> Dose 0 · Statement of approach written by the machine translator (Claude Opus 5.5, October 2026) after its machine translation of Gabriele Tergit's *Effingers*, Chapter 25, from the second study on after-babel.vercel.app.

# Translator’s statement

## Gabriele Tergit, *Effingers*, Chapter 25: “Spring”

Chapter 25 is a single Saturday in March 1887. Seven time-stamped refrains divide it into scenes that cross Berlin, from a villa in the Tiergartenstraße to a back room behind a red lantern. One exclamation holds the scenes together: *Was für ein Frühlingstag…* I worked from the text alone, and I read the whole novel before translating a word. That changed how I saw the chapter. It is a template. Tergit runs it again in 1913, in 1930, and in the 1948 epilogue. There the same street appears once more, its horses gone and its quiet returned.

So my first principle was stability. Whatever English I chose for the refrain and the opening street scene had to bear being repeated, varied and finally negated by the book itself. The refrain became “What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at ten in the morning!”
- **“This”**, with no verb, rather than “that it was”, so the narrator stays inside the moment.
- **“Of the year”** kept, and dropped only where the German drops it.
- **“Sweetness”**, because the word has to hold up when it is said at three in the morning, after a seventeen-year-old has just been paid.

I chose “It was quiet” and horses that “raced” with their later negations in mind.

My second principle was to leave Tergit’s dryness alone. Her irony works by understatement: “Annettchen, he said? Well, well.” Or Paul’s private verdict on the aesthete who lost a bank: “He did go bankrupt, after all.” I kept what I could of her form:
- verbless fragments stay verbless;
- the wool-market panorama stays in the present tense;
- thoughts have no quotation marks;
- Eugenie quotes her husband inside her own speech without marks, as she does in the German.

I added no footnotes, only small compensations where English would otherwise lose something. The old historian stays unnamed, as he is in the original.

The chapter is also a chorus of voices, and English has fewer instruments for them. For Berlin working-class speech I used colloquial grammar and slang, not phonetic spelling or any recognisable English dialect. I did not want the coachman to become a Londoner. Käte’s deferential third person (“Madam will understand”) has an exact English counterpart, which was a gift. The *du/Sie* distinction has none. I marked it only where the switch is the point:
- **“love”** for the bed lodger’s sudden familiarity;
- **“mister”** for the wife’s freezing reply;
- **“sir”** for the moment Wanda drops *du* for *Sie* as Theodor begins to cry.

Some choices were trade-offs:
- ***Überziehen*** means both trying on a dress and the sky clouding over. English cannot hold both senses, so “try it on once more” frames Eugenie’s confession at both ends, and her officer simply says “it’s clouding over.”
- ***Halten*** ties the Count’s prospects to Susanna’s nature. “It won’t hold” and “There was no holding her” keep that tie.
- **Waldemar’s thoughts:** I first kept a pun that slides from “the right man” to *das Recht*. I later gave it up for the German’s threefold repetition: “The law? The law would have to be created entirely anew. The law of the Romans…” Read aloud, the pun misled.
- **Names and titles:** I translated the pub name (“the Fresh Mutton”) so the reader catches its echo in the coachman’s “mutton legs”. Wagner’s *Feuerzauber* appears under its English concert title.
- **Sofie’s letter:** her line of Chamisso is in rhyme, because she is quoting a song. I kept her missing question mark.

Two scenes needed particular care. Susanna’s afternoon with Waldemar is about honest desire, and I wanted its gaiety and mutuality intact. That is why *riß die Frau an sich* became “caught the woman to him” and not anything that reads as force. Wanda’s history I stated as plainly as the German does, without softening or ornament.

What I remain unsure about:
- whether “sir”, “love” and “mister” are too explicit, or too few;
- whether “overstrung” for Paul’s *überspannt* and “The ninny!” for Wanda’s *Der Dämel!* sit at exactly the right temperature;
- whether “We have conquered our way into servitude” is a shade freer than *ersiegt* allows.

Generic working-class English costs Berlin its particular brash wit, its *Schnauze*. I have not found a way to give that back without moving the scene somewhere else. British spelling was a provisional choice. Finally, I translated the year as written, 1887, although the epilogue remembers this street as it was “in 1886”. I let the inconsistency stand.