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After Babel, The Machine?

Blind comparison of four translations — against the German source

The chapter is a single Berlin day, March 1887, told as five vignettes of sharply different register — a society fitting-room, a love-letter, a university debate plus a lovers' tryst, a working-class courtyard, a streetwalker's back room — stitched together by a recurring time-stamped refrain: "Was für ein Frühlingstag, dieser Sonnabend im März des Jahres 1887! Was für eine Süße, morgens um zehn Uhr!" It returns seven times, each time on its own as a standalone beat, advancing the clock. The German also leans hard on anaphora and fragments ("Es war still."; "Eine Stunde später."; "Weich war der rote Teppich, weich das Sofa…"), on heavy Berlinerisch in the poorer scenes, and on untranslated cultural furniture (Schumann, Wagner, Mozart, in verba magistri, § 1378). How each translation treats the refrain, the white space around it, the dialect, and these fixed quotations is what separates them. Because the refrain and many short exchanges recur in near-identical form, the source supplies an unusually clean set of controlled tests.

The headline finding is a clean two-way split: T1, T2, and T3 form one tight, faithful, structure-preserving cluster — so close that long sentences come out word-for-word identical — while T4 stands alone as a free, modernizing, re-paragraphed rendering. The finer structure within the trio is a web rather than a tree: T3 is a swing text, sharing word-choices with T1 but spelling and register with T2.

T1 — faithful, British, orthographically scrupulous

Register / diction. The most consciously "period-literary" of the four, in an Edwardian key. "die Herren barhäuptig" becomes "the gentlemen bareheaded"; "wehende Schleier um den Zylinder" → "veils streaming about their top hats". It reaches for the elevated word: "the consecrated circle" (geheiligten Zirkel), "blow off the dust" literal for "Staub abblasen", "I suffered every torment of hell in that hour". Spelling is consistently British: "honour", "theatre", "Grey Cloister", "paraffin" (for Petroleum), "pram".

Sentence rhythm / fidelity. Tracks German clause order closely and keeps its inversions: "Haben wir irgendeinen hervorragenden Mann, so…" → "Let us have any outstanding man, and the first thing we do is…" It preserves the "Soft was the red carpet, soft the sofa that took Susanna Widerklee, soft the armchair…" anaphora intact and in German order.

Distinctive habits. T1 alone preserves the capitalized intimate address of the German love-letter — "Ich liebe Dich. Ich träume von Dir. Warum hast Du…" → "I love You. I dream of You. Why did You tell me…" — mirroring the German convention of capitalizing Du. No other version does this. Conversely, T1 alone translates the pet name: "Ach, Annettchen" → "Ah, dear little Annette" (T2/T3/T4 keep "Annettchen"), and "Annettchen hat er gesagt?" → "Dear little Annette, he said?" Address to the lady is "madam" / "your ladyship".

Dialogue / dialect. Working-class speech is colloquial but grammatically clean, with no phonetic spelling: "Paule, muß denn det sin?" → "Paule, does it have to be, then?"; "Sie doofe Ziege, Ihnen müßte man die Hammelbeine langziehen" → "You daft goat, somebody ought to give your mutton-legs a good haul" — keeping the literal Hammelbeine image.

T2 — faithful, American-spelled, most foreignizing on proper nouns

Register / diction. Same close, literary register as T1 but in American spelling ("honor", "theater", "neighborhood") and often a shade terser. Where T1 says "Magic Fire Music" T2 says "Magic Fire"; where the litany quote runs "a martial sound" in T1, T2 has "warlike sound"; "What is the matter?" (T1) is trimmed to "What is it?"

Sentence rhythm / fidelity. Like T1 it keeps German inversions — "Haben wir irgendeinen hervorragenden Mann" → "Have we some eminent man, then we seek…" — and the "Soft was the red carpet, soft the sofa…" anaphora. In the historian's dense periodic sentence it favors Latinate cognates that shadow the German: "pikiert sich" → "piques himself", "hervorragenden" → "eminent", "Richtung" → "direction".

