Repository path: workshop/translations/bettelweib-locarno/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-bettelweib-locarno-R06-v1 — Kleist, «Das Bettelweib von Locarno» ¶1–3, DE→EN, single pass

Regime: R06 v1.0 (lead single pass, source-only, no revision), frozen 2026-07-27. Source: workshop/canon/bettelweib-locarno/source.txt — the 1810 Berliner Abendblätter printing, ¶1–3, 361 German words in 3 paragraphs. Translated by: the lead agent, as a labeled subject (charter §3, §5, A4). No API call; cost $0; not ledgered. Lineage: the baseline arm of E-20260728c-length-matching. Its unconstrained self-revision is T-bettelweib-locarno-R04-v1 and the length-matched variant of that is T-bettelweib-locarno-R04m-v1; both were written after this file was committed. Priming: none. No English rendering of this story was read, fetched, or opened. Two Gutenberg volumes were searched for the string Locarno to establish that no free comparator exists (manifest §Comparator reachability); the search printed one 67-character line from a critical introduction and no narrative prose. Note (abm) applied — verification by counts and offsets only. Contamination: suspected, UNMEASURED. The story is widely anthologised in English and the lead may hold some of it; no freely reachable published English translation exists against which a longest-common-run could be computed (three verified checks in the manifest). The declaration is the honest one for the case note (bcd) names as unmeasurable, not disqualified. Evaluation: none, and none is possible under this design. The lead never judges its own translation (charter §5). The only quantities taken from this text are a word count and its role as the reference list in a token diff.

Translation

At the foot of the Alps, near Locarno in upper Italy, there stood an old castle belonging to a marchese, which one now sees lying in rubble and ruin as one comes down from the St. Gotthard; a castle with high and rambling rooms, in one of which an old sick woman, who had presented herself begging at the door, had once been bedded down by the lady of the house, out of pity, on straw that was shaken out beneath her. The marchese, returning from the hunt and happening to step into the room where he was accustomed to set down his gun, ordered the woman crossly to get up out of the corner she was lying in and to take herself off behind the stove. The woman, as she raised herself, slipped with her crutch on the polished floor and injured her back in a dangerous way; so that although she still got to her feet with unspeakable effort and crossed the room as she had been told to, she sank down behind the stove, with groaning and moaning, and died.

Several years afterwards, when the marchese had fallen through war and failed harvests into precarious circumstances, a Genoese knight presented himself, wishing to buy the castle from him for the sake of its fine situation. The marchese, to whom the sale mattered a great deal, instructed his wife to lodge the stranger in the empty room mentioned above, which was very handsomely and comfortably furnished. But how disconcerted the couple were when the knight came down to them in the middle of the night, distraught and pale, swearing by all that was holy that the room was haunted: that something invisible to the eye had got up in the corner of the room with a noise as though it had been lying on straw, had walked with audible steps, slowly and infirmly, across the room, and had sunk down behind the stove with groaning and moaning.

The marchese, alarmed, without rightly knowing why himself, laughed the knight out of it with a forced cheerfulness, and said he would get up at once and spend the night with him in the room to set his mind at rest. But the knight begged the favour of being allowed to pass the night in an armchair in the marchese's own bedroom; and when morning came he ordered his horses put to, took his leave, and drove away.

Translator's log

Frozen with the draft. Written as the draft was written, decision by decision, and not revised afterwards. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only. Numbering continues at D15 in T-bettelweib-locarno-R04-v1.

D1 — the period is kept whole. ¶1 is two sentences in German, the first running 71 words across a semicolon, with the beggar-woman's whole arrival and bedding-down suspended inside a relative clause on Zimmern. English can break this into three or four sentences and normally would. I kept the semicolon and the single period. Alternative recorded and not taken: split at ; ein Schloß, into two sentences. This decision is the reason this passage was chosen — the choice is genuinely open and it moves the word count.

D2 — Marchese left untranslated as "marchese", lower case. Alternatives: "Marquis" (French, and the castle is Italian); "Marquess" (English peerage, wrong system); capital "Marchese" as a title. Kleist uses it as a common noun with the article throughout, so lower case follows his usage.

