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

«O enfermeiro» — Machado de Assis, two passages, R04 (close, source-only)

Source. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, «O enfermeiro», in Várias Histórias (Rio de Janeiro: Laemmert & C., 1896), pp. 169–189. Public domain; Portuguese Wikisource transcription of the 1896 reference edition, fetched 2026-08-05. Passages stored byte-for-byte at workshop/experiments/E-20260805e-naturalness-wording/materials/enfermeiro-A-pt.txt (¶20–23, 307 words) and …-B-pt.txt (¶43–46, 310 words).

Lineage. R06 draft T-o-enfermeiro-R06-v1, frozen before this revision began (R04 §Procedure 2a). This is the second pass against the source.

Why these two passages. They are the reference texts of E-20260805e-naturalness-wording, where each is paired with a copy of itself carrying eight deliberate accuracy errors. The experiment asks what such damage does to a jury's reading of the English; it makes no quality claim about this rendering, and the lead does not judge it (charter §5).

Contamination: suspected, declared with a measurement. Isaac Goldberg's 1921 English of the whole story is free and reachable (Brazilian Tales, Project Gutenberg #21040), and the lead read Goldberg's rendering of the story's opening — about its first 1,000 words — while selecting material, before the passages were chosen. Neither translated passage lies inside that span, and no English of ¶20–23 or ¶43–46 was read before this text and its log were frozen. The declaration is required by R04 §Procedure 1 and by CLAUDE.md's standing rule; the measurement against Goldberg's complete text is a selection gate for the register anchor, not a claim of independence — nothing in E-20260805e turns on this rendering being independent of any published one, and no such claim is made.

The measurement, tools/dependence_check.py, each passage against Goldberg's complete 4,220-word English (both figures reported, per CLAUDE.md: run length alone is a poor proxy):

The 19-token run is "him back to life it was too late the aneurism had burst and the colonel was dead i went", rendering agitei-o para chamá-lo à vida, era tarde; arrebentara o aneurisma, e o coronel morreu. It is below the project record for a lead-against-published measurement (24 tokens, S079) and above its 12-gram signal threshold, and this artifact does not decide which of the two available explanations holds — remembered Goldberg, or a sequence whose rendering is close to forced. The forced-run probe that would separate them costs money and is not run here, because no figure in E-20260805e depends on the answer (CLAUDE.md: the measurement programme on this rule is closed unless a published figure comes to depend on it).

What is worth recording is the asymmetry: 21 shared 7-grams against 6, and 8 shared 12-grams against 0, for two passages of the same story, by the same translator, in the same hour, against the same comparator. Passage A is a scene of violent action in short declarative clauses; passage B is interior self-justification. Whatever the mechanism, it is not uniform across a single work.

Passage A — ¶20–23

Now you shall see what happened. On the night of the twenty-fourth of August the colonel had a fit of rage, went at me, called me a great many coarse names, threatened to shoot me, and ended by throwing a plate of gruel at me, which he found cold; the plate ended up against the wall, where it broke to pieces.

"You'll pay for it, you thief!" he roared.

He went on grumbling a long while. At eleven o'clock sleep took him. While he slept I drew a book out of my pocket, an old novel of d'Arlincourt's, in translation, which I had come across in the house, and set myself to read it, in the same room, a short distance from the bed; I had to wake him at midnight to give him his medicine. Whether from weariness or from the book, before reaching the end of the second page I fell asleep too. I woke to the colonel's shouts and got up still fuddled with sleep. He seemed to be raving; he kept up the same shouting, and ended by laying hold of the water jug and hurling it at me. I had no time to get out of the way; the jug struck me on the left cheek, and the pain was such that I saw nothing more; I threw myself upon the sick man, put my hands to his throat, we struggled, and I throttled him.

When I saw that he was dying, I drew back in terror and gave a cry; but nobody heard me. I went back to the bed and shook him to call him back to life; it was too late — the aneurism had burst, and the colonel was dead. I went out into the next room, and for two hours I did not dare go back in. I cannot even tell you all that I went through in that time. It was a daze, a vague and stupid delirium. It seemed to me that the walls had figures in them; I heard muffled voices. The victim's cries, before the struggle and during the struggle, went on echoing inside me, and the air, whichever way I turned, appeared cut through with convulsions. Do not think that I am making images, or style; I tell you that I distinctly heard voices shouting at me: murderer! murderer!

Passage B — ¶43–46

I thought about it for three days, and kept running up against the thought that a refusal might make people suspect something. At the end of the three days I settled on a middle course: I would take the legacy and give it all away, bit by bit and on the sly. It was not only scruple; it was also a way of redeeming the crime by an act of virtue; it seemed to me that this left me square.

I made ready and set off for the town. On the way, as I drew nearer, I kept recalling the sorry business; the country around the town had a look of tragedy about it, and the colonel's shade seemed to me to rise up on every side. My imagination went on reproducing the words, the gestures, the whole horrible night of the crime...

