> Dose 20 · 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”*

This chapter had two loyalties. One was to Tergit’s German. The other was to the published English of the twenty chapters before it, which this chapter had to continue without a seam. So before translating a line, I read the whole novel. Then I read the existing translation of Chapters 5–24 sentence by sentence against the German to learn its habits. It uses American spelling and idiom. It keeps “Herr” and “Fräulein,” renders *gnädige Frau* as “madam” and *Papa* as “Father,” and writes street names without the article (“along Tiergartenstrasse”). It puts Berlin dialect into American colloquial speech rather than phonetic spelling. I adopted those conventions wholesale.

The chapter is one Saturday in March 1887, seen in seven time-stamped snapshots: a banker’s wife packing for Nice, a fifteen-year-old’s love letter, a jurist’s lunch with an opera singer, a ruined banker selling insurance, a seventeen-year-old prostitute in the small hours. A refrain stitches them together. Reading to the end showed me the refrain is not local. Tergit brings it back in 1913, in 1930, and among the ruins of 1948, and she brings back the street picture too: “It was quiet,” then “no longer quiet,” then “quiet again.” So I treated those lines as fixed text, worded for reuse: “What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at ten o’clock in the morning!”

- **“This,”** not “that Saturday . . . it was,” keeps the verbless immediacy of *dieser*.
- **“Of the year”** gives the chronicle’s formality, and it is dropped exactly where Tergit drops it.
- **“Sweetness”** because the word must turn bitter by the final line, and because *süß* runs through the whole book.

Where she varies the refrain, the English varies in the same place and nowhere else.

Here I let myself be stricter than my predecessor. Their English is fluent, but they sometimes vary lines Tergit repeats, give verbs to her verbless sentences, and now and then drop a phrase. In this chapter repetition is structure. So I kept her anaphoras (“Soft was the red carpet, soft the sofa . . . , soft the armchair . . .”), her verbless tableau at the Weidendammer Bridge, and her sudden switch into the present tense for the wool market. I omitted nothing.

For the voices, I tried to hear each speaker before writing them:
- **Eugenie** is warm, worldly, a little grand (“One should only ever marry men who goggle”).
- **Käte** is plain and deferential (“madam will understand”).
- **Waldemar** compresses an argument into an aphorism (“A premium on spinelessness”).
- **Mayer** is florid in his ruin. I kept both of his singing idioms because they answer each other.
- **Wanda**’s last contemptuous thought became “The chump!”, a word the earlier translation had already put in a Berliner’s mouth.

Some losses I accepted. Tergit plays on *überziehen*, which means both trying on a dress and a sky clouding over. English can’t do both, so I kept only Käte’s repetition of Eugenie’s “let’s try it on once more.” Elsewhere a single verb could carry the echo: the count “won’t hold,” and later, of Susanna, “There was no holding her.”

In one place I added punctuation the German lacks. Eugenie quotes her husband without quotation marks. English can’t show the change from formal to familiar “you,” so readers would take his “I’ll always give you” as Eugenie’s own promise to Käte. Ludwig’s words therefore stand in nested quotes. I added brief explanations, as the reference does (“Napoleon’s coup of the second of December”). I translated the love scene and Wanda’s history plainly. Tergit is neither coy nor lurid, and the English shouldn’t be either.

What I remain unsure of:
- **The shift between *du* and *Sie*** is invisible in English. The most poignant case is simply gone: Wanda moves to the formal “you” the moment Theodor begins to cry. I left it to tone, as the reference would, but I feel the loss.
- **“Father” for *Papa*** follows precedent but runs cooler than the German, especially in Amalie’s “Dear, oblivious Father!”
- **Single word choices:**
  - I am not sure “high-strung” catches *überspannt*.
  - I am not sure “the Fresh Mutton” sounds as ordinary to an English ear as the pub name does to a Berliner.
  - I am not sure “o’clock” doesn’t slow the refrain by a beat.
- **Tergit’s own inconsistencies,** two of which I translated as written. The Epilogue remembers this day as 1886. And March 16, 1887, the date the old historian names so solemnly, was a Wednesday.