Repository path: workshop/translations/quijote-I20/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-quijote-I20-R04-v1 — Cervantes, Don Quijote I.20, Sancho's tale, revised

The R06 draft (T-quijote-I20-R06-v1) was committed at 72acb43 before this revision began, so the R06/R04 pair is paired by construction and not reconstructed.

• Source: as T-quijote-I20-R06-v1. Locus 778 Spanish words, SHA-256 d8bd3e370faf2e04f121deaa1a1344d51f12ccb7376ba905265d8f205417fef1.
• Regime: R04 (lead close translation, source-only). Cost: $0, never ledgered.
• Priming: the locus was moved after a declared R04 §1 breach. The full declaration is on the R06 artifact and is not repeated here; it applies equally to this one.

Contamination — measured

suspected. The measurement against the two published renderings whose English of this locus the lead had not seen before freezing is reported in E-20260805f §Gate and summarised on the result page. Don Quijote is among the most translated books in existence; the lead does not claim independence from remembered renderings, and no part of ARM-translated-register's design turns on its having any. This rendering enters the arm as a labeled subject and as the source of a translator's log, never as an independent third translation.

Translation (revised)

"Well then, Sancho, since Rocinante cannot stir, I am content to wait for the dawn to smile, though I weep for as long as she is in coming."

"There's no call for weeping," said Sancho, "for I'll keep you entertained telling stories from now till daylight — unless you'd care to get down and stretch out a while on the green grass, the way knights errant do, so as to be better rested when the day comes and the moment for taking on this outlandish adventure that's waiting for you."

"What do you mean, get down? What do you mean, sleep?" said Don Quixote. "Am I, by any chance, one of those knights who take their rest in the middle of danger? Sleep yourself — you were born to sleep — or do what you like; I shall do whatever I see best suits my purpose."

"Don't be angry, sir," Sancho answered. "I didn't mean anything by it."

And going up to him he put one hand on the front saddle-bow and the other on the back one, so that he was left clasping his master's left thigh, not daring to move a finger's breadth from it: such was the fear he had of the blows, which were still sounding in turn. Don Quixote told him to tell some story to pass the time, as he had promised, to which Sancho said he would if the dread of what he was hearing would let him.

"But all the same, I'll make an effort to tell a story that, if I manage to tell it right and nobody stops me, is the best story there is. Now pay attention, sir, for I'm beginning. 'Once upon a time, and may whatever good comes be for everybody, and whatever harm, for whoever goes looking for it...' And mind, sir, that the beginning the ancients gave their old tales wasn't just anyhow: it was a saying of Cato the Sensorious the Roman, which goes, 'and whatever harm, for whoever goes looking for it' — which fits in here like a ring on a finger, so that you'll hold still and not go looking for harm anywhere, and instead we'll turn back by some other road, since nobody's forcing us to follow this one, where so many frights come at us."

"Get on with your story, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and leave me to worry about which road we take."

"I say, then," Sancho went on, "that in a village in Extremadura there was a goatherd shepherd — I mean to say, one that kept goats — and this shepherd or goatherd, as I say, of my story, was called Lope Ruiz; and this Lope Ruiz was in love with a shepherdess called Torralba, and this shepherdess called Torralba was the daughter of a rich stockman, and this rich stockman —"

"If that's how you tell your story, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "saying everything twice over, you won't be done in two days. Tell it straight through and tell it like a man of sense, or else say nothing at all."

"The way I'm telling it," Sancho answered, "is the way they tell all the old tales where I come from, and I don't know how to tell it any other way, and it isn't right for you to ask me to start new customs."

"Tell it how you like," said Don Quixote. "Since fortune will have it that I can't help listening to you, go on."

"So then, sir of my soul," Sancho went on, "as I've said already, this shepherd was in love with Torralba the shepherdess, who was a sturdy girl, and wild with it, and ran a bit to the mannish, because she had a few hairs of a moustache — I can see her now."

"Then you knew her?" said Don Quixote.

