Repository path: workshop/translations/osso-di-morto/R08-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-osso-di-morto-R08-v1 — Tarchetti, «Un osso di morto», opening, under R08 (resistancy)

• Source. As T-osso-di-morto-R07-v1: Tarchetti, «Un osso di morto», Racconti fantastici (1869), opening two paragraphs, 362 words, public domain.
• Regime. R08 v1.0 (resistancy), frozen at 9846fbd before the source was read for translation.
• Translated from the source, not from the R07 rendering. The R07 text was written first, in the same session; it could not be unseen, and that is declared here as a limitation of the pairing rather than denied. What was not done: no line of R07 was consulted while writing, and no R08 choice was made by inverting an R07 choice — where the two agree (sites 9 and 44 below), they agree because both rule sets pointed the same way.
• Translated by the lead agent, in session. Cost $0; not ledgered.
• Contamination suspected, unmeasurable, on the same basis as the R07 artifact.
• Evaluation. None designed. The lead never judges its own translation (charter §5).

Translation

I leave to whoever reads me the appraisal of the inexplicable fact I am about to relate.

In 1855, having domiciled myself at Pavia, had given myself to the study of drawing in a private school of that city; and after some months' sojourn had contracted a connection with a certain Federico M., who was professor of pathology and of clinical practice for the university teaching, and who died of a fulminant apoplexy a few months after having known him. He was a man most loving of the sciences, and of his own in particular — he had virtues and endowments of mind not common — save that, like all anatomists and clinicians in general, he was profoundly and incurably a sceptic — was so by conviction, nor could I ever bring him over to my beliefs, for all that I laboured at it in the impassioned and heated discussions we had every day in this regard. Nonetheless — and it pleases me to render this justice to his memory — he had always shown himself tolerant of those convictions which were not his own; and I and as many as knew him have kept the dearest remembrance of him. A few days before his death he had counselled me to attend his lessons in anatomy, adducing that I should draw from them not a few cognitions serviceable to my art of drawing: I consented, though repugnant; and pushed by the vanity of appearing to him less fearful than I was, asked of him some human bones, which he gave me and which I set upon the chimneypiece of my room. With his death I had ceased to frequent the anatomical course, and later had desisted also from the study of drawing. Nonetheless had kept those bones still for many years, for the habit of seeing them had rendered them almost indifferent to me, and it is no more than a few months since, taken by sudden fears, I resolved to bury them, retaining by me nothing but a bare knee-wheel. This little bone, spherical and smooth, which for its shape and its smallness I had destined, from the first instant I had it, to discharge the office of a paperweight — as one that called up to me no frightful idea — was found already set these eleven years upon my writing-table, when I was deprived of it in the inexplicable manner I am about to relate.

408 words (source 362; R07 373). At 2,194 characters the R08 rendering is the same length in characters as the Italian source, to the character — a coincidence, recorded because it is the sort of number that invites over-reading.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written and frozen with it. Codes as R07 §5, plus INT where the decision was made on an interpretation of what the source means rather than by any rule (R08 §5a).

Tally

45 contested sites. D = 39 · P = 6 · S = 0. INT = 1. cov(R08) = 39/45 = 0.867.

The rule conflict, and why it is reported separately

Site 36 is not covered by the frozen D/P/S scheme at all. R6 ("calque where the source's figure is not English") and R9 ("stop short of the parodic") pull in opposite directions on «rotella», and no live option satisfies both: "kneecap" violates R6, "knee-wheel" risks R9. The spec's definition of P — "two or more live options satisfy all of them" — is false here, and so is the definition of D. The site is recorded as P because that is the nearer of the two, and the gap is recorded as a finding rather than papered over. Sites 4, 14, 17 and 39 are the opposite case and are cleanly P: R3 licenses archaism without requiring it, so it can never decide between two dated options.

Things worth recording, noticed while translating

• R5 did the most conspicuous work and it is Venuti's own move. Dropping the English subject pronoun where the Italian verb carries it (#7, #16, #27) is exactly what he describes doing to «È venuta» in "L'idea centrale" — and the result here has the same property he claims for his: it makes the English stranger than the Italian, because Italian licenses the omission and English does not.
• The high D-rate is not the same thing as a rule set doing the work. Twenty-eight of the thirty-nine D codes cite R2 or R6, and both are "follow the source" rules. A rule that says do what the source does will decide almost any site, because the source has already decided it. That is a structural reason to expect cov(R08) > cov(R07) which has nothing to do with foreignization being better specified — and it is the opposite of what this session predicted.
• S = 0 is suspicious and is reported as such. Every site the R07 rules were silent on — doublets, number, tense anchor — R2 answers automatically, because R2 is a rule about everything.
• R10 (abusive fidelity) never fired. No site was decided by it. The regime's own limitation note predicted it could absorb anything; on this passage it absorbed nothing.
• R1 fired once (#15, with R2). This prose is periodic and dash-broken but not discontinuous in De Angelis's sense; the rule set was built from a poet whose syntax fragments, and the source here does not fragment.

Any evaluative sentence in this log carries internal-judgment-only.