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

T-fagelfrie-R06gate-v1 — Lagerlöf, «De fågelfrie», the tarn (the second gate unit)

Source. Selma Lagerlöf, «De fågelfrie», in Osynliga länkar (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1894), Project Runeberg runeberg.org/osynliga/04.html. Public domain. Paragraph 42, 218 Swedish words — a mid-story descriptive passage, deliberately not the story's opening.

Regime. R06 — lead, source-only, single pass. Purpose not declared: this is a gate unit.

Why there is a second gate unit. The first candidate work, «En julgäst», failed its gate (T-julgast-R06gate-v1: longest run 17 tokens, 6 shared 12-grams) and was discarded under the frozen rule E-20260801g §3.4 V3. This is the replacement candidate. The span is mid-story by choice, and the reason is stated before the measurement rather than after it: the discarded run sat inside the story's first sentence, which is the most constrained text a story contains — a name, a relative clause, two flat verbs — and this project's own standing reading is that shared runs land where the source is shortest and least figurative. Whether that is why it landed there is not re-litigated here; CLAUDE.md closes the measurement programme on the forced-run question, and this design does not reopen it.

Contamination: none, measured. tools/dependence_check.py, unmodified, against the whole of Pauline Bancroft Flach's "The Outlaws" (Invisible Links, 1899, Project Gutenberg #14273). Comparator body never read; extraction by script, counts only printed (note (bdn)). Nulls per note (bgf): three further stories by the same translator in the same volume.

The translation

On one of the broad, forest-grown fells there lay a dark tarn. It was four-square, with shores so straight and corners so sharp that it might have been dug out by men. On three sides it was walled in by sheer rock, to which the spruces clung by roots as thick as arms. All round the tarn, where the turf had little by little been washed away, those roots stood up out of the water, bare and crooked and wonderfully twisted about one another. They were an endless mass of snakes that had all wanted to crawl up out of the tarn at once, and had tangled together and been left standing. Or they were a heap of blackened skeletons of drowned giants that the tarn had wanted to heave up onto land. Arms and legs curved about each other, the long fingers dug down into the rock itself for a hold, the enormous ribs made arches that carried up ancient trees. It had happened, though, that those iron arms, those steel-hard giant's fingers by which the spruces held fast, had given way, and a great north wind had swung one spruce in a wide arc from the ridge down into the tarn. Top first, it had driven deep into the muddy bottom and stuck there. Now the fry had a good refuge among its branches, but the root stuck up above the water like a many-armed monster, and its black root-limbs helped to make the tarn ugly and frightening.

Translator's log

Frozen with the translation, before the gate was run and before the R11 pair's locus was selected.

1. tjärn — "tarn". A tjärn is a small, deep, dark forest lake; English "tarn" is a northern dialect word carrying the same. The nearest neutral option, "pool", loses the depth; "mountain lake" loses the size.
2. fjällen — "fells". Fjäll in southern Sweden is a wooded upland, not the bare alpine fjäll of the north, and the text says skogbevuxna (forest-grown), which settles it. "Fells" keeps the northern-English register; "mountains" would have overstated the height.
3. fyrkantig — "four-square". Literally four-cornered; "square" alone would say a shape the next clause has to earn, and "four-square" holds the corners the sentence goes on to name.
4. granarna — "the spruces". Gran is Norway spruce; "fir" is the commoner English word and the wrong tree.
5. armstjocka rötter — "roots as thick as arms". One Swedish compound, five English words, and the arm is needed because the paragraph turns the roots into limbs three sentences later.
6. vräka upp på land — "heave up onto land". Vräka is to fling or pitch something heavy and unwanted; "cast up" was the alternative and is more biblical than the Swedish.
7. The two Det var … sentences — "They were an endless mass of snakes …", "Or they were a heap of blackened skeletons …". Swedish opens both with the impersonal det var, which English can carry as "it was" only at the price of losing the plural agreement with the roots. Rendered with the plural; the impersonal framing is lost and is recorded as lost.
8. fiskynglet — "the fry". Collective singular in Swedish, collective in English too, which is the rare case of a free match.
9. stygg och skrämmande — "ugly and frightening". Stygg is both ugly and wicked, and of a place it leans to the second; the pair "ugly and frightening" takes the first sense and lets the second go. "Evil and frightening" was live and was refused as too explicit for a landscape sentence.
10. nordan — "north wind". Nordan is the named wind, not a direction; English has no name for it and takes the direction.

No sentence in this log is a quality claim about the rendering.