> Dose 10 · 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 shows Berlin on a single Saturday in March 1887, in seven scenes marked by the clock. It begins with a banker’s wife packing for Nice at ten in the morning and ends late at night with a seventeen-year-old girl in a back room behind a red lantern. One exclamation ties the scenes together: what a spring day, what sweetness. I read the whole novel before translating, so I knew this sentence doesn’t belong to this chapter alone. Tergit brings it back in 1913, in 1930, and in the epilogue of 1948. Some details return with it: the quiet of the Tiergartenstrasse, the one-legged man selling wax matches, Eugenie’s garden. So does Frieda, the maid sent here for a pincushion, who is last seen planting vegetables among the ruins.

My first principle was therefore stability. Any phrase the novel will later echo had to be fixed in a form that could be echoed. I chose “What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887!” over “that it was” to keep the German’s verbless, present-tense exclamation. I kept every variant exactly: the changing hours, the one place where “of the year” drops out, and the last line, which loses its comma at three in the morning.

My second principle was continuity. The chapters before this one already exist in English, and I wanted Chapter 25 to read as though the same translator had simply turned the page. So I adopted that translation’s conventions even where I might have chosen differently:
- American spelling
- “Tiergartenstrasse” without an article
- “madam” for *gnädige Frau*
- “the councilor” for *Herr Stadtrat*
- “bed lodger” for *Schlafbursche*
- “Goodbye” for *Adieu*
- Berlin dialect rendered through contractions and slang rather than phonetic spelling

I put seamlessness ahead of my own preferences.

I parted from the earlier English in how I handled repetition. That translation sometimes lets Tergit’s verbal echoes slip, and this chapter is built from them. The verb *halten* runs through it three times:
- a father urges his daughter toward moderation
- Waldemar predicts the Count won’t last
- Susanna cannot be kept

I carried it with “keep”: “Keep to a noble measure,” “He won’t keep,” “not a kept woman,” “There was no keeping her.” I set the seamstress’s “please stand still” against Eugenie’s first kiss, when she thought the earth must stand still. The “popular enthusiasm” for the old Kaiser stands against the “enthusiasts” at the stage door. One echo defeated me. *Überziehen* means both to try on a dress and for the sky to cloud over, and no English verb does both, so I accepted the loss.

Other choices were about legibility. Eugenie quotes her husband without quotation marks, and only the pronoun *dir* tells a German reader whose voice it is. In English, “you” would point at the wrong woman, so I added quotation marks. When Wanda shifts from the intimate *du* to the formal *Sie*, a single “sir” marks the new distance. I kept Sofie’s missing question mark, because it is hers and the novel quotes her letter later. The wool-market panorama stays in the present tense, and the street scene at the Weidendammer Bridge stays without verbs. For the love scene and for Wanda I aimed at sobriety: exact, unembellished, neither coy nor lurid. I chose “demurring and resisting” so as not to suggest force, because the German describes a protest that Waldemar sees through.

I remain unsure about several choices:
- “He won’t keep” may strike some readers as too clever; “He won’t last” is plainer but breaks the chain.
- “Father” for *Papa* matches the earlier chapters but sounds stiff in Amalie’s “Dear, oblivious Father!”
- I translated the pub’s name as “the Fresh Mutton” because the earlier English translates inn names, but it may read oddly.
- Sofie’s couplet from Schumann’s song cycle gives up some literalness to keep the rhyme.
- I translated without outside research, by design, so the period details — the *Monumenta*, § 1378, Hiller’s — stand as the page gives them.

These are the places where I would most welcome an editor’s eye.