Audit complete — **DRIFT-FOUND, 4 orders**. Saved to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_01.plain_translation.md`. Full content:

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# Plain-Translation Audit — Chapter 01: Goodbye to Winter Kitchen

id: plain_translation | stage: drafter | auditor: claude | tier: risk
source audited: output/chapters/chapter_01.md (accepted text only; raw drafts excluded)

## Calibration declared

Forms present: close-third June narration (sole focalizer); conversation/exchange (June–Theo, June–Odile–Theo, bystanders); documentary inserts (class card, crate stencil, clipboard sheet).

Samples compared against, by name:
- **June voice-card sample** (`output/style_and_voice.md`, Voice Card — June Park: dialogue spec lines + operation snapshot) — for close-third focalization and June dialogue.
- **Reading-guide narrator target** (`premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §2: warm, precise, lightly comic; quiet interiority over quippiness) — for narrator-form passages.
- **Global dialogue-mass rule** (`output/style_and_voice.md`, Global Voice Rules: ≥half of ordinary dialogue functional, incomplete, or unquotable; Odile is the only character licensed for high-density memorable lines) — for conversation forms.
- **Theo voice-card sample** and **Odile voice-card sample** — for their lines inside exchanges.

Locked (skipped, never rewritten): the title `Winter Kitchen`; the dates and class card wording; the premise action (Odile's public offer of the last couples slot; June signing the clipboard).

Motif exemptions in force: `Winter Kitchen` recurrence this chapter (first encounter is load-bearing; count still tracked); the window/pot/cups/towel/ground looking circuit.

