Repository path: workshop/translations/zapiski-oct3/R19-v3/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-zapiski-oct3-R19-v3 — the same paragraph, specification B: self-knowledge moved

• Source. Identical to T-zapiski-oct3-R19-v1: Gogol, «Записки сумасшедшего», Октября 3 ¶1, 306 Russian words, materials/source.txt.
• Regime. R19 v1.0. Specification B — MOVE K6 self-knowledge; HOLD K1 register, K2 rhythm, K3 diction temperature, K4 idiosyncrasy, K5 distance. Single pass, no revision.
• Drafting order and the dependence it creates (R19 Q4). Written third, from the Russian, with C's propositional inventory in view. Not an independent second translation; shared wording with C is carryover by construction, and here it is deliberate and near-total — the HOLD set is five sixths of the declared carrier list.
• Dialect: British English, as C. Register point: unmarked / literary-contemporary, held.
• Translated by the lead agent, in session. Cost $0; not ledgered.
• No published rendering was read before all three members and their logs were frozen.

Today an extraordinary thing happened to me. I got up rather late, and when Mavra brought in my boots, cleaned, I asked what the time was. Hearing that ten had struck long ago, I dressed in a great hurry. I admit I would not have gone in to the department at all, knowing in advance the sour face our section head would pull. He has been at me for ages: "What is this muddle you always have in your head, my dear fellow? Sometimes you tear about like a scalded cat, you get a case into such a tangle that Satan himself could not unpick it, you write a title with a small letter, you leave off the date and the number." Damned heron! He is jealous — or so I prefer to call it — jealous that I sit in the Director's own study and trim the quills for His Excellency. Trim the quills. In short, I would not have gone in at all but for the hope of catching the treasurer and begging something out of that Jew, some part of my salary in advance. There's a creature for you! That he should ever pay out a month's money before the day — Lord above, the Last Judgment will come first. Ask till you burst, be in the direst need — he will not part with it, the grey devil. And at home his own cook slaps his face. The whole world knows it, and I bring it up whenever I want him smaller. I cannot see what there is to be got out of serving in a department. No resources of any kind. Now the provincial board, the civil and treasury chambers — that is quite another matter, I tell myself. There you will see some fellow squeezed into a corner, scribbling away. A wretched little coat on him, a face you want to spit at — and then look at the country house he takes! Don't so much as offer him a gilt porcelain cup: "That," he says, "is a present for a doctor." What he wants is a pair of trotters, or a droshky, or a beaver worth three hundred roubles. To look at him, meek as anything; he speaks so delicately — "Lend me your little knife, I must mend my pen" — and then he cleans a petitioner out and leaves him standing in his shirt. And I am on my way to the treasurer. Still, our service is a noble one. There is a cleanliness about everything that the provincial board will never see in its life. Mahogany desks. Every chief speaking to you politely. Yes, I admit it: if it were not for the nobility of the service I should have left the department long ago.

Translator's log

Frozen before any evaluation of this triple was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

The problem this member is, stated first

Self-knowledge is not a surface property, and moving it cannot be done for free. A's five moves are all executable by substitution: a formal word exists for every plain one. There is no word that means what jealous means and additionally means and I know it. What English has instead is marking — a clause, a repetition, a juxtaposition that stands outside the sentence it comments on — and every marking device either asserts something new or rearranges what is there.

So this member was written under a rule the specification does not contain and the log states here because it governed every choice: prefer marking that repeats or rearranges an existing proposition to marking that adds one; where an addition is unavoidable, make it a statement about the narrator's own practice and nothing else; count them.

The eight departures from C, exhaustively

Three additions, five departures that add nothing. Every addition is a first-person statement about how the narrator handles his own material; none supplies a new fact about Mavra, the chief, the treasurer, the provincial clerk, the department, or the day.

What was hard

Site 6 was the hardest and it is the one I am least sure of (internal-judgment-only). The whole comedy of the paragraph is that a page of moral outrage about other men's extortion sits three sentences from the narrator's own errand, and C leaves the two facts side by side and unconnected. B has to make the man see the connection. The options were an explicit statement of the hypocrisy (and I am no better, which adds a judgment and would have been a fourth addition, and a large one), or the flat restatement chosen — a fact already on the page, put back where it hurts. The flat restatement is the whole irony in seven words if it works and is invisible if it does not.

Site 7 strains the HOLD. Breaking a colon and a compound into four fragments is a rhythm change, and K2 is in the HOLD set. It is inside C's own repertoire — C already has No resources of any kind. as a fragment — but it is not zero, and the manipulation check will measure K2 on this member for exactly this reason. Recorded before the measurement, not after.

What the passage would not let me do. I twice wrote a sentence in which the narrator sees that the nobility of his service amounts to furniture and a pronoun, and cut it both times: it is the paragraph's best joke and it is Gogol's, made by arrangement, and having the narrator make it explicitly would have been a fourth addition and the loudest one. Site 7's fragments are what survived of that attempt — the same joke, made by punctuation.

A consequence for voice's carriers that is a translator's observation and not a result (internal-judgment-only): the five carriers A moves are all things a translator can choose a different word for. The property B moves is not; it lives in what is put next to what. If the readers separate B from C at all, they will be separating on something that is not lexical, and this log's eight-row table is the whole of the material they could be separating on.