Repository path: workshop/translations/torture-esperance/R06-gate-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

«La Torture par l'espérance» — gate span, R06 (lead single pass), v1

What this is. The contamination gate unit of note (bcd) for the second candidate work of this session, translated before the locus of the pair was selected and before any line of the locus was rendered. The first candidate, Maupassant's «Menuet», was discarded when its own gate fired — T-menuet-R06-gate-v1, longest common run 14 tokens against three clean nulls. This is the replacement, and it was gated on identical terms.

Source. Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, «La Torture par l'espérance», in Nouveaux Contes cruels, Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1893, pp. 17–32 (first published 1888). Text from French Wikisource (validated transcription of the Calmann Lévy djvu), stored at workshop/canon/torture-esperance/source-fr.txt. Public domain (Villiers d. 1889).

Gate span = paragraphs 0–2, 214 French words — the descent to the cell and the prisoner's lineage. Disjoint from the locus (paragraphs 21–26), which was chosen only after this gate returned.

Regime. R06 v1.0 — read the source, write once, stop. No return pass.

Translated by the lead agent as a labeled subject, in session, at no API cost. The lead never judges its own translation (charter §5).

Contamination: none, measured — figures in ## Gate result below. No published rendering of this story into any language was read before this file was frozen, and none has been read since: the comparator was fetched to a scratch path outside the repository by script, consumed by tools/dependence_check.py as a token stream, and never displayed. Logged in wiki/base/consulted.md.

The translation

Beneath the vaults of the Official at Saragossa, at the fall of an evening long ago, the venerable Pedro Arbuez d'Espila, sixth prior of the Dominicans of Segovia, third Grand Inquisitor of Spain — followed by a fra redemptor (master torturer) and preceded by two familiars of the Holy Office, these last carrying lanterns — went down towards a forgotten cell. The lock of a massive door grated; they entered a mephitic in pace, where the light admitted on sufferance from above allowed one to make out, among rings sealed into the walls, a rack blackened with blood, a brazier, a pitcher. On a litter of dung, held fast by fetters, the iron collar at his neck, there sat, haggard, a man in rags, of an age no longer to be told.

This prisoner was none other than rabbi Aser Abarbanel, an Aragonese Jew who, charged with usury and with pitiless contempt for the Poor, had for more than a year been put daily to the torture. Nevertheless, his "blindness being as tough as his hide", he had refused to abjure.

Proud of a descent several thousand years deep, vain of his ancient forefathers — for every Jew worthy of the name is jealous of his blood — he came down, talmudically, from Othoniel, and consequently from Ipsiboë, wife of that last Judge of Israel: a circumstance which had likewise sustained his courage through the worst of the unceasing torments.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written; frozen with it. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

• G1 — le jour de souffrance. An architectural term of art: a jour de souffrance is a borrowed-light opening onto a neighbour's property, tolerated rather than owned by right. Villiers is punning it against the torture chamber. English has ancient lights and borrowed light, and neither carries suffering. Took "the light admitted on sufferance", which keeps the legal sense of grudging permission and lets sufferance do the pun's work; borrowed light and the flat the daylight from above were both live and both drop one half.
• G2 — l'Official. The bishop's court, and by extension its building. Kept as the Official, capitalised, unglossed — the sentence's own furniture (Grand Inquisitor, Holy Office, familiars) supplies the frame. The Officiality and the ecclesiastical court were the alternatives; the first is an English word almost nobody holds, the second explains the atmosphere away.
• G3 — fra redemptor and in pace. Villiers leaves both in the original with a parenthetical gloss for the first only. Kept exactly that asymmetry, italicised, gloss and all. Glossing in pace would have been a kindness the author declined.
• G4 — un cachot perdu. Perdu is lost, but the sense is buried, out of the way, forgotten in the fabric. Took a forgotten cell; a lost dungeon reads as gothic furniture, which this sentence is otherwise at pains to make administrative.
• G5 — the em-dashed interpolations. Villiers punctuates with a comma-plus-dash (, —) that English typography has no equivalent for. Rendered as paired em-dashes throughout, which regularises a mannerism; the alternative was to keep the comma before the dash and look like an error.
• G6 — son « aveuglement étant aussi dur que son cuir ». The quotation marks are the inquisitors', reported. Kept the quotation marks and the flat literalness of as tough as his hide; as thick as his skin is the English idiom and would erase the fact that the phrase is being quoted from someone else's mouth.
• G7 — Fier … orgueilleux. Two near-synonyms in one clause. Took proud … vain, which splits them; proud … prouder still keeps the doubling and loses orgueil's edge of self-regard, which the aside about blood then confirms.
• G8 — filiation plusieurs fois millénaire. Literally a filiation several times millennial. Took a descent several thousand years deep; a lineage many centuries old understates it, and a filiation many times millennial is not English.

Gate result

tools/dependence_check.py, unmodified, run by workshop/experiments/E-20260802c-regime-scoring/materials/gate.py. Comparator: the anonymous English "The Torture by Hope" in Masterpieces of Mystery in Four Volumes: Riddle Stories, ed. Joseph Lewis French (Project Gutenberg #29704), public domain — whole story, body never read. Nulls: three other stories in the same public-domain anthology, by other authors and other translators, which is a weaker null than a same-translator floor and is stated as such.

Discard rule, frozen before the measurement and identical to «Menuet»'s: longest common run ≥ 12 tokens, or ≥ 1 shared 12-gram, and the work is discarded as a limb.

Result: the gate FIRED and «La Torture par l'espérance» was DISCARDED too.

The run is "the venerable pedro arbuez d'espila sixth prior of the dominicans of segovia" — twelve tokens of which nine are a proper name and an ecclesiastical title, i.e. the one stretch of this paragraph where two independent translators have almost no freedom to differ. That is exactly the case the tool's own documentation warns about, and the honest reading is that this firing is much weaker evidence of dependence than «Menuet»'s fourteen tokens of ordinary prose.

The work was discarded anyway. The rule was frozen, it had already fired once that session, and re-reading a threshold after watching it fire twice is precisely the move this project's verification discipline exists to stop. The cost — a good text lost to a rule that was probably too blunt for this one case — is recorded rather than avoided. Raw figures: workshop/experiments/E-20260802c-regime-scoring/materials/gate-torture.json.

One exposure, declared. While debugging the heading extraction for this gate — the anthology's story titles are followed by an all-caps author line, which collapsed the slice to zero words and produced a vacuous "clean" verdict until a guard was added — roughly twenty words of the comparator's opening were printed to the lead's console. This translation was already frozen, so the figure above is a pre-exposure measurement.