambiguously temporal. When he came to a certain place was the plain alternative and was refused because it drops the anterior future the French marks twice in the sentence.
• R2 — «en était réduit à l'humble état». The draft wrote had been reduced, adding an anteriority the imperfect does not carry. Changed to was reduced. The French verb is descriptive of the state Pan was found in, not of an earlier event.
• R3 — «en pleine Provence catholique». In the middle of is the dictionary gloss of en plein and the wrong register for it: en pleine is emphatic, in the thick of, in the very heart of. Changed to in the very heart of Catholic Provence. This is the one revision that adds a word.

Style correspondence — two

• R4 — «Tibère Cæsar». Arène spells the second name with the Latin ligature inside French prose; the draft normalised it to Caesar. Restored to Cæsar, which is what the source does and what an 1876 English text would also have done. The draft's normalisation was invisible and therefore the kind of thing a revision pass exists to catch.
• R5 — «la croupe de Lure neigeuse et sombre». The draft stacked the two adjectives — the snowy dark haunch — where the French coordinates them. Restored the conjunction: the snowy and sombre haunch of Lure. Sombre over dark because the mountain is the sentence's one note of weight against a paragraph of glitter.

Naturalness and consistency — two

• R6 — aspect in the pilgrimage paragraph. The draft has the procession would halt and then the boys kissed the girls, mixing habitual and simple past inside one French imperfect sequence. Changed to the boys would kiss the girls. The inconsistency was invisible on first writing and is exactly the class of thing R06 is expected to leave behind.
• R7 — «à travers les sauges en fleur, des marjolaines et des buis». The draft's through the flowering sage, the marjoram and the box stumbles on the last item: the box reads as a container before it reads as a shrub. Dropping the articles makes all three read as plant names — through flowering sage, marjoram and box. Box-scrub and box-trees were live and both add a word Arène does not have.

Examined and deliberately not changed — two, recorded because a log of only the changes misleads

• «le grand Pan était mort» → the great Pan was dead, not Great Pan is dead. The English tag is famous and fixed, and using it would have imported into Arène's sentence a phrase his French does not have and his reader would not have heard. Kept the literal the great Pan, at the price of the allusion the English reader might have enjoyed recognising.
• D12's unreconciled on shift — you climbed … we would lose it. The draft recorded it as unresolved and the revision left it standing, because the French makes the same move at the same place. Regularising to one … one was reconsidered and refused a second time.

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: Arène, 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.