After Babel, The Machine?

Translation passes — Effingers, Chapter 25 ("Frühling" / "Spring")

A working log. One entry per pass. I record what I was trying to do, not what I hope I did.

Pass 1 — 2026-05-25, 21:11 CEST

What this pass is. A complete first English draft of the whole chapter, start to finish, written straight through from the close-read in notes/step3.md. Not a crib to be polished later — a real attempt at the finished thing, so that pass 2 has something true to push against. I would rather over-commit now and pull back than hedge and have nothing to judge.

The governing idea. This chapter is the founding-era idyll — one spring Saturday in March 1887, told hour by hour across the whole society. Its law is the law of the book: it is not written from the end. Nobody in it knows what 1887 leads to. So the sweetness is rendered straight — the blossom, the courtships, the workers' Feierabend, the new flats — and the dread is left entirely to the reader, who knows what these people cannot. I did not let one elegiac adjective leak backward from the catastrophe into 1887. The sheet- lightning stays on the horizon (the old historian's prophecy is the only thunder, and it is dated 1887, spoken by a living man, not by me looking back).

The refrain. The chapter is built on an anaphoric time-refrain. I fixed it as a lyric phrase so the English ear catches the repetition as the German does:

What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at ten in the morning!

— varying only the hour (eleven in the morning / one in the afternoon / five in the afternoon / three in the morning). I kept Tergit's two deliberate breaks in the pattern rather than regularizing them:

Register by diction, not by mapped dialect. I will not turn Berlinisch into Cockney or Franconian into a Scots — that is the translator's vanity and it falsifies. Instead each voice gets its level through word-choice and rhythm: Eugenie the grande dame; Käte Winkel the Berlin dressmaker (she "goggles," a man "twists his hat into a sausage"); the Chausseestraße workers and the street- quarrel in plain low idiom ("Paule, does it have to be, then?"; "daft goat … mutton-legs … prettied-up snout"); Mayer the ruined banker-aesthete in long fastidious sentences; Wanda the street-girl short and hard ("Nah, don't go killing anyone. … The great fool!").

Honorifics and place. Herr / Fräulein kept with the names — they are part of the air. "gnädige Frau" / "gnädigste Frau" → "madam" / "your ladyship"; "Herr Stadtrat" → "the councillor." Street-names left German (Chausseestraße, Bellevuestraße): the reader stands in Berlin.

Leitwords held — these must stay constant across the book, so I fix them now:

Cultural quotation kept recognizable, not footnoted. Schumann/Chamisso "A Woman's Love and Life"; Wagner's "Magic Fire Music"; Heine's "The lotus flower fears …"; "fifers and drummers, a martial sound." The reader who knows hears it; the reader who doesn't loses nothing of the scene.

Sofie's letter. Capitalized "You / Your" throughout to carry the intimacy of the German Du-letter — the one place the chapter lets a heart speak without irony, and I let it.

Title. "Chapter 25 / Spring."

Left uneasy, for pass 2 to weigh:

Pass 1 complete. Stopping here.

Pass 2 — 2026-05-25, 21:33 CEST

What this pass is. A fresh-eyes read of the whole draft against the German, line by line. The prose held; I made no stylistic churn. But the read turned up three places where I had not been faithful to the sense — two outright meaning errors and one muddied thread. Those I fixed. Nothing else changed.

The three corrections:

  1. The Recht thread (1 p.m., Waldemar at the window). German: »…für den Rechten, morgen für den Unrechten. Das Recht? Ganz neu müßte man das Recht schaffen. Das Recht der Römer…« — three times das Recht, and in a jurist drafting the Civil Code it means law, not moral "right." My pass-1 draft slid "right man → Right? → make right anew → the law," which an English reader hears as set things right, losing the jurisprudential point entirely.

    • was: "…tomorrow for the wrong one. Right? One would have to make right over entirely new. The law of the Romans…"
    • now: "…tomorrow for the wrong one. The law? The law would have to be created entirely anew. The law of the Romans…"
    • I accept that the pun der Rechte / das Recht (right man / the law) goes soft in English; the conceptual spine — a jurist who sees the crowd cheer and thinks at once of law itself — matters more, and "law" carries it.

