Repository path: workshop/translations/pelsen/R10c-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«Pelsen» — Hjalmar Söderberg, 1898 → English, R10 against A-mchugh-presence

Regime R10 (anchored register target) v1.0. Translator: the lead agent, as a labeled subject (charter §3, A4). Target register: A-mchugh-presence — unmarked / literary-contemporary English — supplied as the nineteen frozen propositions C01–C19 (../target-propositions.json, from E-20260731f/claims.json, sha256 1e9430e4…, frozen S074).

Source: the whole story, 34 paragraphs, 1,273 Swedish words (workshop/canon/pelsen/pelsen-sv.txt). This English: 1,298 words (whitespace tokens over the body, the scene-divider asterisks excluded). Single pass, no return pass. Order: target propositions frozen (S074) → source ingested and read once → opportunity list frozen (9fb7ba2) → this file. The translator has read no English rendering of this story.

Contamination: high. Declared none before measurement and corrected: 24-token longest run, 31.1% of this English inside a shared run with a published rendering never read. See §Contamination.

The Fur

It was a cold winter that year. People shrank in the cold and got smaller, except the ones who had furs.

Judge Richardt had a big fur. It was practically part of the job, since he was managing director of a brand-new company. His old friend Dr. Henck had no fur at all: what he had instead was a beautiful wife and three children. Dr. Henck was thin and pale. Some people get fat from marrying and some get thin. Dr. Henck had gotten thin. And then it was Christmas Eve.

"I've had a bad year this year," Dr. Henck said to himself, at around three on Christmas Eve, just as the light was going at midday, on his way up to his old friend John Richardt's to borrow money. "I've had a very bad year. My health is shaky, not to say ruined. My patients, on the other hand, have picked up, nearly the whole set of them; I hardly ever see them these days. I'll probably die soon. My wife thinks so too, I've seen it in her. In that case it would be best if it happened before the end of January, when the damned life insurance premium is due."

By the time he had gotten this far in his thinking he was at the corner of Regeringsgatan and Hamngatan. As he was crossing to go on down Regeringsgatan he slipped on a slick sleigh track and went down, and at that same moment a cab-sleigh came along at full speed. The driver swore and the horse swerved aside by instinct, but Dr. Henck still took a knock on the shoulder from one of the runners, and on top of that a screw or a nail or something of the kind caught his overcoat and tore a big hole in it. People gathered around him. A policeman helped him to his feet, a young girl brushed the snow off him, an old woman waved her hands about his torn coat in a way that suggested she would have liked to mend it on the spot if she could have, a prince of the royal house who happened to be walking by picked up his cap and put it on his head, and then everything was all right again, except the coat.

"God, you look like hell, Gustaf," Judge Richardt said when Henck came up to his office.

"Yes, I've been run over," Henck said.

"That's just like you," Richardt said, and laughed good-naturedly. "But you can't walk home like that. You may as well borrow my fur, and I'll send a boy over to my place for my overcoat."

"Thanks," Dr. Henck said.

And after borrowing the hundred kronor he needed, he added:

"You'll come to dinner, then."

Richardt was a bachelor and usually spent Christmas Eve at the Hencks'.

*

On the way home Henck was in a better mood than he'd been in a long time.

"It's the fur," he said to himself. "If I'd had any sense I'd have gotten myself a fur on credit years ago. It would have shored up my confidence and made people think more of me. You can't pay a doctor in a fur the small fees you pay a doctor in an ordinary overcoat with the buttonholes torn open. It's a shame it never occurred to me before. Now it's too late."

He took a turn through Kungsträdgården. It was dark already, it had started snowing again, and the people he knew who passed him didn't recognize him.

"And who knows, for that matter, whether it is too late?" Henck went on to himself. "I'm not old yet, and I may have been wrong about my health. I'm as poor as a little fox in the woods; but so was John Richardt not long ago. My wife has been cold and unkind to me lately. She'd certainly start loving me again if I could earn more money and if I went about in a fur. It has seemed to me that she's liked John better since he got himself a fur than she did before. She was a little taken with him when she was a girl, too, I think; but he never proposed to her — on the contrary he told her, and told everybody, that he would never dare marry on less than ten thousand a year. But I dared; and Ellen was a poor girl and wanted very much to be married. I don't think she was in love with me in the way that would have let me seduce her if I'd wanted to. But then I didn't want to; how could I have dreamed of a love like that? I haven't done that since I was sixteen and saw Faust at the Opera for the first time, with Arnoldson. All the same I'm sure she was fond of me the first while we were married; you don't get that wrong. Why shouldn't she be able to again? In the first while after we were married she always said spiteful things to John whenever they met. But then he started a company and took us to the theater now and then and got himself a fur. And then of course in time my wife got tired of saying spiteful things to him."

*

Henck still had a few errands to run before dinner. It was already half past five when he got home loaded down with packages. His left shoulder was very sore; otherwise there was nothing to remind him of his accident earlier in the day, except the fur.

"It'll be fun to see the face my wife makes when she sees me in a fur," Dr. Henck said to himself.

The hall was completely dark; the lamp was never lit except during office hours.

"There she is in the sitting room," Dr. Henck thought. "She walks as lightly as a little bird. It's odd that my heart still warms every time I hear her step in the next room."

Dr. Henck was right to think his wife would give him a friendlier welcome when he was wearing a fur than she usually did. She pressed close against him in the darkest corner of the hall, put her arms around his neck and kissed him warmly and deeply. Then she buried her head in his fur collar and whispered:

"Gustaf isn't home yet."

"Yes," Dr. Henck answered, in a slightly unsteady voice, stroking her hair with both hands, "yes, he is home."

*

A big fire was burning in Dr. Henck's study. There was whisky and water on the table.