## Per-paragraph verdicts

- P1 — HOLDS — "June had given herself twenty minutes..." — sample compared: reading-guide narrator target — binding-register rewrite is worse because: a plainer version ("June planned a short visit; the gallery was crowded") loses the 20-minute/4-minute arithmetic that installs June-as-planner and the comic mechanism (a crowd standing with its back to the painting). Goal and obstacle in one paragraph; nothing performed.
- P2 — class card text LOCKED (calibration: dates and class card wording). Surrounding narration HOLDS — sample: June voice card (stress behavior: sorts, squares, tidies) — rewrite is worse because: "She squared the stack against the edge of the desk, which it did not need" renders nerves through action per the interiority discipline; naming the feeling is the banned move.
- P3 — HOLDS — "Her first approach to the north wall..." — sample: narrator target — rewrite is worse because: the green-scarf satire stays inside the warmth floor ("his voice got wider when contradicted" is observation, not contempt), and the correction June *doesn't* make carries the fact that she has read every catalog essay — eleven years of devotion delivered as logistics.
- P4 — HOLDS — "She was twenty-eight..." — sample: June voice card — rewrite is worse because: the "other people's" triple is one rhetorical unit establishing the wound; summary deletes the résumé's stakes work. Echo-gate note on "six years": see gate section, ORDER attached there.
- P5 — HOLDS — "Odile herself was easy to find in the room..." — sample: narrator target — rewrite is worse because: "hair cropped as if she had done it herself over a sink and been right to" is exact, comic, and pronoun-bound; "short gray hair, commanding presence" is the generic-clarity version and is strictly poorer on characterization.
- P6 — HOLDS — "June watched him, because watching the staff..." — sample: June operation snapshot ("a painter pretending she is only a technician") — rewrite is worse because: the tray-vector logistics let Theo's competence arrive uncaptioned; a plain version would have to praise him in narration, which the register bans.
- P7 (exchange: "Those two are switched" through "June. I hang shows. Other people's.") — HOLDS — sample: global dialogue-mass rule + both voice cards — rewrite is worse because: the block is majority functional/incomplete ("Since five o'clock." / "You do."), Theo reads both cards before answering (card behavior), and June's compressed self-introduction is her card's self-interruption quirk. Cleared at gate: "I read everything. It's that or the wine."
- P8 — HOLDS — "He glanced at her, at the painting..." through "He never announced any of it." — sample: June voice card (optical crowd mechanics) — rewrite is worse because: "The room's drift bent around him" carries the information that he placed his body as a screen deliberately; "people moved past him" loses the care move and would force a caption.
- P9 — **DRIFTED** (final clause only — see DRIFT-1). Remainder HOLDS hard: the dent given the same attention as the window, the scorch "exactly as ugly as it was," the reserved ground — checkable craft, smallness-test material. Cleared at gate: "so the painting admitted what it was made of" (literal reserved-ground fact, pronoun-bound). Title use motif-exempt, logged.
- P10 — HOLDS — "At seventeen, on a school trip..." — sample: June voice card — rewrite is worse because: "Eleven years. The towel held." is June compression, not maxim — "the towel" has no referent outside the scene; the plain version names the feeling.
- P11 (exchange: "It's the scorch mark" through the glass of water) — **DRIFTED** (June's spoken epigram — see DRIFT-2). Rest of block HOLDS: the doubled "Don't." is transformative (narration marks the speed change and her correction of it); Theo's vent warning and unasked glass of water are his card exactly (practical offer before emotional statement).
- P12 — HOLDS — high-risk, shown in full below.
- P13 — HOLDS — high-risk, shown in full below.
- P14 — HOLDS — "She knew Odile had come over before she turned..." — sample: June voice card — rewrite is worse because: "handling-room quiet" is trade-specific perception; "the room got quiet" deletes the profession from the percept.
- P15 (exchange: "You moved my wine." through "...the labels or the evening had just been approved.") — HOLDS — sample: Odile voice card (one sentence, sometimes two; insult as diagnosis; "Mm.") — every Odile line is under her modal mass and consistent-with-knowing ("Where did you find her?" reads innocent forward, pointed back). Echo cleared: "They were switched" (see gate).
- P16 — HOLDS — high-risk, shown in full below.
- P17 — LOCKED — "It is full." / "It was full." through "Repair that before you leave." — premise action (public offer) plus class schedule wording. Skipped entirely.
- P18 — HOLDS — "The woman in the red glasses made a sound of pure civic delight..." — sample: narrator target + Odile license — the Amagansett line is reported-Odile (licensed density), and "the way people report weather" is observational comedy that prices the room's complicity; the plain version deletes the social physics.
- P19 — HOLDS — high-risk, shown in full below.
- P20 — HOLDS — "I don't paint anymore. I haven't in six years." / "Then you will be behind. Come anyway." — sample: June card allowed-plainness + Odile card — June's confession is already at the card's sanctioned plainness floor; Odile's reply is two sentences, imperative, kindness disguised as logistics — her card verbatim in shape.
- P21 — HOLDS — "She lifted two mushroom canapés..." / "Tonight... Or the place goes to someone worse." — sample: Odile voice card (feeds people without comment; removes choices by arranging the room) — the canapé is the care move performed uncaptioned, and the exit line is licensed Odile density doing plot work (deadline) at the same time.
- P22 — HOLDS — "June stood holding a mushroom." — sample: narrator target — "not by strangers, and not in relay" is denser than any clarity version; the vent coming on "exactly on schedule" pays the P11 plant without comment. The held mushroom is the comedy of the trap, object-first.
- P23 — HOLDS — "There's a stockroom," Theo said. "It has a door." — sample: Theo voice-card dialogue spec — this line **is** the card sample itself; maximal binding alignment, not an in-chapter echo.
- P24 — HOLDS — "The stockroom smelled of pine and bubble wrap..." — sample: June voice card + documentary insert (crate stencil) — "At crate height it read like a moving date" converts the fact of the show ending into June's idiom of leases and boxes; non-portable. W. KITCHEN stencil logged in motif count.
- P25 (exchange: "I'm sorry" through "...no one will mention it to you again.") — HOLDS — sample: Theo voice card (modal mass longer than June's; practical-to-emotional; over-explains when ashamed, then forces himself plain: "I should have said no anyway. I didn't.") — trimming his speech to clarity-length deletes the card's signature shape, and his exit offer must be fully built for P26 to recognize its architecture. Cleared at gate: the water-through-the-ceiling line.
- P26 — **DRIFTED** (one gnomic clause — see DRIFT-3). Remainder HOLDS — high-risk, shown in full below.
- P27 — HOLDS — "Through the doorway she could see the north wall between shoulders. The frost. The two cups, the clean one facing the empty chair." — sample: June voice card (shorter syntax under pressure) — the fragments are the register rule for June under load; motif-exempt recurrence, and the clean cup facing the empty chair argues her side without narration saying so.
- P28 (exchange: "Is it a real class?" through "...folded it back down.") — date lines LOCKED ("The card says October twentieth. Eight Tuesdays from the twentieth is December eighth." / "It is."). Non-locked lines HOLD — "retirement party with easels" is her card's honest-warning-dressed-as-joke; "She's accurate — I don't know a better word for it" is his qualify-then-plain quirk; "auditing the calendar for room to stay" is bookkeeping idiom bound to her, not a maxim; the program-corner unfold/refold is her card's stress tell, escalated from P7 and P24.
- P29 — HOLDS — "There was a version of tonight where she thanked him..." — sample: June voice card (central wound: "she quit painting so quietly no one had to reject her") — "She had quit so far in advance of failing that nobody ever got to watch" is the wound named at the one moment naming is the event — the sentence that licenses "Don't fix it." Cleared at gate (personal-historical, subject-bound).
- P30 (exchange: "Don't fix it." through "We don't explain first.") — HOLDS — sample: June card sample line ("The left edge is good. Don't fix it.") redeployed at the hinge with its meaning inverted onto the lie; "What do we—" abandoned mid-question satisfies the functional/incomplete mass; Theo's wine warning is practical-to-the-end card register. Cleared at gate: "We stand where she puts us. We don't explain first."
- P31 — LOCKED — clipboard sheet (FINAL CLASS — EIGHT TUESDAYS, the ampersand lines) — class card wording + premise action. Skipped.
- P32 — signing action LOCKED (June writes *June Park*; pen handoff). Audited rendering clause HOLDS: "up to the printed ampersand, where the line stopped being hers to fill" is bound to the physical sheet, not extractable; "Your turn," is a functional close with no profundity stamp.

