Repository path: workshop/translations/erdsegen/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-erdsegen-R04-v1 — Rosegger, «Erdsegen», the opening of the first letter

Source. Peter Rosegger, Erdsegen. Vertrauliche Sonntagsbriefe eines Bauernknechtes (Leipzig: Staackmann, 1906; first published 1900); copy-text Project Gutenberg #57076. Span: «Daß euch derrr Kuckuck hol'!» → «…werbend um eine leibhaftige Mistgabel.», 391 German words, SHA-256 6a1e2f3ebb45e006… (full hash in workshop/experiments/E-20260807-narrator-unknown/materials/sources.json).

Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source only. Draft frozen first as T-erdsegen-R06-v1 (§Procedure 2a). Translator: lead. Cost $0, never ledgered.

Contamination: none, measured. A published English rendering exists — The Earth and the Fullness Thereof: A Romance of Modern Styria, authorised translation by Frances E. Skinner (New York: Putnam, 1902) — and was not read before this translation and its log were frozen. It was found after the freeze, when the absence this artifact first claimed was checked against archive.org rather than asserted; the first claim was wrong and is corrected here rather than quietly replaced. Measured by tools/dependence_check.py on the matched span: 7 shared 7-grams, 0 shared 12-grams, 0 shared 15-grams, longest common run 10 tokens — clean (materials/contamination.json).

Lineage. T-erdsegen-R06-v1 → this. Evaluations: E-20260807-narrator-unknown (profiled as a source–target crossing item; not judged for quality anywhere).

Drrrat the lot of you!

Such greeting aforesaid, dear friends — and now laugh, laugh, laugh!

Long, long ago! — so sang the old man under our courtyard windows. I had never understood him. Two eternities en miniature, that is what the first two days of this year were. The third has not come to an end at all yet. But if this remarkable year that has now begun should ever stop, which by human reckoning is at any rate probable, then I shall laugh, gentlemen! And my laughter shall be to you the trumpet-blast of the Last Judgment, if you have any notion what is meant by that.

My present frame of mind lies, I admit, a good way off from laughter. For six years, in your company, under pen and paste-scissors, I diligently mistook my calling; now that I am hunting for it all on my lonesome with a walking-stick, it will, I hope, soon come in sight. And next New Year's Eve I shall loom up terribly before your eyes, in a tasselled cap and with a hayfork. Not one hour do I serve over, though half of January go by before I am one. Endeavour? Honest. — In der Zusen is the name of the hole where, at a tavern table, I write you mourners my first bulletin. Two farms have already thrown me out, yesterday. Today is a rest day — To my civil enquiry at the first one the answer was: "Well I never! In summer the cherries grow, and in winter the vagabonds! I'll warrant the gentry would like a warm nest and a full bowl about New Year. Afterwards, when the snow goes, off they go too, and a man's on his own again when the field work has to be done. Off with you to the Social Democrats! Happen you're one yourself!" Bang — and I had the door in my face.

That had been a handsome holding, out on the high road. I am sorry about it. But it has furnished material for a brilliant piece of political economy, twenty kreuzer the line and not a farthing less. Costs me as much myself.

At the second farm, when I put in — hat in hand — to ask whether they had no want of a hand, the farmer gawps at me, a little fat cocky fellow. Then he reaches with his snotty fingers for the point of my moustache, still tolerably well turned up, and says: "And what sort of a dainty fork has he got there? Is that supposed to be a dung fork?" My fingers cramp at once, but there is nothing doing in the way of avenging one's honour; pleadingly I knock my fists together, applying for a dung fork in the flesh.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-07 (S125), at translation time, before the study limb of E-20260807-narrator-unknown was designed. Decisions and alternatives; no quality claims. Any evaluative sentence here is internal-judgment-only.

1. The first line, and what the roll is attached to. «Daß euch derrr Kuckuck hol'!» — Kuckuck is a minced oath standing in for Teufel, and the trilled r is written into the definite article, which is where the shout starts. English has no article in its oaths, so the roll has nowhere to sit. Options tried: "The dev-v-vil take the lot of you!" (the roll lands on the word the German is avoiding, which undoes the mincing); "Confound the whole rrrotten lot of you!" (the draft — the roll lands on an adjective the German does not have, so I invented a word to hold a sound); "Drrrat the lot of you!" (chosen). Drat is itself a minced oath — from God rot — so the mincing survives, and its initial r takes the trill in the position where the German has it, at the front of the shout. This is the closest device-for-device match in the passage, and it is luck: English happens to keep one minced oath that begins with an r.
2. «Sothanen Gruß zuvor» → "Such greeting aforesaid". Chancery-archaic in German — the narrator opening a letter in the formula of a legal writ, for the joke. Such a greeting first (draft) loses the writ. "Aforesaid" is the English legal-archaic word and puts the joke back, though in a slightly different office: German's sothan is old and general, English's aforesaid is old and specifically legal.
3. «unter Feder und Schere» → "under pen and paste-scissors". Pen and scissors (draft) reads in English as a stationery list. The scissors are the sub-editor's, for cutting copy out of other papers; "paste-scissors" names the trade the narrator is quitting, and it is an explicitation — a word and a half added to hold information the German idiom carries without saying.
4. «mutterseelen allein» → "all on my lonesome". All alone in the world was live and is the neutral rendering. «Mutterseelenallein» is not neutral: it is a big folk-compound, faintly comic in this mouth. On my lonesome is the colloquial English of about the right date and keeps the comedy. The register goes down where the German goes down, but by an idiom rather than a compound, because English cannot build the compound.
5. «Er» — the obsolete third-person address, and the device English does not have. The farmer says «Was hat Er denn da für eine saubere Gabel?» — the old condescending Er, used downward to servants and inferiors, which is the whole social content of the line: the farmer is classifying this applicant on the spot. Options: you (the relation vanishes entirely); thou (wrong direction — English thou to a stranger reads as archaic-intimate or biblical, not as contemptuous); the third person, "what sort of a dainty fork has he got there?" (chosen). English does have a servant-addressing third person, but it belongs to the drawing room and not to a farmyard, so the marking arrives with the wrong class attached to it — the farmer sounds like a butler's employer rather than a peasant putting a tramp in his place. The relation is carried; the register of the carrier is not the register of the source's carrier. This is the same category the framework/v0.1 §4 address-device contrasts are about, and it is a second instance of a device that asserts a register the no-added-fact clause does not reach.
6. «Bemühen? Redlich.» → "Endeavour? Honest." Two words answering themselves, in the clipped style of a man filling in a form about himself. Trying? Honestly. (draft) turns them into speech. The chosen pair keeps the noun-then-adjective shape, at the cost of sounding like a telegram in English where in German it sounds like a shrug.
7. «nicht unter zwanzig Kreuzern» → "twenty kreuzer the line and not a farthing less". The currency is kept unconverted; farthing is an English coin-word doing duty in a German-currency sentence, which is a mixed choice I made deliberately — the kreuzer holds the setting and the farthing holds the idiom, and I could not find an idiom that holds both. A reader who notices will notice a seam.
8. What the paragraph loses. Rosegger's narrator is a Viennese journalist writing Styrian dialect-flavoured German at his city colleagues, and the comedy is in the distance between the two. In English I have only one gradient (formal/colloquial) where the German has two (literary/popular and city/regional), so the farmer's dialect and the narrator's slang come out on the same scale. The farmer's «Bist 'leicht selber einer!» is rendered "Happen you're one yourself!" — a regional English marker borrowed from the wrong region, which is the standard trade and is recorded here as a trade rather than a solution.