Crime, or struggle? Really it was a struggle, in which I, being attacked, defended myself, and in defending myself... It was a wretched struggle, a fatality. I fastened on that idea. And I balanced the grievances, entering the beatings and the insults on the credit side... It was not the colonel's fault, I knew that well, it was the disease, which made him so cantankerous and even wicked... But I forgave everything, everything... The worst of it was the fatality of that night... I considered too that the colonel could not have lived much longer; he was near the end; he felt it himself and said so. How long would he have lived? Two weeks, or one; it might even be less. It was no longer a life, it was a rag of a life, if one could give that name at all to the poor man's continual suffering... And who knows, indeed, whether the struggle and the death were not merely coincidental? It might be; it was even the most likely thing; it was nothing else. I fastened on that idea too...

Near the town my heart tightened, and I wanted to turn back; but I mastered myself and went on. I was received with congratulations. The vicar told me the provisions of the will, the pious bequests, and in passing went on praising the Christian meekness and the zeal with which I had served the colonel, who, harsh and hard as he was, had known how to be grateful.

Translator's log — R04 (frozen 2026-08-05, before the evaluation was designed)

Written at translation time; the R06 log above it records the first pass. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Nothing here is an assessment of the result.

What the second pass changed, and on what grounds

1. atropelou-me — knocked me about → went at me. The draft's phrase settles a question the Portuguese leaves open. atropelar is to run over, to trample; here it stands between an acesso de raiva and a volley of names, so the aggression may be bodily or purely verbal. Went at me keeps both readings live, which is what the source does. Rejected: rode over me (idiom drifts to overruled), trampled me (commits to the body).
2. passou pelo sono — dropped off to sleep → sleep took him. The Portuguese has the colonel passing through sleep rather than performing it; the reflexive-free construction puts sleep in the agent position and the draft had reversed that. The English idiom is common enough not to read as a foreignism.
3. que lá achei — which I had found there → which I had come across in the house. lá is deictic to the colonel's house, not to the sickroom, and there in English attaches to the nearest place named, which in the draft was the bed.
4. estremunhado — half-stunned with sleep → still fuddled with sleep. Stunned imports the jug-blow that has not happened yet, four lines early. Nothing in English carries the whole word; fuddled keeps the not-yet-in-possession-of-oneself sense and drops the abruptness. A loss, recorded as one.
5. esganei-o — strangled → throttled. esganar is the throat-specific, coarser verb beside the neutral estrangular; the sentence is four verbs of increasing violence in one breath and throttled is the one that does not flatten the last of them.
6. recuei aterrado, e dei um grito — let out a cry → gave a cry. Let out is idiomatic but makes the cry involuntary; dei is neutral and the narrator's whole account of this night turns on which of his acts were his.
7. Passei à sala contígua … não ousei voltar ao quarto — the draft named the bedroom twice. Revised to went out into the next room … did not dare go back in. The repetition was mine, not Machado's, and it made a room-plan out of a sentence about terror.
8. atordoamento — a stupefaction → a daze. The draft's Latinate noun is available in English and is the cognate, but this narrator's diction is plain and Latinity here reads as period costume the source does not wear.
9. vultos — shapes → figures. A vulto is a looming human form, not a shape; the draft lost the person in the wall.
10. Não creia que esteja fazendo imagens nem estilo — fine style → style. Fine was an editorial sneer of mine. Machado's narrator names the two things a reader might accuse him of — imagery and style — and does not colour either.
11. ficava assim de contas saldas and punha no ativo — the accounting is now one vocabulary. Draft: the accounts came out even / weighed up the wrongs / on the credit side. Revised: this left me square / balanced the grievances / entering … on the credit side. Machado runs a single bookkeeping figure across three paragraphs — the legacy squares the murder, the blows are entered as assets — and the draft had let it dissolve into general idiom in the first of the three.
12. aos bocados e às escondidas — in secret → on the sly. às escondidas is furtive rather than confidential, and it is the word that tells the reader the charity is also concealment.
13. não podia viver muito mais / Viveria quanto? — present-capable → past-counterfactual. The draft read could not live / would he live; the man is already dead and the narrator is reasoning backwards to acquit himself. English tense has to choose here and Portuguese does not.
14. rabugento — peevish → cantankerous. Peevish is a child's fault; the colonel's is an old man's.
15. coincidentes — coincident → coincidental. The draft's adjective is a technical term in English; the narrator is reaching for the ordinary word, and the sentence is the hinge of his self-acquittal.
16. Receberam-me com parabéns — They received me → I was received. The Portuguese subject is the impersonal they of a whole town; an English they wants an antecedent and the nearest is the vicar, who is named in the next sentence and is not the crowd.

Held open, unresolved

• de caminho ia louvando — in passing went on praising keeps the imperfect's duration but loses that de caminho also means on the road, which in this paragraph is literal: they are walking. English cannot have both without adding a clause.
• Não creia was rendered Do not think; Do not believe (the draft) is nearer the verb and further from the idiom. Neither is right.
• molambo — rag is the dictionary word; a molambo is specifically a filthy shred of clothing, and rag of a life recovers about half of that.
• The ellipses are Machado's and are kept at every occurrence, including the three consecutive trailing ones in ¶45, where they are the syntax of the argument rather than punctuation.