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

Immensee, «Elisabeth» — R06 (lead single pass)

Source. Theodor Storm, Immensee (1849; text as printed in Project Gutenberg ebook 6651, German, SHA-256 3768a9071c15dcd3435c22106922e59a35ecb4ae356644303948346b61edc179), the chapter headed ELISABETH — the ninth of ten, 1,260 German words. Extracted verbatim to workshop/experiments/E-20260806c-source-grammar/materials/immensee-elisabeth-de.txt.

Regime. R06 v1.0 — read the source, write the translation once, stop. This file is the frozen draft required by R04 §Procedure step 2a; the revision of it is T-immensee-elisabeth-R04-v1.

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

Source-only declaration (R06 §Procedure 1). No English rendering of Immensee was read before this draft and its log were frozen. One piece of non-translational apparatus was read and is declared: the German e-text carries an editorial footnote on Storm's coinage priesterten, glossing it "sangen schon die Sperlinge großartig, wie Priester" and noting that the word is found nowhere else. That is commentary on the source language, which R06 §1 permits; it is recorded here because it changed a choice.

Contamination: suspected. Immensee is among the most frequently translated German novellas of the nineteenth century and English versions plausibly sit in the lead's training data. Measured against the one freely reachable published English (Project Gutenberg 6650) after this draft was frozen; the figures are on the R04 artifact. Nothing in E-20260806c turns on the lead being independent — the lead's prose enters no statistic in that design.

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 charged by Erich, while he and her mother were away, with showing Reinhard the finest views of the immediate neighbourhood, and above all the view of the estate itself from the opposite bank. 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 eyes turned to her again and again, for she walked beautifully, as though her dress were carrying her. Again and again, without meaning to, he let himself fall a step behind, so as to have her whole and full in view.

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 low plants growing at his feet. 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 quickly along the shore until they had reached their boat.

During the crossing Elisabeth let her hand rest on the gunwale. 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 hallway stood a girl wrapped in rags, with a beautiful, distracted face, 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 pretended to himself that he wanted to listen to the nightingale singing below in the walls of yew; but he heard only the beating 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 stopped singing. 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; something came 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 beads of dew hanging in the spiders' webs flashed in the first rays of the sun. He did not look back; he walked quickly out; and more and more the quiet homestead sank behind him, and before him rose the great wide world.

Translator's log

Written at translation time, before the revision, and frozen. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims (R06 §Outputs; charter §3, A4). Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

D1 — du to the beggar-girl, and the one thing English cannot carry

Reinhard says »Was willst du noch?« to the ragged girl in the hall. Every other second-person form in the chapter is du to Elisabeth, whom he has known since childhood. The German therefore marks two entirely different relations with the same pronoun: intimacy with Elisabeth, and — with a stranger begging at a manor door — either the condescension a gentleman uses downward or the shock of recognition (she is the singer of the earlier chapter, and he "cried out a name" two lines later). English has one you and no way to choose. The alternative I considered was to add a vocative or a tonal marker ("What more do you want, girl?") to force one reading; I did not, because the German does not choose either. What is lost is that the reader of the English cannot tell that anything was at stake in the pronoun.

D2 — where the German withholds the possessive

The chapter alternates, apparently freely, between a possessive determiner and a bare definite article on body parts and belongings: ihre Hand / die Hand, seine Tasche, den Kopf schütteln, die Augen nieder, in der Hand hielt, um den Hals, nahm es in die Hand, den Rücken. English will not take the article in any of these: shook the head, cast the eyes down, worn round the neck are not available. So the translator supplies a possessive at every one of those sites and has no choice about it. Where German does supply the possessive (ihre Hand auf dem Rande des Kahnes, seinen Arm, ihrer Börse), the English simply copies it.

I record this here, before anything is counted, because it is the mechanism ARM-translated-register step 1 could not separate: its four cells all translate from Spanish or French, where the article-for-possessive construction is the norm rather than one option among two. German is intermediate — it does both, in the same paragraph — and that is exactly the prediction I want registered before the corpus is measured. §Census below counts it.

D3 — priesterten, a word that exists once

Draußen im Garten aber priesterten schon die Sperlinge von den Zweigen. The editor's footnote (read, declared above) says the verb is Storm's own and occurs nowhere else. Three live options: translate the sense and lose the coinage ("were already holding forth like priests", "were already intoning"); find an English word that is odd in the same way; or coin. I coined — "were already priesting from the branches" — because a hapax rendered by a normal word stops being a hapax, and the sentence's whole comedy is that the sparrows are performing an office. The cost is that "priest" as a verb does exist in English (to ordain), so the English reader may take it as a word they merely do not know rather than as one nobody knows.

D4 — es kam die Treppe herunter

Impersonal: not she came down the stairs, not someone — it came down. Storm withholds the subject for one clause so that Elisabeth's arrival is a sound before it is a person. English has no comfortable impersonal here. I wrote "something came down the stairs", which supplies a noun the German refuses and makes the moment slightly more gothic than it is. The alternative "there was a coming down the stairs" keeps the withholding and costs the plainness of Storm's clause.

D5 — schlug twice, and a pun given up

die Nachtigall … schlug (the nightingale sang; German uses schlagen of birdsong) and, one clause later, den Schlag seines eigenen Herzens (the beat of his own heart). One verb, two meanings, side by side — the nightingale he pretends to listen to and the heart he actually hears are doing the same thing. English beat covers the heart and not the bird; English strike up covers the bird and not the heart. In this draft I took the plain reading (singing / beating) and lost the figure. It is the first thing I will look at in revision.

D6 — Hof

Used four times in three senses: the estate seen from across the water (auf den Hof selber), the place one arrives at (Auf dem Hofe angekommen), and twice the yard one walks across (über den Hof hinab, auf dem Hofe begegnete ihm der Kutscher). I split it — estate, estate, yard, yard — which reads correctly and destroys a repetition Storm has running from the chapter titled Immensee onwards.

D7 — Zigeunermelodie

Kept as gypsy tune. The word is a period ethnonym and is offensive in present-day English. I kept it because the chapter's two figures — the knife-grinder humming and the girl in rags who sings the song — are linked by it, and because a close translation of an 1849 novella that silently modernises its ethnic vocabulary is making a claim about the text that the text does not make. Declared, not hidden.

D8 — the song

Sterben, ach! sterben / Soll ich allein! is the last couplet of the gypsy girl's song from the earlier chapter. The German is dactylic and its force is in the inversion (die … must I). I wrote "Dying, ah! dying / Must I, alone!" — five syllables and four, the inversion kept, the comma before alone doing the work of the exclamation the German puts on ach.

Census — every second-person and possessive form in this draft, and what licensed it

Counted mechanically by workshop/experiments/E-20260806c-source-grammar/analysis/census.py, which parses this section's table and the frozen translation text; the script is committed with the tally (the binding condition in workshop/translations/README.md). The table is the data structure. Each row is one English token of the class {you, your, my, his, her, its, our, their}, coded:

• O — an overt German form licenses it one-for-one (du → you; seine Tasche → his pocket)
• S — the German has no corresponding form and the translator supplied it (den Kopf schütteln → shook her head; a pro-dropped subject → you)

Registered from this table, before the corpus is measured (this is E-20260806c P2): German licenses roughly half of the English possessive class overtly and forces the translator to supply the other half. If the displacement of the possessive class in translated English is driven by the source's grammar rather than by translating as such, then the German cells must sit below the Romance cells, whose sources use the article construction as the norm — and the Russian cells, whose source omits possessives at least as freely, must not.