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

T-voyage-jardin-R04-v1 — Karr, «Voyage autour de mon jardin», Lettre I

Source. Alphonse Karr, Voyage autour de mon jardin (Paris: Curmer, 1851; first serialised 1845), Lettre I; copy-text Project Gutenberg #38385. Span: «Chemin faisant, je commençai à penser» → «…captivés par ce magnifique spectacle.», 431 French words, SHA-256 e7802a57d8ab7531… (full hash in workshop/experiments/E-20260807-narrator-unknown/materials/sources.json).

Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source only. Draft frozen first as T-voyage-jardin-R06-v1 (§Procedure 2a). Translator: lead. Cost $0, never ledgered.

Contamination: none, measured. A published English rendering exists (A Tour Round My Garden, tr. Rev. J. G. Wood, London: Routledge, 1855) and was not read before this translation and its log were frozen. Measured against it by tools/dependence_check.py after the freeze: 5 shared 7-grams, 0 shared 12-grams, 0 shared 15-grams, longest common run 8 tokens — clean (materials/contamination.json). The comparator is uncorrected OCR, which can only depress these counts; that is stated rather than smoothed.

Lineage. T-voyage-jardin-R06-v1 → this. Evaluations: E-20260807-narrator-unknown (profiled as a source–target crossing item; not judged for quality anywhere).

On the way home I began to think rather ill of you. I had found your manner almost disdainful; you seemed flattered by the notice your departure was attracting, and still more by your turn-out; you seemed to be leaving your street, your house and your old friend behind you the way one leaves things that are worn out and of no further use.

Little by little I let feelings very near to hatred take root in my heart on your account; but happily I smothered them soon enough, when I discovered that they were nothing else in the world but envy.

Every happiness stirs up a little hatred. We ask nothing better than to fancy that those who enjoy it have done us some grave wrong, which lets us give a rather nobler name to that low and shameful feeling whose real name is envy, and call it just resentment, legitimate pride, wounded dignity.

Once I had recognised the monster I got the better of it soon enough, and I had promptly justified you. Justifying myself before my own tribunal was not so easy.

Certainly the devil would have small hold on us if he offered us the baits he holds out under their true names.

Home again, I envied your happiness still; but I no longer envied it in you, and you had become for me an excellent and dependable friend again as soon as I had reasonably left off looking in you for those chimerical proportions we impose upon a poor Pylades, without ever troubling to examine whether we are ourselves to another what we require another to be to us: in a word, everyone wants to have a friend, and hardly anyone troubles to be one.

Only, since you had got clear of my ill humour, I fell upon fate instead, and complained bitterly of the ill fortune that would not let me set off as you had, to go and see other countries, other men, other climates; and I became aware of my poverty, to which until then I had scarcely given a thought.

And what! I said to myself, am I to be for ever like that goat I see tethered to a stake in the middle of a field? She has already cropped every blade inside the circle her rope allows her, and must begin again on lucerne already shorn to the likeness of velvet.

As I said this I was leaning on the rail of a low window that gives on my garden, looking in front of me without seeing. The sun was going down; my eyes first, and then my soul, were soon taken captive by that magnificent spectacle.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-07 (S125), at translation time, before the study limb of E-20260807-narrator-unknown was designed. Decisions and alternatives; no quality claims. Any evaluative sentence here is internal-judgment-only.

1. «votre train» → "your turn-out", revised from "your equipage". «Train» here is the whole apparatus of the departure — carriage, courier, postilion, valet — as a display. Equipage (draft) is exact for the carriage-and-servants but is now a museum word in English and pulls the sentence up in register; turn-out is period, colloquial-genteel, and covers the same referent. The choice moves the sentence down, which is the direction English's shelf makes cheap (RS-20260806g §6); the alternative would have cost register I did not want to spend here.
2. «justifié» / «justifier» — the repetition restored in revision. The draft had "I had you acquitted on the spot. Acquitting myself before my own tribunal was not so easy." That reads better and destroys the figure: Karr uses the same verb twice so that the second clause turns the first one round on the speaker, and tribunal is the word that makes the pair legal. Revised to "I had promptly justified you. Justifying myself before my own tribunal was not so easy." The revision is the flatter English and the closer figure, and I took the figure.
3. «un pauvre Pylade» — a type-name with no English currency. Pylades is the type of the perfect friend; French can use the bare name as a common noun and English cannot without a gloss. Options: a poor Pylades (chosen), some poor Damon (the English pair is Damon and Pythias — a substitution, and a domestication), a poor devoted friend (an explicitation, which the passage does not need because the surrounding sentence already says what a friend is). Chosen the bare name. An English reader who does not know it loses the joke; an English reader who does gets exactly what the French gives. Nothing here can serve both.
4. «amorces» → "baits". Lures and hooks were live. Baits keeps the devil's fishing and is the plainer word; amorce is also "priming/percussion cap", but the fishing sense is the one the verb «tend» selects.
5. «je m'aperçus de ma pauvreté» → "I became aware of my poverty". The draft had "I noticed my poverty", which is crisper and wrong in aspect: «s'apercevoir de» is the dawning, not the noticing, and the sentence's point is that the poverty had been there all along.
6. The goat. «elle a brouté déjà toute l'herbe» — "she has already cropped all the grass" (draft) → "cropped every blade" in revision, to keep the sentence's rhythm against the long relative clause that follows. This is a small addition of emphasis the French does not make, and it is the only place in this passage where I chose cadence over literal extent.
7. «je regardais machinalement devant moi» → "looking in front of me without seeing". Looking mechanically in front of me (draft) is the literal and is odd English; the chosen phrase substitutes the effect for the manner. This is an interpretation, not a rendering: Karr says how the looking was done, and I have said what it amounted to.
8. Register, generally. The passage is a familiar letter that keeps sliding into the pulpit («Tout bonheur excite un peu de haine», «Certes, le diable…») and back out again. The sliding is carried in French largely by the on constructions, which move between "one" and "we" and "people". I have used "we" throughout for these, which fixes the narrator inside the generalisation. One was live and would have held him outside it. The choice is uniform and was made once, for the whole passage.