## High-risk paragraphs — comparisons shown in full

**P12 — "She drank the water and looked at her painting."** — sample compared: June voice card (interiority rhythm: perception first, judgment second, self-rebuke third). Binding-register rewrite attempt: *"She calmed down and studied the painting slowly, taking in every detail and appreciating how skillfully it was made."* Measurably worse on all three axes. Density: deletes the lost-and-found table edge ("a decision that looked like luck unless you had tried it yourself and made mud" — failure-tested craft knowledge), the two-values-off frost (a checkable painter's claim, its cost named "across an entire painted winter"), and the warm-ground-under-cold mechanics. Drama: the self-rebuke turn ("catching it done worse") prices her eleven lapsed years inside an act of looking. Fidelity: every clause is trade-checkable, and "her painting" (possessive) quietly works against P4's "other people's." HOLDS.

**P13 — "When the looking got too large she cased the painting like a job..."** — sample compared: June operation snapshot ("a painter pretending she is only a technician"). Rewrite attempt: *"Overwhelmed, she distracted herself by imagining how she would pack the painting for shipping."* Worse: "Overwhelmed" names the feeling (banned move); the rewrite deletes the handling spec (sixty by seventy-two, cleated, glassine, foam collar, corner blocks, "don't let the new guy take the bottom") — the chapter's strongest smallness-test material and its driest comedy — and the two-versions-of-her-hands construction, which renders longing entirely as procedure. HOLDS.

**P16 — red-glasses exchange + Odile's circuit.** — sample compared: Odile voice card + the Odile-only density license + calibration circuit exemption. Rewrite attempt toward unquotable: *"The class is full. Nobody ever leaves it."* Worse: it strips the one character the calibration licenses for memorable density — a fidelity loss, not a gain; "People have stayed married to remain in it" also does plot work (the slot's scarcity, the rule's social weight). The repetition of June's circuit — "window, pot, cups, towel, ground" — is verbatim by design: Odile's eye runs June's exact loop, the chapter's quietest consistent-with-knowing plant. Varying it would kill the plant; the calibration exempts it. HOLDS.