Judge Richardt lay stretched out in a big leather armchair smoking a cigar. Dr. Henck sat slumped in the corner of the sofa. The door stood open to the front room, where Mrs. Henck and the children were lighting the Christmas tree.

Dinner had been very quiet. Only the children had chirped and talked over each other and been happy.

"You're not saying anything, old man," Richardt said. "Sitting there brooding over your torn overcoat?"

"No," Henck answered. "Over the fur, more likely."

It was quiet for a few minutes before he went on:

"I'm thinking about something else, too. I'm sitting here thinking that this is the last Christmas we'll spend together. I'm a doctor and I know I don't have many days left. I know it now with complete certainty. So I want to thank you for all the kindness you've shown me and my wife lately."

"Oh, you're wrong," Richardt muttered, and looked away.

"No," Henck answered, "I'm not wrong. And I want to thank you as well for lending me your fur. It has given me the last seconds of happiness I have known in my life."

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written and frozen with it. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only, which the front matter also carries for the whole file. A decision is logged when two or more renderings were live at the moment of writing. Target codes are R10 §5: A = taken in order to satisfy a numbered proposition; X = a proposition bore and was not followed; N = no proposition bore.

Codes, counted

32 logged decisions. A at 24, X at 6 (##8, 22, 26, 27, 28 and the half of #5), N at 1, with #5 and #8 carrying both codes and counted in each. These are contested sites only — the log under-counts total choices by construction, exactly as R10 §5 says.

Every X is on C08 or C12 — the attributing verbs and the no-gloss rule — and the concentration was not predicted. The opportunity list expected the conflict at C08 and named it; it did not expect that C12 would be violated by a reticence (#8, unpacking a Nordic winter noun) rather than by a gloss.

Which propositions were reachable at all. Of nineteen, eleven bore on at least one logged decision (C01, C02, C03, C05, C06, C08, C09, C10, C11, C12, C15, C16, C19 — thirteen by name, of which C01, C06, C09 and C10 bore only in company). Six bore on nothing: C04, C07, C13, C14, C17, C18. That is the opportunity list's prediction, made before translating, holding at five of its six named cases — and one it did not name, C18, which turns out to be unactionable in the same way: a translator cannot decide to have no idiolect, only decline to add one.

What was hard, apart from the above

The story turns on a garment being visually anonymous in a dark hall, and English has no single word that is both the fur coat and, worn, an unreadable silhouette. Everything the log does with «pels» is downstream of that.

Söderberg's interiority is quoted, not free-indirect — sade han till sig själf three times over — so the anchor's C06 had almost nothing to act on. A translator who wanted to satisfy C06 would have had to convert quoted monologue into free indirect discourse, which is not a register decision but a rewrite, and it was not done.

The last line's «de sista sekunder af lycka jag har känt i lifvet» was the one place where a flatter English was available (the last happy seconds I've had) and was declined. The chosen rendering keeps the source's slightly formal cadence at the one point where the story asks for it. internal-judgment-only.

Contamination

⚠ MEASURED AFTER THE FREEZE, AND IT IS THE LARGEST OVERLAP THIS PROJECT HAS EVER RECORDED FOR A LEAD TRANSLATION. The front matter's contamination: field was written none before the measurement and is corrected to high in the same commit that adds this section. The translation and the log above were committed at 217ce02, before gate/fetch_comparator.py was written or run; the comparator was located, sliced and written to disk by that script, which prints counts and not prose.

Comparator: Hjalmar Söderberg, "The Fur Coat", tr. Charles Wharton Stork, in Modern Swedish Masterpieces: Short Stories (E. P. Dutton, 1923), Project Gutenberg 64808. Public domain. Not canonical — an obscure single-volume anthology rendering, not a standard English Söderberg.

tools/dependence_check.py, unmodified, whole text against whole text:

The four longest:

24 — "in it people gathered around him a policeman helped him to his feet a young girl brushed the snow off him an old woman" 17 — "marry on less than ten thousand a year but i dared and ellen was a poor girl" 16 — "too late henck went on to himself i'm not old yet and i may have been" 15 — "it has given me the last seconds of happiness i have known in my life"

Three things about this that the project should not soften.

(i) 24 tokens exceeds every prior lead figure. CLAUDE.md records the measured range across five lead translations as 0 tokens (Ovid) to 21 (Turgenev–Garnett). This is 24, on a language the project had never used, against a comparator that is not canonical.

(ii) The 15-token run is the story's last sentence, and it is the one site where this log records declining a flatter alternative. Entry §"What was hard" above, written before the comparator existed, says the flatter English the last happy seconds I've had was available and was not taken because the source's cadence asks for the fuller one. The fuller one is Stork's, word for word, for fifteen tokens. That is recorded as a fact about the two texts and not as a claim about how it happened — which the project's own instruments cannot settle from a run length (RS-20260728b, RS-20260730f, and wiki/backlog.md's standing row on run length as a proxy).

(iii) It is the single strongest case yet against CLAUDE.md's canonicity clause. That clause says the lead "cannot serve as the independent third translator for any work whose standard English translation is canonical", which implies obscurity is protective. Stork 1923 is about as obscure as a published English Söderberg gets, and it produced a longer run than Garnett did. S065 measured the same inversion at 10 tokens against canonical Garnett and 11 against non-canonical Fell; this is 24 against the obscure one.

Consequence for this artifact. T-pelsen-R10c-v1 is a labeled subject and nothing more. It may not be used as an independent third translator anywhere, and no comparison that treats it as independent of the published English record is admissible. Its use in ARM-anchor-instance is unaffected, because that arm uses the translator's log — which propositions bore on which decisions — and never the English as evidence about anything.

Whether the runs are forced is measured separately, in workshop/experiments/E-20260801c-anchor-instance/, stage F.