"I never knew her," Sancho answered, "but the man who told me this story told me it was so true and certain that when I told it to anybody else I could safely swear I'd seen the whole of it. So then, with the days coming and the days going, the devil, who never sleeps and tangles everything, brought it about that the love the shepherd had for the shepherdess turned into a grudge and ill will; and the cause of it, according to wicked tongues, was a certain quantity of small jealousies she gave him, of the sort that go over the line and get into forbidden ground; and the shepherd hated her so much from then on that, so as not to see her, he decided to take himself away from that country and go where his eyes would never see her again. Torralba, once she found herself scorned by Lope, was fond of him straight away, more than she'd ever been fond of him before."

"That is the natural condition of women," said Don Quixote: "to scorn whoever loves them and love whoever hates them. Go on, Sancho."

Revision log (R04 step 2; the draft log is frozen on the R06 artifact and is not amended here)

Eleven changes. The draft's own log named D2 as its largest unresolved tension, before any measurement existed; R1 below resolves it in the direction the draft's declared policy required, and it is the largest change in the passage.

• R1 — «vuestra merced» ×8: "your worship" → "you", with "sir" placed where deference needs marking. The draft wrote the traditional your worship against its own standing decision. The revision follows the decision. The reason is a fact about English rather than a preference: Spanish makes deference with a third-person honorific used as a pronoun, and English has no such pronoun — it lost the whole category. So vuestra merced has no equivalent: it becomes either "you", which is plain and drops the deference from the grammar, or "your worship", which restores the deference and, in 2026, costumes the speaker. English can only put the deference back as a vocative ("sir"), which is a different part of the sentence and a lighter mark. The revision takes that route: "your worship" survives nowhere; "sir" stands in three places where Sancho is pleading or performing, and the other five become plain "you".
• Kept unchanged: the two independent «señor mío» vocatives already rendered "sir" (D4).
• R2 — «Érase que se era…» reworded to "may whatever good comes be for everybody, and whatever harm, for whoever goes looking for it". The draft's "the good that comes come for everybody" has an audible stutter that is the English's accident and not the Spanish's. The re-quotation three lines later is changed identically, because Don Quixote's complaint requires the two to match word for word (D3).
• R3 — "in the midst of dangers" → "in the middle of danger". «en los peligros»; the draft reached for the more literary preposition without the Spanish asking.
• R4 — "what I see best befits my purpose" → "whatever I see best suits my purpose". Befits is a mark the Spanish «viene con» does not carry. Don Quixote is the marked speaker in this passage, but he is marked by what he says, not by a translator's diction.
• R5 — "he ended up with his arms round his master's left thigh" → "he was left clasping his master's left thigh". Closer to «quedó abrazado», and removes an idiom ("ended up") that belongs to a lower register than the narrator's.
• R6 — "still sounding, one after another" → "still sounding in turn". «alternativamente»: the blows alternate, which is the detail that later identifies them as fulling-hammers. The draft's phrase loses the alternation and keeps only the succession.
• R7 — "Now let your worship pay attention" → "Now pay attention, sir". Part of R1, listed separately because it also changes the clause's shape: the Spanish imperative is direct and the draft's third-person construction made it circumlocutory.
• R8 — "leave the road we're to take to me" → "leave me to worry about which road we take". «déjame a mí el cuidado» — the cuidado is the point, and the draft dropped it while producing a sentence with two "to"s in four words.
• R9 — "it isn't right for your worship to ask me" → "it isn't right for you to ask me". R1.
• R10 — "where so many frights come at us" — reviewed against «donde tantos miedos nos sobresaltan» and left unchanged. Recorded because it was reopened: sobresaltar is to startle, and "come at us" adds an approach the Spanish does not have; every plainer alternative ("where so many frights startle us") reads as a gloss. Kept, with the addition noted as a small loss.
• R11 — "Cato the Sensorious" — reopened and left unchanged (D5). "Cato the Zonzorine" and "Cato the Dunsorious" were both re-examined; the first loses the joke for an English reader and the second stops sounding like a real Roman epithet, which is what makes the malapropism a malapropism.

What the revision did not touch, and why it matters to E-20260805f. The deliberate clumsiness at D8 — "a goatherd shepherd — I mean to say, one that kept goats", and the three-fold "this shepherdess called Torralba" — was reviewed and kept intact. The self-revision pass therefore did not simply smooth the English toward the translator's default: it moved eight sites toward plain current idiom (R1, R2, R3, R4, R5, R7, R8, R9) and deliberately protected one site of source-imposed awkwardness. Both directions are in the same pass.