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

T-kohlhaas-lisbeth-R06-v1 — Kleist, «Michael Kohlhaas», the Lisbeth span, no rule set

Source. Heinrich von Kleist, «Michael Kohlhaas. Aus einer alten Chronik» (1810), the span from «Diese Reise war aber von allen erfolglosen Schritten…» to «…wieder bei ihm in Kohlhaasenbrück zu sein.» — 728 German words in seven segments, read in German, stored at ../source-de-segments.txt. Text as carried by Project Gutenberg #6645 (Ausgewählte Schriften), already held in this repo at workshop/experiments/E-20260806-published-loss/materials/source-de-full.txt.

Regime. R06 v1.0 — lead single pass, source only, no rule set, no return pass. Cost $0; lead translation is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Order. Rendered first of the three lead arms, before R08 and before R07, and frozen before either was begun. The lead's order for this run is R06 → R08 → R07, deliberately crossed against E-20260807e's R06 → R07 → R08 so that the two runs do not share an order confound (RS-20260807e limit 4).

Contamination — declared before the design was written

contamination: suspected, and the basis is specific rather than formulaic.

1. No published rendering of this span was read before this draft was frozen. The two public-domain English hands used as comparators (Oxenford & Feiling 1844; Frances H. King 1913–14) were extracted to ../comparators/ programmatically, by proper-noun anchoring, and were never displayed. Word counts and anchor counts were printed; no English sentence of this span was read.
2. A disclosed exposure, on an adjacent span. Earlier in the same session, while locating a working span, the lead did read both hands' English of the immediately preceding ~730 words of the same novella (the Kallheim petition and the first Chancery decree). That span is not translated here, but it shares recurring terminology with this one — the renderings of Junker, Stadthauptmann, Roßkamm, Kanzlei. The exposure is common to all three lead arms, since all three were written after it, so it cannot drive a contrast between them; it can inflate the measured overlap of all three against both hands.
3. Prior exposure to this novella inside the project. T-kohlhaas-R04-v1, T-kohlhaas-R20-v1 and T-kohlhaas-R20-v2 rendered two other scenes (the Herse report at words 3032–4336 and the Luther interview at 13142–14563). This span (words ~7560–8290) does not overlap either.
4. Measured after the freeze, per ../comparators/dependence.json, and reported in the result page. The measurement is the declaration; this paragraph without it would be a placeholder.

The translation

S1

But of all the fruitless steps he had taken in his cause, this journey was the unhappiest of all. For after only a few days Sternbald drove into the yard again, leading the wagon step by step, in which his wife lay stretched out with a dangerous injury to the breast. Kohlhaas, who stepped up pale to the vehicle, could learn nothing coherent about what had caused this misfortune. The castellan, the groom said, had not been at home; they had therefore been obliged to put up at an inn near the palace; this inn Lisbeth had left the next morning, ordering the groom to stay behind with the horses; and not until evening had she come back, in this condition.

S2

It seemed that she had pressed too boldly up to the person of the sovereign, and, through no fault of his, had received from the mere brutal zeal of a guard surrounding him a blow on the breast with the shaft of a lance. At least so reported the people who brought her, unconscious, into the inn towards evening; for she herself, hindered by the blood welling from her mouth, could say little. The petition had afterwards been taken from her by a knight. Sternbald said it had been his wish to mount a horse at once and bring him word of this unhappy occurrence; but she had insisted, in spite of the remonstrances of the surgeon who had been called, on being carried to her husband at Kohlhaasenbrück without any notice being sent ahead.

S3

Kohlhaas put her, whom the journey had utterly destroyed, into a bed, where she lived some days longer, painfully labouring for breath. They tried in vain to restore her consciousness, in order to obtain some explanation of what had happened; she lay there with a fixed and already breaking eye, and did not answer. Only shortly before her death did her senses return to her once more.

S4

For as a clergyman of the Lutheran religion (to which faith, then just springing up, she had professed herself after her husband's example) stood beside her bed and read her a chapter of the Bible in a loud and feelingly solemn voice, she suddenly looked at him with a dark expression, took the Bible out of his hand, as though there were nothing in it to be read to her, turned the leaves and turned them, and seemed to be searching for something in it; and pointed out to Kohlhaas, who sat by her bed, with her forefinger, the verse: "Forgive your enemies; do good also to them that hate you." As she did so she pressed his hand with a look of the utmost soulfulness, and died. Kohlhaas thought: "so may God never forgive me as I forgive the Squire!"; kissed her, while the tears came fast, closed her eyes, and left the room.

S5

He took the hundred gold gulden which the bailiff had already made over to him for the stables in Dresden, and ordered a funeral that seemed arranged less for her than for a princess: a coffin of oak, heavily mounted with metal, cushions of silk with gold and silver tassels, and a grave eight ells deep, lined with fieldstone and lime. He himself stood by the vault, his youngest child on his arm, and watched the work. When the day of the burial came, the body, white as snow, was laid out in a hall which he had had hung with black cloth.

