Repository path: workshop/translations/kohlhaas-lisbeth/R07-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-kohlhaas-lisbeth-R07-v1 — the same span under the fluency rules

Source, span, and contamination: identical to T-kohlhaas-lisbeth-R06-v1, which see. Rendered third of the three lead arms, after both R06 and R08 were written. Cost $0.

Regime. R07 v1.0 (frozen) — the ten-rule fluency set, consulted at every choice. Coverage codes F / P / INT as in R08.

The translation

S1

Of all the useless steps he had taken in his case, this journey was the most disastrous. Only a few days later Sternbald came back into the yard, leading the cart at a walking pace. His wife lay stretched out inside it with a dangerous injury to her chest. Kohlhaas went pale as he came up to the cart, and he could get no clear account of how the accident had happened. The steward, the servant said, had not been at home, so they had had to stop at an inn near the palace. Lisbeth had left the inn the next morning and told the servant to stay with the horses, and she had not come back until the evening, in the state he now saw.

S2

Apparently she had pushed her way too boldly towards the Elector himself, and one of the guards around him, in sheer brutal enthusiasm and through no fault of his master's, had struck her in the chest with the shaft of a lance. That, at least, was the account given by the people who carried her, unconscious, into the inn that evening, for she could say very little herself: blood kept welling up into her mouth and stopped her. The petition had afterwards been taken from her by one of the noblemen. Sternbald said that he had wanted to get on a horse at once and bring Kohlhaas the news of the accident, but that she had refused. The surgeon they had called in had argued with her, and she had still insisted on being driven home to her husband at Kohlhaasenbrück without any warning being sent ahead.

S3

The journey had completely broken her. Kohlhaas put her to bed, and she lived on there for a few days, struggling painfully for breath. They tried to bring her round, so that she could tell them something about what had happened, but it was no use: she lay with her eyes fixed and already dulled, and gave no answer. Her mind cleared once more only shortly before she died.

S4

A Lutheran minister was standing by her bed — she had adopted the new faith herself, following her husband's example — and he was reading her a chapter of the Bible in a loud and solemn voice. She looked up at him suddenly with a dark expression and took the Bible out of his hand, as if there were nothing in it worth reading to her. She turned the pages over and over, searching for something. Then she pointed out a verse to Kohlhaas, who was sitting by the bed: "Forgive your enemies; do good to those who hate you." She pressed his hand as she did so, with a look of great feeling, and died. Kohlhaas thought: may God never forgive me as I forgive the squire. He kissed her, weeping freely, closed her eyes and left the room.

S5

The magistrate had already paid him a hundred gold pieces for the stables in Dresden. He took the money and ordered a funeral that seemed to have been arranged for a princess rather than for her: an oak coffin heavily bound with metal, silk cushions with gold and silver tassels, and a grave eight feet deep, lined with fieldstone and lime. He stood at the graveside himself with his youngest child in his arms and watched the men work. On the day of the funeral the body, white as snow, was laid out in a hall that he had had hung with black cloth.

S6

The minister had just finished a moving address at the bier when the Elector's answer to the petition his wife had delivered was brought in. It said that Kohlhaas was to collect his horses from Tronkenburg and to make no further application in the matter, on pain of imprisonment. Kohlhaas put the letter in his pocket and had the coffin carried out to the cart. The mound was raised, the cross planted on it, and the mourners who had come to the burial were sent away. Then he knelt down once more beside the bed that was now empty, and turned to the business of revenge.

S7

He sat down and drew up a judgment. In it he used the authority he believed had been granted to him to sentence the squire Wenzel von Tronka to bring the two black horses he had taken and worked to ruin in his fields back to Kohlhaasenbrück within three days of receiving the document, and to fatten them in his own stables with his own hands. He sent the judgment off by a mounted messenger, with instructions to hand the paper over and return to Kohlhaasenbrück at once.

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

Sites, in order, with the rule that decided.

