> Dose 3 · 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: *Effingers*, Chapter 25, “Spring”

Chapter 25 is a single Saturday in March 1887, cut into seven scenes. It runs from Eugenie’s dress fitting at ten in the morning to Theodor’s night in a back room in the east of Berlin, and it closes at three the next morning. One exclamation stitches the scenes together, and the novel never lets it go: it returns in 1913, in 1930, and in the 1948 epilogue, among the ruins. That set my first principle. I was translating a chapter, but I was also fixing formulas the rest of the book will quote, so they had to be exact, plain and reusable: “What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at ten o’clock in the morning!” I chose *this* over *that* because Tergit’s line is verbless and present: the narrator stands inside the day rather than looking back on it. I chose *sweetness* for *Süße* because the word has to survive its last appearance, at three in the morning, when it has turned bitter. Every variation stays: one instance drops “of the year,” one shrinks to a single sentence, and the last loses its comma. Smaller fixed phrases follow the same logic. “It was quiet” can become “no longer quiet” in 1913 and “quiet again” in 1948. “Wax matches” returns in the epilogue, and “lodger” links the Chausseestrasse scene to Wanda’s story.

My second principle was continuity of voice. I worked only from what was in front of me: the novel, and a published English translation of the chapters just before this one. I wanted a reader to pass from Chapter 24 into 25 without sensing a new hand, so I adopted that translation’s conventions:

- American spelling and “o’clock”;
- Herr and Fräulein kept, Mama and Papa as Mother and Father, Ludwig as “the councilor”;
- street names in the form Tiergartenstrasse, and inn names in English (hence the Fresh Mutton);
- thoughts left without quotation marks.

I did not adopt its liberties. That translation sometimes drops sentences and smooths away repetition. Here repetition is structural (“Soft was the red carpet, soft the sofa . . . soft the armchair”), so it stays, as do the verbless street panoramas and the wool-market passage that slips into the present tense. Within that voice each speaker keeps a register. Eugenie has a warm, faintly formal grace. Käte speaks in a servant’s third person (“or I’ll end up pricking madam”). The old historian speaks in long academic periods. The Berliners of the Chausseestrasse speak plain colloquial English with a few dropped g’s, never phonetic spelling.

Some choices took weighing. Waldemar says of Susanna’s new admirer, “Er wird nicht halten” (he won’t last), and later the narrator says of her, “Sie war nicht zu halten” (she couldn’t be held). I wanted one verb for both and chose *keep*: “He won’t keep” and “There was no keeping her.” *Halten* used this way is exactly the *keep* of food that won’t last, and the word brushes against “kept woman” a line before Waldemar calls her an artist, not a mistress.

English cannot mark the shift between the formal *Sie* and the familiar *du*. So where the German makes one grammatical shift, I allowed one word: the lodger’s “honey” against the wife’s “mister,” and Wanda’s “sir” when she turns formal with the man she is comforting. The lodger’s jibe that her husband keeps her short became “short rations,” because the wife’s answer, that they have only the one room, makes sense only as innuendo. Some things I let go. *Überziehen* means both trying on a dress and the sky clouding over, and no English verb does both.

Susanna’s afternoon with Waldemar, and Wanda, seventeen and seduced at fourteen, I tried to render as Tergit does: plainly, neither softened nor heightened.

What I remain unsure of:

- whether “He won’t keep” reads as Waldemar’s wit or as mine;
- whether “madam,” serving both for Käte’s deference to Eugenie and for the woman who exploits Wanda, will seem a resonance or an accident;
- whether the small words added for *du* and *Sie* over-colour lines that are bare in German;
- whether “casino toilette” will puzzle readers;
- the pun between *den Rechten* (the right man) and *das Recht* (the law), which is lost;
- the fragments I kept that the earlier translator might have completed; I can’t be sure that is how that translator would have carried the book forward.

One discrepancy I left alone: the epilogue remembers this day as 1886, but the chapter says 1887, and I translated the chapter as it stands.