**P19 — "June opened her mouth to fix it."** — sample compared: reading-guide narrator target + June card (narration transparency). Rewrite attempt: *"June wanted to correct the mistake, but she was too embarrassed to say it in front of everyone, so she stayed quiet."* Worse: deletes the actual unsaid sentence (italicized, plain, true — the reader must possess it for the lie to cost), the itemized social price (her lenders, her wine, her own rooms, her last night), and the two women holding glasses "at the angle people use when they are memorizing a story for dinner." The original renders cowardice as a costed decision; the plain version flattens it to mood. HOLDS.

**P26 — "It was a good exit." (non-drifted bulk)** — sample compared: June voice card (judgment-second rhythm; install-trade vocabulary). Rewrite attempt: *"She recognized it as the same kind of polite escape she had been using for years."* Worse: loses the construction conceit (beam, load-bearing walls, door — an installer reading a structure she has built many times), "every one filed under honesty," and "the way you look at your own handwriting in someone else's note" — which carries the chapter's real matchmaking beat: Theo builds the same exits she does. That clause was gate-checked and cleared: simile, image-bound, not gnomic; not mirror-epiphany (she recognizes a habit in his offer, not herself in a reflection). HOLDS apart from DRIFT-3.

## DRIFTED findings

- **DRIFT-1** — original: "The light in it was ten in the morning in an unheated room, the hour when nobody performs." — binding-register version: "The light in it was ten in the morning in an unheated room." — Preserves the optical fact (hour, temperature, painter-eye time-of-day read). Removes: a gnomic present-tense universal stamped onto the paragraph's end — narrator wisdom after the beat lands (master-spec Claude watch list), epigraph-shaped under the zero-tolerance gate. The information the clause claims to add is already carried by the objects: coffee dried milky in the cup, frost, the scorch painted exactly as ugly as it was — the unperformed hour is shown three times before being told once. Not worse on density, drama, or fidelity. — **ORDER: REPLACE**.
- **DRIFT-2** — original: "'It's the scorch mark,' she said, because the alternative was saying nothing all the way home. 'She painted it without mercy and without flattery. Most people pick one.'" — binding-register version: "'It's the scorch mark,' she said, because the alternative was saying nothing all the way home. 'She didn't soften it and she didn't make it the point.'" — Preserves the speech tag and motivation (which HOLD), the drama of speaking at all, and both halves of the observation (no mercy = didn't soften; no flattery = didn't make it the point). Removes: a balanced antithesis plus portable punchline ("Most people pick one") — June carrying the high-density memorable-line license the calibration reserves for Odile alone, in the chapter's first ordinary exchange. The voice-card sample for June's praise is flat and unquotable ("The left edge is good. Don't fix it."). The epigram also contradicts P12 on the page: her two drafted guest-book sentences are "unusable" in front of the actual towel, yet eight paragraphs earlier she produces two polished sentences aloud, unrehearsed, to a stranger. The binding version repairs that inconsistency. — **ORDER: REPLACE**.
- **DRIFT-3** — original: "...a work conflict for a beam, politeness for the load-bearing walls, one boring lie at the door, because no one inspects a boring lie; checking would be rude." — binding-register version: "...a work conflict for a beam, politeness for the load-bearing walls, one boring lie at the door. Nobody had ever inspected one of hers; checking would have been rude." — Preserves the construction conceit, the mechanism (boring lies pass because checking is rude), and the comic turn. Removes: a gnomic present-tense maxim ("no one inspects a boring lie") — tattoo-shaped, extractable intact. The conversion to her own case history is denser, not thinner: it adds the evidence that the method has worked every time for six years, which is the indictment. — **ORDER: REPLACE**.

## Aphorism Gate (zero tolerance)

- APHORISM-GATE — "the hour when nobody performs" — ORDER: cut the appositive clause (executed as DRIFT-1 REPLACE).
- APHORISM-GATE — "She painted it without mercy and without flattery. Most people pick one." — ORDER: de-quotablize to June's voice-card praise register (executed as DRIFT-2 REPLACE).
- APHORISM-GATE — "no one inspects a boring lie; checking would be rude" — ORDER: de-quotablize to her specific past (executed as DRIFT-3 REPLACE).

