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

Immensee, «Elisabeth» — R04 (lead close translation, source-only)

Source. Theodor Storm, Immensee (1849; Project Gutenberg ebook 6651, German, SHA-256 3768a9071c15dcd3435c22106922e59a35ecb4ae356644303948346b61edc179), the chapter headed ELISABETH, 1,260 German words in 33 paragraphs. Locus file: workshop/experiments/E-20260806c-source-grammar/materials/immensee-elisabeth-de.txt.

Regime. R04 v1.0. The frozen draft required by §Procedure 2a is T-immensee-elisabeth-R06-v1, committed before this revision began; the two are a paired R06/R04 comparison by construction.

Lineage. R06-v1 → self-revision against the source, same session → this file. No API call, no run/.

Cost. $0. Lead translation, never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Source-only declaration. No English rendering of Immensee was read before the R06 draft and its log were frozen, nor before this revision. The one piece of non-translational apparatus read is declared on the R06 artifact (the editor's footnote on Storm's coinage priesterten).

Contamination: suspected — measured, not asserted. Against the one freely reachable published English, Project Gutenberg 6650:

Figures are computed by tools/dependence_check.py after this translation was frozen and are reported in RS-20260806c-source-grammar §Translation limb. No published–published baseline is reachable: only one English Immensee is freely available, so the lead's overlap cannot be compared against an independent pair on this locus, and it is reported without one. Nothing in E-20260806c turns on the lead being independent — the lead's prose enters no statistic in that design; its role is the log and the census (as in ARM-translated-register step 1, where the registered prediction came from the log and not from the prose).

Evaluation pointers. Not judged. No jury was convened; the lead never judges its own translation (charter §5). Tier D is NOT PASSED and config/models.md reads NOT CALIBRATED.

Translation

ELISABETH

The next afternoon Reinhard and Elisabeth were walking on the far side of the lake, now through the timber, now along the jutting edge of the shore. Elisabeth had been given the task by Erich, while he and her mother were away, of making Reinhard acquainted with the finest views of the country round about, and above all with the view of the estate itself from the other side of the water. So they went from one point to the next.

At last Elisabeth grew tired and sat down in the shade of overhanging branches; Reinhard stood facing her, leaning against a tree trunk; then he heard the cuckoo calling deeper in the wood, and it came over him suddenly that all this had been just so once before. He looked at her with a strange smile.

"Shall we look for strawberries?" he asked.

"It isn't strawberry time," she said.

"But it will come soon."

Elisabeth shook her head without speaking; then she stood up, and the two of them went on with their walk; and as she went at his side his gaze turned to her again and again, for she walked beautifully, as if she were being carried along by her clothes. Often, without meaning to, he stayed a step behind, so as to be able to take her in whole and full.

So they came to an open place grown over with heather, with a view that reached far into the country. Reinhard stooped and picked something from the herbs growing on the ground. When he looked up again his face wore an expression of passionate pain.

"Do you know this flower?" he asked.

She looked at him questioningly. "It is heather. I have often picked it in the wood."

"I have an old book at home," he said; "I used to write all kinds of songs and rhymes into it; but that hasn't happened for a long time now. Between its leaves there is a sprig of heather too; only it is a withered one. Do you know who gave it to me?"

She nodded without a word; but she cast her eyes down and looked only at the sprig he held in his hand. They stood like that a long time. When she raised her eyes to him, he saw that they were full of tears.

"Elisabeth," he said — "behind those blue mountains lies our youth. Where has it gone?"

They said nothing further; they went down to the lake in silence, side by side. The air was close, and black cloud was rising in the west. "There will be a storm," said Elisabeth, quickening her step; Reinhard nodded without speaking, and the two of them walked rapidly along the shore until they had reached their boat.

During the crossing Elisabeth let her hand rest on the edge of the boat. He looked across at her as he rowed; but she looked past him into the distance. So his gaze slid downward and stayed on her hand; and the pale hand betrayed to him what her face had kept from him.

He saw on it that fine trace of secret pain which takes possession so readily of beautiful women's hands that lie at night upon a sick heart. When Elisabeth felt his eye resting on her hand, she let it slip slowly over the side into the water.

Arriving at the estate they came upon a knife-grinder's cart in front of the manor house; a man with black hair hanging down in curls was busily working the treadle and humming a gypsy tune between his teeth, while a dog still in its harness lay panting beside him. In the hall stood a girl wrapped in rags, with beautiful, distracted features, holding out her hand to Elisabeth in entreaty.

Reinhard reached into his pocket, but Elisabeth was there before him and hastily poured the whole contents of her purse into the beggar-girl's open hand. Then she turned quickly away, and Reinhard heard her go up the stairs, sobbing.

He meant to stop her, but he thought better of it and stayed behind at the stairs. The girl was still standing in the hall, motionless, the alms she had been given in her hand.

"What more do you want?" Reinhard asked.

She started. "I want nothing more," she said; then, turning her head back towards him, staring at him with her lost eyes, she walked slowly towards the door. He cried out a name, but she no longer heard it; with her head sunk, her arms crossed over her breast, she walked away down across the yard:

Dying, ah! dying Must I, alone!

An old song roared in his ear, his breath stood still; a short while, and then he turned away and went up to his room.