D3 — in Schutt und Trümmern liegen sieht → "sees lying in rubble and ruin". The German is a fixed doublet. English "rubble and ruin" is alliterative where the German is not; "rubble and ruins" or "ruin and rubble" were live. Chosen for the doublet's shape, at the cost of introducing an alliteration Kleist did not have.

D4 — wenn man vom St. Gotthard kommt → "as one comes down from the St. Gotthard". "Down" is an addition: the German has only kommt. It is licensed by the geography — the pass is above Locarno — and by Am Fuße der Alpen two clauses earlier. Recorded as an explicitation, not as a neutral choice.

D5 — weitläufigen → "rambling". The word means spacious/extensive with a suggestion of sprawl. "Spacious" is the flat gloss and loses the sprawl; "rambling" carries the sprawl and adds a faint English-country-house note the German does not have. Also considered: "far-reaching", "extensive".

D6 — the passive chain in ¶1 is kept passive. auf Stroh, das man ihr unterschüttete … von der Hausfrau, aus Mitleiden, gebettet worden war — an agentless man inside a passive with a named agent. English "on straw that was shaken out beneath her … had been bedded down by the lady of the house" keeps both. Activating it ("the lady of the house had bedded her down on straw") would be shorter and would put the woman's helplessness the wrong way round: in Kleist she is the grammatical patient of every clause in this sentence, and that is the sentence's whole method.

D7 — unterschüttete → "shaken out beneath her". No single English verb. Alternatives: "spread under her" (loses the shaking), "strewn beneath her" (archaic register). Three words where German has one; a length cost taken deliberately.

D8 — befahl … unwillig → "ordered … crossly". unwillig is reluctance shading into annoyance. "Irritably", "with annoyance", "ill-temperedly" were live. "Crossly" is the shortest that keeps the pettiness; a longer choice would make the marchese angrier than the German does.

D9 — sich hinter den Ofen zu verfügen → "to take herself off behind the stove". sich verfügen is stiff, quasi-official movement — the marchese's register, not the narrator's. "To betake herself" is the exact register and is now unreadable; "to go" loses the whole point. "Take herself off" keeps the dismissiveness and is idiomatic. The stiffness is transferred rather than reproduced.

D10 — beschädigte sich … das Kreuz → "injured her back". das Kreuz is the small of the back / the sacrum. "Injured her back" is the ordinary English; "damaged her spine" over-specifies a diagnosis the text does not give; "hurt her loins" is wrong in register. beschädigen used of a person is itself odd in German — one damages an object — and that oddness is lost. Recorded as an unrecovered loss.

D11 — unter Stöhnen und Aechzen → "with groaning and moaning", used twice. The doublet occurs in ¶1 (the woman) and again in ¶2 (the apparition), and the repetition is the story's mechanism: the ghost is identified by reproducing the sentence. Both renderings must stay word-for-word identical. Alternatives for the pair: "groaning and sighing", "with groans and moans". English has no doublet that separates stöhnen from ächzen the way the German does, so the distinction is dropped and the identity of the two occurrences is protected instead.

D12 — hoch und theuer versichernd → "swearing by all that was holy". Literally "assuring highly and dearly"; the German is a set phrase for swearing solemnly. "Solemnly assuring them", "swearing up and down", "protesting on his oath" were live. Chosen for register — the knight is frightened and formal at once.

D13 — ¶2's apparition stays in reported speech, in one sentence. The German runs the whole haunting through Konjunktiv I inside the daß-clause: daß … etwas … aufgestanden, … gegangen, und … niedergesunken sei. English has no productive reportive subjunctive, so the report is carried by "that something … had got up … had walked … and had sunk down", pluperfect throughout, held in one sentence. Alternative, live and not taken: resolve to direct narration ("Something invisible had got up…"), which is more vivid and destroys the fact that nobody in the story ever sees this happen — every occurrence is somebody's report. The second decision in this passage that moves the word count substantially.

D14 — Der Marchese erschrocken → "The marchese, alarmed,". A verbless absolute; Kleist's most abrupt construction in the passage. "The marchese, alarmed," keeps the apposition and the abruptness. "The marchese was alarmed, though he did not rightly know why, and laughed…" would be smoother and would supply a finite verb the German withholds.