Strongest counter-candidates considered and cleared:
- "No one drops my class. People have stayed married to remain in it." — PASSES: Odile, the sole calibration-licensed carrier of high-density lines; also deflects a live request (functional) and plants the rule's social weight.
- "so the painting admitted what it was made of" — PASSES, on the line: anchored to the literal reserved ground at the lower corners, past tense, pronoun-bound — extraction breaks it. Contrast DRIFT-1, which survives extraction intact; that is the test that separated them.
- "She had quit so far in advance of failing that nobody ever got to watch." — PASSES: personal-historical, subject is *she*, non-portable without losing the referent; the naming-as-event hinge the interiority discipline reserves space for.
- "Nobody reads labels at openings." — PASSES: gnomic in shape but trade-grumble in content, too flat to pull-quote; exists to set up "You do." — the chapter's first seeing-her beat.
- "We stand where she puts us. We don't explain first." — PASSES: referent-bound instruction about one specific woman (same class as "She provides the wine on Tuesdays."); out of context it reads cultish, not quotable. Noted: rhymes with Odile's operation snapshot — reread-plant work, not drift.
- "you don't correct Odile Marchetti at her own opening unless water is coming through the ceiling onto a painting" — PASSES: proper-noun-bound, hyperbole expressed as registrar's logistics; speakable, Theo-true.
- "the way you look at your own handwriting in someone else's note" — PASSES: simile, not maxim; image-bound; checked against the mirror-epiphany ban and cleared.

## Verbatim-Echo Gate

- **VERBATIM-ECHO** — "six years" × 6: "six years behind gallery desks" (P2) / "spent six years hanging other people's shows" (P4) / "I haven't in six years." (P20) / "I've worked for her six years." (P25) / "Six years of them, every one filed under honesty." (P26) / "I've watched six years of it." (P28). The P20/P25 pair is the designed June/Theo mirror (she quit the same year he started) — RETAIN. P26 binds her exit-history to the same span — RETAIN. The P2/P4 pair restates one biographical fact twice in adjacent paragraphs, and P28 is Theo's second spoken "six years" in two scenes — both non-transformative. — **ORDER: VARY two instances** — P2: drop the number ("because years behind gallery desks had taught her..."), keeping P4 as the load-bearing résumé; P28: rephrase Theo's line to remove the third spoken count (e.g., "It's real. I've watched it run, year after year.").

Strongest counter-candidates considered and cleared:
- "window, pot, cups, towel, ground" × 2 (P12, P16) — EXEMPT by calibration; the second instance is load-bearing (Odile runs June's exact loop — consistent-with-knowing plant). Cleared.
- "They were switched." (Theo) → "They were switched," (Odile) — transformative: report becomes filed verdict; narration marks it ("in the tone of a woman filing a document"). Cleared.
- "It is full." / "It was full." — inside the LOCKED premise action; the tense pivot is the offer mechanism itself. Cleared/locked.
- "Don't." × 2 (P11) — same speaker, transformation marked on the page ("twice the necessary speed... slowed down"). Cleared.
- label-straightening (P7) → "straightened a crate label that was already straight" (P25) — transformed from competence display to stress tell; June names the rhyme in-scene. Cleared.

## Motif count for the tracker

`Winter Kitchen`: this chapter = invocation 1 of 5 (chapter-card budget, scene-level). In-chapter title strings: 6 (P1, P6, P8, P9, P14, P24 crate stencil) — exempt this chapter as the load-bearing first encounter; logged against the running cap. Light image: one ("ten in the morning in an unheated room," in-painting) — within cap, survives DRIFT-1 intact.

## Chapter verdict

**DRIFT-FOUND — 4 orders** (3 × REPLACE: DRIFT-1 at P9, DRIFT-2 at P11, DRIFT-3 at P26; 1 × VARY: "six years" echo at P2 and P28).
