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

T-moulin-installation-R04-v1 — the miller takes possession, close

Source. Alphonse Daudet, Lettres de mon moulin (1869; text of Charpentier 1895), «Installation», ¶1–4, 380 French words, read in French. Copy-text fr.wikisource.org, fetched 2026-08-06; working span workshop/experiments/E-20260806f-persona-crossing/materials/sources.json (daudet, sha256 6a67187c6868…).

Regime. R04 v1.0 — source-only draft (frozen separately as T-moulin-installation-R06-v1), then self-revision against the source in the same session. Cost $0 (charter §3, A4).

Why this passage. Almost nothing happens: a man moves into a mill and tells you about the rabbits and the owl. The passage is the narrator's manner, and very little else.

Contamination: none — MEASURED, against the one comparator this project can reach. Keith Adams, Letters from My Windmill (PG #30442), the matching 375-word span: 1 shared 7-gram, 0 shared 12-grams, longest common contiguous run 7 tokens, verdict clean. No comparator was read before the rendering and log were frozen (R04 §Procedure 1). What this does not establish: other English Lettres de mon moulin exist and were not reachable, so the value rests on one comparator.

It was the rabbits who were astonished!… For so long they had been seeing the mill door shut, the walls and the platform overrun with weeds, that they had ended by believing the race of millers extinct, and, finding the place a good one, had made of it something like a general headquarters, a centre of strategic operations: the rabbits' mill of Jemmapes… The night I arrived there were a good twenty of them, and I am not lying, sitting in a ring on the platform warming their paws at a ray of moonlight… I had no more than got a skylight ajar — frrt! there goes the bivouac in rout, and all those little white backsides scampering off, tails in the air, into the thicket. I do hope they will come back.

Somebody else greatly astonished at the sight of me is the tenant on the first floor, a sinister old owl with the head of a thinker, who has lived in the mill for more than twenty years. I found him in the upper room, motionless and upright on the shaft, in among the fallen plaster and tiles. He looked at me a moment with his round eye; then, quite dismayed at not recognising me, he set about going "Hoo! hoo!" and shaking, with difficulty, his wings grey with dust — these devils of thinkers! the creatures never brush themselves… No matter! such as he is, with his blinking eyes and his sullen face, I like this silent tenant better than I should like another, and I have lost no time in renewing his lease. He keeps, as in the past, the whole top of the mill with an entrance by the roof; I reserve the room below for myself, a little room whitewashed with lime, low and vaulted like a convent refectory.

It is from there that I write to you, my door wide open, in the good sunshine.

A pretty pinewood, all glittering with light, comes tumbling down in front of me to the bottom of the slope. On the horizon the Alpilles cut out their fine crests… Not a sound… Barely, at long intervals, a note of a fife, a curlew in the lavender, a mule-bell on the road… All this beautiful Provençal country lives only by the light.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-06, before the study limb of E-20260806f-persona-crossing was designed.

1. The tense scheme is the persona and it was preserved literally. Daudet moves between plus-que-parfait (the rabbits' long belief), passé composé (what happened on arrival) and a présent that reaches out of the letter — «c'est le locataire du premier», «C'est de là que je vous écris». English can hold all three, and the rendering does not level them: "Somebody else greatly astonished at the sight of me is the tenant" keeps the present tense that a fluent English would have made "was". That was the single most consequential decision here.
2. «à un rayon de lune» — the draft got it wrong and the revision fixed it. Se chauffer les pattes à takes the thing you warm yourself at, as at a fire. The draft's "in a moonbeam" made the moonlight a place; the revision's "at a ray of moonlight" restores the joke, which is that the rabbits are treating the moon as a hearth.
3. «le moulin de Jemmapes des lapins». A battle-name joke (Jemappes, 1792) hung on a windmill. Kept as "the rabbits' mill of Jemmapes" with no gloss: a footnote would be a different kind of book, and an English reader who does not catch the allusion still gets this is their fortress from the military vocabulary around it (headquarters, strategic operations, bivouac).
4. «ces diables de penseurs ! ça ne se brosse jamais». The contemptuous impersonal ça used of a person (here of a class of persons) has no English pronoun. Options: they (loses the contempt), it (ungrammatical of a plural), a noun. Taken: "the creatures never brush themselves" — a noun carrying the dismissal the pronoun carried. Displaced marking again, and from a pronoun again.
5. «Le temps d'entrouvrir une lucarne, frrt !» The elliptical le temps de + infinitive is a French construction with no English counterpart at that speed. Draft: "No sooner had I got a skylight open a crack". Revision: "I had no more than got a skylight ajar" — one word shorter and it keeps the sentence running into frrt without a comma-stop.
6. The onomatopoeia was kept unnaturalised. frrt, "Hou ! hou !" → "Hoo! hoo!". The owl was anglicised because English spells owls; the rabbits' frrt was not, because English has no settled spelling for it and inventing one would be louder than the French.
7. «me plaît encore mieux qu'un autre» → "I like this silent tenant better than I should like another" (draft: "pleases me better than another would"). The French makes the owl the subject and the speaker the experiencer; the English inverts it, which is a real loss of the passage's habit of letting animals act on the narrator. Recorded rather than solved.
8. The suspension points are Daudet's punctuation, not a translator's mannerism, and all fourteen were kept in place.
9. internal-judgment-only: ¶4 (the pinewood and the Alpilles) came out closer than the rest; ¶2's long middle sentence is the one I would revise again.

Contamination measured

Taken after the renderings and logs were frozen. Comparator and figures in E-20260806f-persona-crossing/design.md §2.