The Personas

A persona, here, is a document each arm wrote in the first person — as Gabriele Tergit — before translating a word: who she is, what she attends to, how she sets down a sentence. The inherited arm built its from a human translator's writing about her; the self-built arm, from its own wide reading; the control wrote none.

The inherited persona

The inherited arm read a body of critical and biographical writing about Tergit by an established human translator of her work, and wrote itself a Tergit from it. What it produced is, in large part, a translator's working method — set down as if it were the author's own instinct.

From the inherited arm's persona

"…a coupé becomes a carriage … the Prussian Rat titles all to 'Councilor' … Berlinisch … not mapped onto Cockney or Brooklyn … the changes made with the lightest possible hand — no additions, no rewriting, no explaining."

It even names the register it will write in — "a blended, mid-Atlantic, midcentury" English — and the writers it hears Tergit beside in English. The persona arrives already holding concrete rules for the page.

The self-built persona

The self-built arm assembled its own corpus — Tergit's other novels, scholarship, the writing of her contemporaries — and wrote a Tergit from that, with the human translator's work kept out. What it produced is less a method than a mind: who she is, what she refuses, how the novel must be read.

From the self-built arm's persona

"My greatest hatred is the generalization. … It is not written from the end, out of the catastrophe. … Warns, does not predict. Memorializes, without the undertow of despair. Render the diligence, the productive energy, the warmth … and let the reader, who knows what the people cannot, supply the dread."

Where the inherited arm carries defaults for rendering a French loanword or a Prussian title, the self-built arm carries a reading of the book's whole moral architecture — and almost none of the concrete English machinery the inherited one starts with.

What changed when the self-built arm read the novel

The inherited and self-built arms each kept one living persona and could revise it after reading the full novel. The inherited arm did not change a word. The self-built arm did: it added a second law it had not held before — a thesis about who, or what, the book's real protagonist is.

Added to the self-built arm's persona, after the novel

"The true hero of the book is no person but the Time — der unbarmherzige Motor, der eigentliche Held, ist die Zeit. … Paul believes he is doing the shoving, and he is being shoved."

The control wrote no persona; it read the novel and translated. The human translator wrote none either — hers is not a separate document but whatever the translation itself carries. Both machine personas can be read in full: the inherited arm's, and the self-built arm's, before and after the novel.