  2. vergessen = forget, not forgive (Waldemar on Napoleon). German: »Ich könnte Napoleon den zweiten Dezember vergessen, die deutsche Reaktion nach dem Siege nicht!« — vergessen is forget. Pass 1 had "forgive," which imports a moral pardon the word doesn't carry — and the whole scene is built on memory (the historian freshening his boyhood Hessian, im Präsens / im Imperfekt, the dated prophecy). "Forget" is both literally and thematically right, and the parallel lands clean: I could forget X — Y I cannot.

    • was: "I could forgive Napoleon the Second of December…"
    • now: "I could forget Napoleon the Second of December…"

  3. The Gotthard Tunnel — reversed agency (Mayer, 5 p.m.). German: »Der Gotthardtunnel hat mich auf dem Gewissen.« The idiom jdn auf dem Gewissen haben = to have someone's ruin on one's conscience; here the tunnel is the subject and Mayer the object — the tunnel is what destroyed him (confirmed by what follows: money lost, »ich weiß ein Lied davon zu singen«). Pass 1 reversed it, making Mayer the guilty party who feels remorse for the tunnel. I kept the German's personification, which is exactly the ruined-aesthete's gallows wit — the tunnel as the murderer who must answer for him.

    • was: "The Gotthard Tunnel is what I have on my conscience."
    • now: "The Gotthard Tunnel has me on its conscience."

Deliberately left unchanged (reconsidered, judged right as they stand):

This was a correction pass, not a rewrite. Were I offered another, the one task left is to read the whole chapter aloud for speed and the catch of the refrain in the English ear — I have not yet done that, and Tergit is nothing if not fast. As of now, with these three fixes, I judge the chapter faithful and would be content to call it final, but I'll wait to be offered the next pass.

Pass 2 complete. Stopping here.

Pass 3 — 2026-05-25, 21:40 CEST

What this pass is. The aloud-read I owed the chapter and had not yet done. Tergit is fast — terse, cut to the bone — and the test of an English sentence is whether it can be said in one breath at her speed, without the tongue catching. I read the whole chapter slowly for rhythm and the catch of the refrain. The sense was sound after pass 2; this pass is pure cadence. Five small places stumbled to the ear that the eye had skated over. I fixed those and nothing else — no churn, no lateral swaps.

The five:

  1. "down the trouser" → "down the trousers" (10 a.m., the officers on the Tiergartenstraße). German »breiten roten Streifen an der Hose«. Singular "trouser" is a stiff tailoring usage that catches the ear, and it clashed with the 1 p.m. parade where I already had weiße Sommerhose as "white summer trousers." Made them consistent and natural.

  2. "grants a man his rights, then, before marriage?" → "grants a man his rights even before marriage?" (Eugenie, delicately). German »wenn sie also dem Mann vor der Ehe gleich Rechte einräumt?«. My ", then," (trying to carry also) read as a temporal stumble between two commas. Dropping it for "even" both clears the catch and renders gleich — the prematurity that is the whole point of her question — which the bare phrase had lost.

  3. The Annettchen echo (10 a.m., Käte and Eugenie). German has the cast-off girl quote the man cooing »Annettchen« to his wife, and Eugenie fasten on exactly that word: »Annettchen hat er gesagt?« — the pet name is the twist of the knife. Pass 1 rendered the two differently ("my dear little Annette" / "Annette, my dear"), slackening the echo. Now both are "dear little Annette", so the English reader hears the same words repeated back, as the German does. (Warmth kept, echo restored.)

  4. "he had once already had bitter experiences with her" → "he had had bitter experiences with her once before" (Waldemar on Susanna). German »Aber er hatte schon einmal böse Erfahrungen mit ihr gemacht.« "had once already had" is a genuine tongue-twist aloud; the clean pluperfect "had had … once before" says the same thing and runs.

  5. "kissing without cease her hand as it hung down" → "ceaselessly kissing her hand as it hung down" (Theodor on the tabouret). German »küßte unausgesetzt ihre herabhängende Hand«. Pass 1 kept the German adverb-placement, splitting verb from object ("kissing without cease her hand"), which makes the ear re-parse. Front the adverb; one breath now.

