plus au sujet de Les Ruines de Paris

Un peu de difficulté avec la traduction de cet extrait:

Si je n'avais énoncé, moi, que le tiers de ce début d'évangile, aussitôt j'en suis sûr il m'aurait traité de cureton.

I have done several versions and would appreciate ideas to do a comparison.

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Permalink Reply by Marc Vonhalmen on July 13, 2009 at 11:50am

I don't know what your level in French is. Is your problem to understand the sentence or to translate it ? I'll try to translate it but my English is really... well... it sucks :)

If I had enunciated even one little word of the gospel, he would have immediately called me a "cureton".

I'm not sure that "enunciate" really fits here. It's supposed to mean "read aloud" in this context in French.
The I is to insist on the fact that the subject of the sentence is "je". That's what the "moi" does in the French version.
I'm not sure how to translate "cureton". It's a pejorative term to say "curé" (curé = priest).
"que le tiers de ce début d'évangile" does not really need (in my opinion) to be translated literally. It just means "just a tiny part of the gospel". It means that he would have been "cureton" only a few seconds after starting to read the gospel aloud.

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Permalink Reply by Diana Ferguson on July 14, 2009 at 4:04am

I am doing a translation and my translation was:

If I, myself, had uttered only part of what was said at the start of this gospel, I am sure he would have immediately treated me as a novice priest.

This is not too different from your translation. Thank you.