Repository path: workshop/translations/osso-di-morto/R07-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-osso-di-morto-R07-v1 — Tarchetti, «Un osso di morto», opening, under R07 (fluency)

• Source. I. U. Tarchetti, «Un osso di morto», in Racconti fantastici (Milan: E. Treves, 1869), opening two paragraphs, 362 words. Public domain. Text at ../source-it.txt, transcribed from the 1869 djvu on Italian Wikisource.
• Regime. R07 v1.0 (fluency), frozen at 9846fbd before the source was read for translation.
• Dialect declared under F5. American English, held throughout.
• Translated by the lead agent, in session. Cost $0; not ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Contamination suspected. Venuti's own English of this tale exists (Fantastic Tales, Mercury House, 1992), is in copyright, and is not freely reachable, so no longest-common-run measurement is possible. The book read this session contains no English of this tale (verified by string search: osso di morto, Dead Man, Letter U — 0 hits). No published rendering of this passage was read.
• Not the project's first Italian→English translation — ARM-longwork has been rendering Verga's «Jeli il pastore» since S036 and completed it at S047. It is the first Italian prose fiction of the fantastic, and the first Italian passage rendered twice under contrasting regimes.
• Paired with T-osso-di-morto-R08-v1, translated from the source and not from this text.
• Evaluation. None designed. The lead never judges its own translation (charter §5).

Translation

I leave it to my readers to judge the inexplicable event I am about to describe.

In 1855 I settled in Pavia and took up the study of drawing at a private school there. After a few months in the city I had become friendly with a certain Federico M., a professor of pathology and clinical medicine at the university, who died of a sudden stroke a few months after I met him. He loved the sciences, and his own above all, and he had unusual gifts of mind. But like anatomists and clinicians generally, he was a deep and incurable skeptic, and skeptical on principle; I could never bring him around to my own beliefs, however hard I worked at it in the passionate arguments we had about them every day. Even so — and I am glad to do his memory this justice — he was always tolerant of convictions that were not his own, and I, like everyone else who knew him, have kept the warmest memory of him. A few days before he died he advised me to attend his anatomy lectures, on the grounds that I would learn a good deal from them that would help my drawing. I agreed, though it went against me; and out of vanity, wanting to seem less squeamish than I was, I asked him for some human bones. He gave them to me and I set them on the mantelpiece in my room. After his death I stopped going to the anatomy course, and later I gave up drawing as well. Still, I kept those bones for years, since the habit of seeing them had made them almost a matter of indifference to me. It was only a few months ago that a sudden fear came over me and I decided to bury them, keeping nothing but a single kneecap. That little bone, round and smooth, I had earmarked from the moment it came into my hands to serve as a paperweight, because its shape and size suited it and because it called up nothing frightening in me. It had been lying on my writing table for eleven years when I lost it in the inexplicable way I am about to describe.

373 words (source 362).

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written and frozen with it. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. A site is logged when two or more renderings were live at the moment of writing; sites where nothing was live are not decisions and are not logged, so the totals are over contested sites only.

Coverage codes per R07 §5: D — a rule names the feature and only one live option satisfies it. P — rules bear but two or more live options satisfy them all. S — no rule bears.

Tally

44 contested sites. D = 6 · P = 30 · S = 8. cov(R07) = 6/44 = 0.136. (Counts recomputed from the table by analyse.py, not by hand; a hand tally written first said 7/28/9 and was wrong.)

Things the rules did not cover, noticed while translating

• Nothing in F1–F10 bears on what to do with a doublet (#13, #18) or a grammatical number (#35) or a tense anchor (#33). Those are four of the nine S codes and they are ordinary, high-frequency features of the passage.
• F5 cannot be violated by a translation that declares a dialect and holds it. It did no work here at all.
• F8 (fix a precise meaning) never fired. The passage has no polysemy the translator was tempted to preserve; the rule is written for a case this source does not present.
• The rules that did the most work were F1 and F6 — 19 sites between them. Both are the least specific rules in the set: "current, not archaic" and "idiomatic before close." They narrow; they rarely choose.

Any evaluative sentence in this log carries internal-judgment-only. None is intended.