S6

The clergyman had just finished a moving address at her bier when the sovereign's decision on the petition which the dead woman had delivered was handed to him, to this effect: that he was to fetch the horses from the Tronkenburg, and, on pain of being thrown into prison, was to make no further application in the matter. Kohlhaas put the letter in his pocket and had the coffin carried to the wagon. As soon as the mound was raised, the cross planted upon it, and the guests who had buried the body dismissed, he threw himself down once more before her now empty bed, and then took up the business of revenge.

S7

He sat down and drew up a sentence of law in which, by virtue of the power vested in him, he condemned the Squire Wenzel von Tronka to bring the blacks which he had taken from him and ruined in the fields to Kohlhaasenbrück within three days of sight, and to fatten them in person in his stables. This sentence he sent off to him by a mounted messenger, instructing him to be back with him at Kohlhaasenbrück immediately after delivering the paper.

Translator's log — frozen before any evaluation of this translation was designed

Written as the draft was written. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

The standing problem of the whole span is that Kleist's sentence is a machine for suspending information, and English has almost no way to hold a subject and its verb apart for forty words without the reader losing the thread. Every numbered fork below is a local instance of that.

The forks, in the order they occurred

1. S1 «der allerunglücklichste» — a superlative of a superlative. Options: the unhappiest of all / the most disastrous / the unluckiest by far. Took the unhappiest of all, which keeps the doubling. Alternative live: most calamitous.
2. S1 «die Frau» — Kleist names her die Frau here, Lisbeth two clauses later. Options: the woman (holds the withheld name) / his wife (supplies the relation). Took his wife; the withholding is real and I gave it up for legibility. This is the fork I expect to divide hands.
3. S1 «Schritt vor Schritt den Wagen führend» — a participial pre-modifier English cannot place where German places it. Took leading the wagon step by step, moved after the verb.
4. S1 «Kastellan» / «Wirtshaus» / «Schloß» — three source-culture particulars in one sentence. Took castellan / inn / palace: one retained, two domesticated, with no rule telling me where the line was. Alternatives live throughout: Kastellan, tavern, castle.
5. S1 «Knecht» — groom / servant / man. Took groom, because the man's job in this scene is the horses.
6. S2 «des Landesherrn» — the sovereign, unnamed. Options: the sovereign (keeps the office abstract) / the Elector (specifies, and is correct). Took the sovereign. A resolution I deliberately did not make.
7. S2 «von dem bloßen rohen Eifer einer Wache» — the blow is attributed to an abstraction, not to a man: the zeal did the striking. Kept the abstraction as the agent (received from the mere brutal zeal of a guard). English resists this and the sentence is the worse for it; the alternative was to give the guard the verb, which loses Kleist's exculpation of everyone in particular.
8. S2 «einen Ritter» — a knight / a nobleman / one of the gentlemen. Took a knight.
9. S3 «mit starrem, schon gebrochenen Auge» — singular Auge for both eyes, and gebrochen is the deathbed word. Took with a fixed and already breaking eye, keeping the singular. It is strange English; the strangeness is in the German too.
10. S4 «empfindlich-feierlicher Stimme» — a coined compound. feelingly solemn keeps the hyphen's logic; sensitively solemn and tender and solemn were live.
11. S4 «da … : so sah sie ihn» — the correlative da…so construction, which English lost. Options: keep the so (marked) / drop it (invisible). Dropped it; the sentence became a single long as-clause with no resumptive.
12. S4 «Junker» — the whole story turns on this word. Squire / Junker / the young lord. Took Squire.
13. S4 the Bible verse — Kleist quotes a conflation, not a verse. Rendered plainly, in contemporary English, not in Authorised-Version diction. The alternative — thine enemies, them that hate thee — was live and rejected, on the ground that the surrounding narration is not archaic. Note that this decision is available to a rule set to reverse, which is why it is recorded here.
14. S5 «Goldgülden» / «Amtmann» / «Ellen» — gold gulden / bailiff / ells. Two retained, one domesticated. Amtmann is not a bailiff exactly and I know it.
15. S6 «die Abgeschiedene» — a formal, almost liturgical word for the dead woman. Took the dead woman, losing the register. The departed was live.
16. S6 «das Geschäft der Rache» — Geschäft is business in the commercial sense, and Kohlhaas is a dealer. Took the business of revenge, which keeps the pun.
17. S7 «kraft der ihm angebotenen Macht» — the hardest phrase in the span. Angeboten is offered, not vested: the power was offered to him, and Kleist does not say by whom. Took by virtue of the power vested in him, which closes the question the German leaves open. I record that I closed it.
18. S7 «in Person … dick zu füttern» — the sentence of law ends in a farmyard verb. Kept to fatten them in person in his stables.

Registered before any evaluation was designed

The three sites where I expect independent hands to diverge most are 2 (die Frau), 13 (the verse's register) and 17 (angebotene Macht). The three where I expect them to agree are 5, 8 and 16. This is the P3 register, frozen here; it is a prediction about other hands, not a quality claim about this one.