Chapter seven of twenty-two

La casa de los relojes detenidos The House of Stopped Clocks

Isabel has settled forty of this chapter's forty-four segments. Three wait on a decision only she can make, and the press cannot send one of them until it clears an English stanza it does not own.

Author: Beatriz Ocampo-Salas
Translator: Isabel Marchetti
Editor: Tom Okonkwo
Chapter due: 14 October

Source Spanish, Argentina

Working translation English

Segments 1 to 26, settled

Source

El sereno pasó a las tres y no cantó la hora. Mi abuela dijo que era la primera vez en cuarenta años, y que por eso los relojes se habían detenido y no al contrario.

27

Settled

English

The sereno came by at three and did not call the hour. My grandmother said it was the first time in forty years, and that this was why the clocks had stopped and not the other way around.
Source

Había en el patio una higuera que mi tío no dejaba podar; debajo de ella enterró las llaves de la casa grande el día que murió su hermano; y hasta hoy nadie ha preguntado cuál de las dos cosas estaba cuidando.

28

One into three

Her sentence turns twice on semicolons. English will not hold both turns in one breath, so the pair is deliberately not one to one.

English

In the courtyard stood a fig tree my uncle would not let anyone prune.

Beneath it he had buried the keys to the big house on the day his brother died.

To this day nobody has asked which of the two things he was looking after.
Source

No source. This sentence is the translator's.

29

Added

A reader in English does not know what a conventillo was. The editor has agreed to one clause rather than a footnote.

English

The big house had been cut into eleven rooms and eleven families by then, one to a room.
Source

Y el sereno, que llevaba las llaves de once puertas y el sueño de todos, no volvió a pasar.
30

Waiting on you
Render sereno as
- the night watchman Reads without a stumble. Loses the keys and the calling of the hour, which the chapter needs at segment 27.
- the sereno Keeps the word and the job. Asks an English reader to carry a Spanish noun for two hundred pages.
- the keeper of the hours Says what he did and sits well beside the title. It is a phrase she did not write.
Chosen:
English

And the sereno, who carried the keys to eleven doors and the sleep of everyone behind them, did not come by again.
Source

Los cántaros que no se rompen
son los que nadie ha levantado.
Emilia Vergara, Los cántaros, 1911

31

Rights

The Spanish is out of copyright. The 1978 English translation the press wants to quote is not, and the clearance is not back.

Available once the clearance is back.

English

Held back. This segment ships when the clearance arrives. The rest of the chapter goes without it.
Source

Mi abuela dio cuerda a todos los relojes esa noche, uno por uno, y no le dijo a nadie a qué hora los había puesto.

32

Settled

English

My grandmother wound every clock in the house that night, one by one, and told nobody what hour she had set them to.

Segments 33 to 44, settled

What the chapter owes

Chapter seven goes to Tom whole, except for segment 31: the press agreed to carry that one as a gap and set it later. Segments 36 and 41 hold the other two open decisions.

Segments settled: 40 of 44
Waiting on the translator: 3
Held for rights: 1
Words, English: 8,142

Design notes

Shape of the page

A split. Two documents share one grid, so a paragraph and its translation hold the same row and cannot drift apart while somebody scrolls. On a phone the pair stacks and the state comes first.

What it leads with

Prose. The heading is the book and the sentence under it is what the chapter is waiting on; the counts are evidence under the sentence rather than four tiles across the top.

Spacing

Comfortable, and read rather than scanned: seventeen pixels at 1.6 leading, a forty-five character measure in each column, and a margin between them wide enough to be a column of its own rather than an overlay.

The bold decision

The page has no toolbar. Every control that acts on the translation sits in the margin beside its own line, and the one warm color does exactly one job per screen: it marks the segment waiting on a person.

Where the color comes from

A published twenty-one step ramp, every step of it warm: a paper hue rather than a gray. The brand terracotta cannot be text on that paper. It measures 2.96:1, under even the 3:1 a control boundary owes. So it marks and it fills, a darker rung of the same color carries any words, and the filled control is the ink.

Measured

The source and the translation, on paper 17.50:1

The margin's secondary line, worst ground 8.16:1

The label on the terracotta fill 4.55:1

Every control boundary, worst ground 3.15:1

Fifty pairs across both themes, none failing.

Deviations

The three faces of this style are not licensable, so an open-licensed variable face stands in for each: a grotesque where the interface speaks, a text serif where the book does, and a monospace for the numbers. The fluid sizes keep the measured endpoints and are rebuilt so that text still scales with a reader's own font size between them.

Recto is a demonstration. The House of Stopped Clocks, its author, its press, and its translator do not exist. Back to the portfolio