1. S1 the opening period split — F6 + F9. The German suspends the predicate to the last word; English idiom fronts Of all the useless steps. R08 kept the suspension.
2. S1 «Denn schon nach wenigen Tagen …» split into three sentences — F7 + F9. One 118-syllable German period became three English sentences with definite closes. This is the single largest structural difference between this arm and R08.
3. S1 «Kastellan» → steward, «Wirtshaus» → inn, «Schloß» → palace, «Knecht» → servant — F4. No foreign matter; every particular assimilated. R08 retained all four.
4. S1 «in diesem Zustand» → in the state he now saw — F8 + INT. The German deixis is unanchored; F8 requires one reading, so I anchored it to Kohlhaas's viewpoint. A supplied phrase, and I record it as one.
5. S2 «des Landesherrn» → the Elector — F8. R06 left the sovereign open (its fork 6); R08 retained Landesherr. The rule set forces the specification.
6. S2 «ohne Verschulden desselben» → through no fault of his master's — F8. Desselben is ambiguous between the Elector and the guard; resolved to the Elector, and made explicit.
7. S2 «von aus dem Mund vorquellendem Blute gehindert» → blood kept welling up into her mouth and stopped her — F6 + F7. The stacked participial pre-modifier is the construction F6 exists to forbid. Note the rendering also reverses the direction (into, not forth from): a fluency choice that costs a detail, and I record it as a cost, not as an improvement.
8. S2 «einen Ritter» → one of the noblemen — F4 + F2.
9. S2 the Sternbald report split in two — F7 + F9.
10. S3 «die von der Reise völlig zu Grunde gerichtet worden war» — F6 + F9. The relative clause promoted to its own opening sentence (The journey had completely broken her.). The German subordinates it inside the main clause; English idiom does not want it there.
11. S3 «mit starrem, schon gebrochenen Auge» → with her eyes fixed and already dulled — F1 + F3. Singular Auge pluralised, gebrochen de-archaised. Both R06 and R08 kept the singular. The loss here is real: gebrochen is the deathbed word and dulled is not.
12. S4 the parenthesis → an em-dash aside — F7 + F9.
13. S4 «aufkeimenden Glauben» → the new faith — F1 + F10. Just budding would call attention to itself; F10 forbids that.
14. S4 the Bible verse in contemporary English — F1. R08 archaised it by rule; here the rule forbids archaism, and the effect is that the quoted scripture is indistinguishable in register from the narration around it. This is exactly what F1 and F10 buy and cost.
15. S4 «so möge mir Gott nie vergeben …» unquoted — F10 + F9. Kleist puts Kohlhaas's thought in quotation marks facing the quoted scripture; the typographic facing is a device that calls attention to itself, and F10 removed it.
16. S5 «Goldgülden» → gold pieces, «Amtmann» → magistrate, «Ellen» → feet — F4 + F2. The ells→feet substitution changes the measurement (eight ells is roughly fifteen feet). F4 required assimilation and F8 required a definite quantity; the two together produced a factual error, and I am recording it as an error rather than repairing it, because the regime forbids a return pass and because it is evidence about what the rule set does.
17. S5 «Leichenbegräbnis» → funeral — F2.
18. S6 «die Abgeschiedene» → his wife — F1 + F2. The liturgical register goes.
19. S6 the closing period split into two sentences — F7 + F9.
20. S7 «kraft der ihm angebotenen Macht» → the authority he believed had been granted to him — F8 + INT. The ambiguity R08 kept open (its site 19) is closed here, and closed by interpretation: I chose the reading in which the power is self-arrogated. The German does not say that.
21. S7 «die Rappen» → the two black horses — F8. The number is supplied from elsewhere in the novella, not from this span.

Coverage. 21 sites, all decided by a numbered rule; 2 (4, 20) additionally required interpretation, and P: none. Two rule-driven renderings are factually worse than R06's (sites 16 and 7). They stand.