Reconsidered and deliberately left alone: "political dividedness" (Zerrissenheit — the historian's elevated register carries it); "a great rustling of flounces" (viele Rüschen rascheln — kept the phrase over a closer staccato; lateral, not better); "What a swarming in the Chausseestraße!" (Welch ein Gewimmel — kept for the motion in wimmeln); the seven-fold refrain as a set (reads as the tolling cycle it should, the 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. breaks standing out exactly as in the German).

Decision after this pass. With the aloud-read done and these five caught, I do not find anything further that is an improvement rather than mere fiddling. The sense is faithful (pass 2), the cadence now runs at Tergit's speed (this pass), the leitwords and refrain hold. I judge the chapter final as it stands. If offered further passes I expect to decline them and leave the text unchanged — but I'll say so when asked rather than presume.

Pass 3 complete. Stopping here.

Pass 4 — 2026-05-25, 21:50 CEST

What this pass is. A copy-editor's read, not a translator's. Pass 2 settled sense, pass 3 settled cadence; this time I looked only for the kind of inconsistency a careful house editor flags — orthography, conventions, the treatment of names. I had told myself after pass 3 that I expected to decline further passes and leave the text untouched. I would have, but a genuine fault surfaced that I had never catalogued, and it would have been false to refuse it out of stubbornness.

The fault: mixed British/American spelling. The text was already mostly British — woollen, paraffin, grey, per cent — but three American forms had slipped in against them. A finished literary translation must pick one convention and hold it, and British is also true to the persona: Tergit lived in London from 1938 and wrote English as the English do. So, British throughout:

  1. "what an honor!" → "what an honour!" (Waldemar's colleague at the door).
  2. "driving to the theater" → "driving to the theatre" (the Friedrichstraße montage).
  3. "Mosel?" → "Moselle?" (Waldemar ordering wine). This one is also a consistency fault of its own: I had Englished Rheinwein to "Rhine wine" two lines later but left Mosel in German. The pair must be handled the same way; "Moselle / Rhine wine" is the natural British rendering and harmonizes them.

Checked and confirmed already-consistent / deliberately kept:

Decision after this pass. With sense (pass 2), cadence (pass 3), and now convention and consistency (pass 4) all checked, the text is uniform and clean. I find nothing further that is an improvement rather than mere fiddling, and I am not willing to fiddle. I judge the chapter final. Should a fifth pass be offered, I intend to decline it and leave translation.md exactly as it now stands.

Pass 4 complete. Stopping here.

Pass 5 — 2026-05-25, 21:57 CEST (final pass)

What this pass is. The fifth and last pass. After pass 4 I wrote that I intended to decline this one and leave the text exactly as it stood. I read it again anyway — to refuse even to look would have been pride dressed up as principle, and I will not save my own face at the cost of the page. The read found one genuine fault, so my forecast was wrong, and I would rather be wrong and correct it than be consistent and leave a flaw standing.

The one change: consistent marking of quoted titles and sung fragments. The German sets every musical/work reference and quoted verse in quotation marks — »Feuerzauber«, »Figaro«, »Die Lotosblume …«, »Querpfeifer und Trommler, kriegerischer Klang«, and the nested ›Frauenlieb und -leben‹. My English already quoted four of these:

But one alone stood bare:

I had set it as a capitalized title without quotation marks while quoting all its siblings — a real inconsistency, the same copy-editing class I was hunting in pass 4 and missed because I was looking only at spelling. Now quoted (double quotes, narration-level, matching "Figaro"; full stop inside, matching my settled in-text convention). With this, every quoted title and verse fragment in the chapter is marked the same way.

Everything else: confirmed unchanged. I went through once more and found nothing else that is an improvement rather than fiddling — sense (pass 2), cadence (pass 3), spelling/convention (pass 4) all hold; the seven-fold refrain with its 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. breaks, the leitwords (überspannt → "overwrought", "the courage for his love", the loving-vs.-being-loved thesis, Anständigkeit as honour, "a premium on want of character", the dated 1887 prophecy), the register-by-diction, the kept German names and honorifics — all as set.

Final decision. This was the fifth pass, and it is the last. The translation of Chapter 25, "Spring," is final. The chapter renders the founding- era spring straight, hour by hour, with the dread left wholly to the reader who knows what these people cannot — the law of the book kept faithfully to the end. I am content to put down the pen here.

Pass 5 complete. Translation final.

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