Distinctive habits. T2 is by far the most willing to leave German proper nouns untranslated: the pub "Frischer Hammel" stays "the Frischer Hammel" (T1/T3 "Fresh Mutton", T4 "Young Ram"); "Weidendammer Brücke" stays German (the others give "Weidendamm Bridge"); "das graue Kloster" becomes "the Graues Kloster" (T1/T3 "Grey Cloister"); and Figaro is left bare. It also reads "Kasinotoilette" as the officers'-mess sense — "the dinner gown" — where T1/T3 give "casino gown." Address is a consistent "ma'am".

Dialogue / dialect. Same clean-colloquial strategy as T1, occasionally substituting an English idiom for a German one: "die Hammelbeine langziehen" → "box your ears" (dropping the mutton-leg image T1/T3 keep); "doofe Ziege" → "daft goose" (T1/T3 "daft goat").

T3 — faithful, but the swing text: T1's words, T2's spelling

Register / diction. Indistinguishable in fidelity-level from T1 and T2, and frequently word-for-word identical with them. Its spelling is largely American ("honor", "theater", "neighborhood") yet carries British residue: "Grey Cloister", "perambulator" (for Kinderwagen, where T1/T2 use the lighter "pram" and T4 "baby carriage"). Address is "ma'am", but capitalized "Madam understands" / "Will Madam recommend…".

Distinctive habits. Two consistent fingerprints. (1) It alone writes "o'clock" in every time-stamp — "at ten o'clock in the morning", "at one o'clock at midday" — where T1/T2 give bare "at ten in the morning." (2) It keeps a few dialect/period words the others smooth away: "eine Molle, nur eine Molle" stays "a Molle, just the one Molle" (T1/T2 "a beer," T4 "a beer"); but it also domesticates "Schloß" to "the Palace" (T1/T2 "the Schloss," T4 "Berliner Schloss"). Its working-class speech is marginally more marked than T1/T2 — "Na, laß man" → "Aw, leave off"; "Sarense nischt uf mein Mann" → "Don't you say nothing about my man" (double negative, "my man" for mein Mann, "'cause").

Where T3 leans toward T4. On a few islands T3 departs from T1/T2 in T4's direction: the "o'clock" time-phrase (shared with T4); "das größte Verbrechen … an der Menschheit" → "against humanity" (T1/T2 "mankind"; T4 also "humanity"); and "Ich könnte Napoleon … vergessen" — which means forget — rendered as "I could forgive Napoleon" (T1/T2 correctly "forget"; T4 also "forgive"). These are isolated, not a pattern, but they place T3 nearest the outlier among the trio.

The clustering tell, internal to the trio. Sorting the free-choice forks (places where the German leaves real latitude) shows T3 facing both ways:

So within the faithful trio, T1 and T2 are the two poles (British vs. American; content-word vs. proper-noun-foreignizing), and T3 reads as the midpoint.

T4 — the outlier: free, modern, re-paragraphed

Structure (the largest single difference). T4 dismantles the chapter's white-space architecture. The refrain, a free-standing structural beat in the German and in T1/T2/T3, is glued into running text. One paragraph in T4 swallows the close of a scene, an interior thought, two exclamations, and the next refrain together:

"…don't forget who you are." Dear, innocent Father! thought Amalie. What a terrible stench there was in the hallway! How awful the apartment smelled… before moving in! What a beautiful spring day, that Saturday in March 1887, at eight o'clock in the evening!"

The German keeps each of these as its own block. Dialogue and narration are likewise merged ("'Fine by me.' An hour passed."; "'And I, Susanna?' He stood up, grabbed her…"). The file is ~50 lines shorter than the others for this reason alone.

