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

T-harzreise-R06-gate-v1 — Heine, «Die Harzreise» ¶118, German → English (contamination gate)

The gate text for E-20260802-voice-warrant. Its only job is to be run through tools/dependence_check.py against two published English renderings of the same work, before the studied locus is translated — the order note (bcd) prescribes, as a selection gate rather than as a flag.

Source

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), «Die Harzreise», written 1824, published 1826 in Reisebilder I. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 24249 (Reclam, ed. Otto F. Lachmann, after Strodtmann's hand copy), fetched 2026-08-02 by direct HTTPS GET of https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24249.txt.utf-8. Public domain. Cleaned to 179 paragraphs as ../../experiments/E-20260802-voice-warrant/material/source-de-paras.txt; this is paragraph 118, 203 German words.

Regime R06 (lead single pass, source-only, no revision). Translated from the German alone; neither published English rendering of this paragraph has been read.

The translation

The higher one climbs the mountain, the shorter and more dwarfish the firs become; they seem to shrink into themselves more and more, until nothing is left but bilberry and cranberry bushes and mountain herbs. It grows perceptibly colder here as well. The strange groupings of granite blocks first come properly into view at this height, and they are often of astonishing size. These will be the playing-balls the evil spirits toss to one another on Walpurgis Night, when the witches come riding up on broomsticks and dung-forks and the wonderfully wicked revels begin — as the reliable nursemaid tells it, and as it may be seen in Master Retzsch's handsome Faust pictures. Indeed, a young poet who rode past the Brocken on the first night of May, travelling from Berlin to Göttingen, actually observed a party of belletristic ladies holding their aesthetic tea on a shoulder of the mountain, comfortably reading the Abendzeitung aloud to one another, extolling as universal geniuses their poetical little billy-goats, which went bleating and skipping about the tea-table, and handing down their final verdict on every phenomenon in German literature; but when they came to Ratcliff and Almansor too, and denied the author every trace of piety and Christian feeling, the young man's hair stood on end, horror seized him — I gave my horse the spurs and galloped past.

Translator's log

Frozen before any evaluation of this text was designed; this text is not evaluated at all. Four decisions worth recording, all of which recur in the studied span:

1. zwerghafter → "more dwarfish." The German adjective is doing two jobs — the literal stunting of tree-line firs, and the dwarf/giant scale-play that runs through the whole Brocken section and returns at ¶124 (wir Zwerge). Keeping the dwarf word costs a little idiomatic English and holds the thread.
2. die glaubhafte Amme — "the reliable nursemaid," an ironic appeal to authority. Credible was live and is the closer word; reliable was chosen because the irony reads better in English when the word is flatter, and because credible nurse invites the wrong sense of nurse.
3. abenteuerlich verruchte Lust — "the wonderfully wicked revels." abenteuerlich here is adverbial-intensifying (outlandishly, fantastically), not adventurous; Lust is the Walpurgis revel, not pleasure in the abstract. Plural revels was preferred to singular revelry for its rhythm before the dash.
4. The person-switch in the last clause — bemerkte ein junger Dichter … ich gab dem Pferde die Sporen. The third person collapses into the first without warning: the "young poet" was Heine all along, and the joke is exactly that the sentence forgets to keep the fiction up. Nothing was done to smooth it, and the em-dash was kept where the German has it. This is the clearest single instance in the paragraph of a decision whose rightness cannot be judged from the clause it sits in.

(Evaluative sentences: none. Decisions and alternatives only.)