He sat down to work, but he had no thoughts. After trying for an hour in vain he went down to the family room. There was nobody there, only a cool green half-light; on Elisabeth's sewing table lay a red ribbon that she had worn round her neck that afternoon. He took it in his hand, but it hurt him, and he put it down again.

He could not rest; he went down to the lake and cast off the boat; he rowed across and walked once more every path he had walked with Elisabeth a little while before. When he came home again it was dark; in the yard he met the coachman, who was taking the carriage horses out to grass; the travellers had just returned.

As he stepped into the hall he heard Erich pacing up and down in the garden room. He did not go in to him; he stood still a moment and then climbed the stairs quietly to his room. Here he sat down in the armchair by the window; he made out to himself that he wanted to hear the nightingale striking up below in the walls of yew; but what he heard was only the strokes of his own heart. Below him the house settled to rest, the night ran out, he did not feel it.

So he sat for hours. At last he got up and laid himself in the open window. The night dew trickled between the leaves, the nightingale had left off. Little by little the deep blue of the night sky was driven back from the east by a pale yellow gleam; a fresh wind rose and brushed Reinhard's hot forehead; the first lark went up exulting into the air.

Reinhard turned round suddenly and stepped to the table: he groped for a pencil, and when he had found it he sat down and wrote a few lines with it on a white sheet of paper. When he had finished he took up hat and stick, and leaving the paper behind him he opened the door carefully and went down into the hall.

The half-light of morning still lay in every corner; the big house cat stretched itself on the straw mat and arched its back against his hand, which he held out without thinking. But outside in the garden the sparrows were already priesting from the branches and telling everybody that the night was over.

Then he heard a door go upstairs in the house; there was a coming down the stairs, and when he looked up Elisabeth was standing before him. She laid her hand on his arm, she moved her lips, but he heard no words.

"You are not coming back," she said at last. "I know it; don't lie; you will never come back."

"Never," he said.

She let her hand fall and said nothing more. He crossed the hall towards the door; then he turned once again. She stood motionless in the same place and looked at him with dead eyes. He took a step forward and stretched out his arms to her. Then he wrenched himself round and went out at the door.

Outside the world lay in the fresh morning light, the pearls of dew hanging in the spiders' webs flashed in the first rays of the sun. He did not look back; he walked quickly on out; and more and more the quiet homestead sank behind him, and before him rose the great wide world.

Translator's log — revision

The R06 log stands as frozen and is not amended. This section records only what the self-revision changed, and why. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims; any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

Paragraphing is 33 to 33. The German locus has 33 body paragraphs; so does the draft and so does this revision. Nothing was joined or split. (RS-20260806b §Limits records a case where a Victorian translator's paragraphing was unrecoverable from the scan; here it is recoverable and was kept.)

R1 — the schlug / Schlag pun, taken up on the second pass

R06 log D5 named this as the first thing revision would look at, and it was. The draft had "the nightingale singing … the beating of his own heart", which loses Storm's single verb. The revision reads "the nightingale striking up below in the walls of yew; but what he heard was only the strokes of his own heart." Strike up is idiomatic of birdsong; strokes of the heart is available in English and pulls a clock into the sentence that the German does not have. The figure is recovered and something is paid for it. Two paragraphs later hatte aufgehört zu schlagen becomes "had left off" rather than "had stopped singing", so that the English does not name the verb it has just made strange.

R2 — es kam die Treppe herunter, the impersonal restored

R06 had "something came down the stairs", which supplies the noun Storm withholds. The revision takes the alternative the draft's log had already written down: "there was a coming down the stairs". It is a stiffer clause than the German and it keeps the one thing the clause is for — that Elisabeth is a sound before she is a person.

R3 — two supplied possessives removed, and the census moves

R06 row 6 read "picked something from the low plants growing at his feet", where the German is am Boden wachsenden Kräutern — on the ground. The revision reads "from the herbs growing on the ground". Row 3, "his eyes turned to her", becomes "his gaze turned to her" (sein Blick is singular).

The frozen census in the R06 log is not amended; it is that draft's census and E-20260806c P2 is registered from it. What the revision shows is worth recording on its own: a self-revision against the source removed a supplied possessive (row 6, coded S) and changed no O row. The R04 census is therefore 48 rows where R06 had 49, and 23 S where R06 had 24. This is one instance and is not evidence of a tendency.

R4 — smaller repairs against the source

• von Erich den Auftrag erhalten — the draft's "had been charged by Erich" compressed a two-part German construction; the revision restores it as "had been given the task by Erich … of making Reinhard acquainted with".
• von ihren Kleidern getragen — plural clothes, not a dress: "as if she were being carried along by her clothes".
• dem Rande des Kahnes — the draft's gunwale is a technical word for a plain German phrase: "on the edge of the boat".
• Hausflur / Flur — the draft used hallway once and hall four times for the same room; the revision uses hall throughout.
• verstörten schönen Zügen — "beautiful, distracted features", not face.
• oft and immer wieder in the same paragraph were both "again and again" in the draft; the revision keeps again and again for immer wieder and uses "Often" for oft.

R5 — what revision did not change

The four decisions the draft's log argued for stand: the ethnonym in D7 (gypsy tune), the coinage in D3 (priesting), the split of Hof in D6 (estate / yard), and the song in D8. du (D1) remains unmarkable and remains unmarked.