> Dose 24 · 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 day cut into seven slices, from ten in the morning of a Saturday in March 1887 to three the next morning. We see Eugenie being fitted for the Riviera; Sofie writing her first love letter; Waldemar at a university window, then in Susanna’s bed; a tenement on Chausseestrasse; Paul walking with a ruined banker and his daughter; Theodor in the rain; and a seventeen-year-old girl in a wine parlor. One exclamation stitches the slices together. Before translating anything I read the whole novel, and that changed how I saw the chapter. Tergit returns to this day three times: in 1913, in 1930, and in the 1948 epilogue, where horses no longer race along Tiergartenstrasse and the street has grown quiet again. So my first principle was stability. The refrain (“What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at ten in the morning!”) had to be a formula that could be reused word for word, and its small mutations had to survive exactly: one instance drops “of the year,” one loses its second sentence, the last loses its comma. I kept it verbless, as the German is, so that the narrator stands inside the moment instead of looking back on it. I kept “sweetness” because the word must turn bitter by three in the morning. I also kept Tergit’s forms: her verbless street scenes stay verbless, and the wool market stays in the present tense.

My second principle was continuity. This chapter enters a book that already exists in English, and a reader coming from Chapter 24 should not hear a new translator. I studied that voice: American, quick, idiomatic, frank, ready to trade a German idiom for an English one. I adopted its conventions: “madam” for *gnädige Frau*, “Fräulein” kept, “bed lodger,” “contractor,” “wine parlor.” I also used “Father” instead of “Papa,” a habit I missed at first and corrected in revision. For Berlin speech I followed its method, using colloquial syntax and slang rather than phonetic spelling. There is one dropped *h* (“an ’orse”), which the earlier chapters had already used for the same Berlin sound. Where continuity and fidelity pulled apart, fidelity won. The one-legged man cries “Wax matches,” not just “matches.” Waldemar plays the “Magic Fire Music” rather than an untranslated “Feuerzauber,” because the scene needs an English reader to hear *fire*.

Third, I tried to carry the chapter’s internal echoes, because Tergit builds meaning with them. “Stand still” links Käte’s pins to Eugenie’s memory of a first kiss. Susanna’s “that suits me” comes back to her from Waldemar’s mouth. The verb *halten* runs through three scenes:
- Emmanuel tells Sofie to keep to a noble measure.
- Waldemar delivers his verdict on the Count.
- The narrator says of Susanna, “There was no keeping her.”

Rendering all three with “keep” turned Waldemar’s line into “He won’t keep… Because you’re an artist, not a kept woman.” German uses the same verb for keeping a mistress, so I believe the wit is Tergit’s and not mine. Even so, it is the line I am least sure reads naturally.

Some things would not cross. *Überziehen* means both to try on a dress and for the sky to cloud over. That pun survives only as a parallel between two dressmaking lines. The shift between *du* and *Sie* is invisible in English. I marked Wanda’s one meaningful shift with a single “mister” and let tone do the rest. Eugenie quotes her husband without quotation marks, so that “you” briefly means her and not Käte. I kept the unmarked quotation and added only “to me.”

I remain unsure about several things:
- whether “eccentric” is right for Paul’s dismissive *überspannt*;
- whether “frock coats” and “toilette for the casino” are too plain or too quaint;
- whether the Berlin voices sound a shade too American for 1887;
- whether I have read the coachman’s quarrel correctly, since the German never says who rebukes him.

I treated the sexual scenes as Tergit does: plainly, without coyness and without leering. Wanda’s history is told in a few flat sentences, and I kept them flat. I did no outside research. Everything here rests on the novel itself and on the translation that precedes this chapter. I translated what the page says, including its date, 1887, even though the epilogue later remembers the day as 1886.