Register / diction. Fluent contemporary novelistic English, freely idiomatic and modern: "das ist bitter" → "That's a bitter pill to swallow"; "Volksbegeisterung" → "the crowd is at fever pitch"; "die Großen" → "the powers that be"; "Ochsen, im wahren Sinne" → "What numbskulls"; "überspannt" → "high-strung"; "wo dein Mann dich so knapp hält" → "Your old man's got you on a short leash." Spelling is American and proper nouns are domesticated: "-strasse" throughout (Tiergartenstrasse, Chausseestrasse), "apartment", "baby carriage", "kerosene", "factory" (for Werk).

Free vs. literal. Much freer than the trio — it expands, compresses, and re-points. "und nun überlegen Sie es sich mit Lehmann" (T1/T2/T3 identical: "and now think it over, about Lehmann") becomes the invented question "Why don't you give Lehmann another chance?" It adds matter not in the source — "wo … ein junges Mädchen … spazierengeht" gains "with their beaus"; "in verba magistri" gains "and pledging to the highest authority"; "Das ist ja —" gains "my God." It de-idiomizes the German's figures: "'s hat mir … keiner an meiner Wiege gesungen" (kept literally by all three others) flattens to "no one told me I'd end my days selling insurance." It also breaks the "Weich war … weich … weich" anaphora by reordering and dropping the repetitions.

This freedom occasionally shifts meaning or fact: "wie sie ihn liebte" → "how she loved it" (the others: "how she loved him"); "nich umbringen" → "don't kill yourself" (the others read it as the rival, "don't go killing anyone"); the 3rd-person "Wird er … versaufen" → 2nd-person, coarsened "You'll piss away your week's pay"; "Imperfekt" → "pluperfect"; Interimsrock / blaue Jacke → "greatcoats" / "blue overcoats."

Quotations — a reversed instinct. Where it domesticates almost everything else, T4 keeps the cultural titles in German: "Schumann's 'Frauenliebe und Leben'", Wagner's "Feuerzauber" (the trio give "A Woman's Love and Life," "Magic Fire Music"). It even renders the Schumann lyric as rhyming verse — "Since first I saw you, I believe I've gone blind, as if in a dream, only you in my mind" (blind/mind) — where the trio give prose glosses. And it sprinkles in French flair absent from the German: "Einverstanden" → "D'accord."

Dialogue / dialect. T4 alone uses phonetic eye-dialect for the poor: "Paule" → "Paulie"; "muß denn det sin?" → "d'you haff to?"; "laß man" → "Lettit go"; "lassense los" → "leggo"; "damit Sie sehen" → "Can'tcha see"; "mit die frisierte Schnauze" → "yer fancy talk." The trio render the same lines in clean, unspelled colloquial English.

Clustering — summary with evidence

Group A: {T1, T2, T3} — the faithful trio. They share a single translation strategy and are textually so close that whole sentences are identical across all three:

"It was quiet. Now and then children's laughter rang out from the gardens." "Be ashamed that you are ashamed!" "Oh, such kindness, such kindness." "Very good. Frieda, put them straight into the glove box." "But my dear, I know what you can do. Of course — that goes without saying."

All three keep the refrain standalone with the verbatim-shared first half ("What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887!") and "What sweetness"; keep German paragraphing; keep the ß street-names; keep "Papa", "Agreed", "the mocha", "a fine works"; render the cradle-song idiom literally; preserve the "Soft was… soft… soft" anaphora; and handle dialect without eye-spelling. These are the marks of a close, source-tracking, foreignizing approach.

Group B: {T4} — the outlier. Every one of those shared traits is reversed: refrain folded into prose, paragraphs merged, "-strasse" and American domestication, German titles kept but idioms and structure freely remade, eye-dialect, added and altered content. On the recurring micro-tests T4 is the one that always differs — "What sweetness" → "How sweet the air was", "You are right" → "Quite right", "An hour later." → "An hour passed.", "Papa" → "Father."

Within Group A, the relationship is a web, not a chain:

If forced to one line: T1 ≈ T2 ≈ T3 ≪ T4, with T3 sitting between T1 and T2 and leaning a hair toward T4.

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