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

T-kohlhaas-R04-v1 — Kleist, «Michael Kohlhaas», two scenes, close

Source. Heinrich von Kleist, «Michael Kohlhaas. Aus einer alten Chronik» (1810). Text as carried by Project Gutenberg #6645, Ausgewählte Schriften. Public domain. Read in German (charter §4, A2). The two scenes rendered here are the Herse report (1,304 German words) and the Luther interview (1,421 German words), stored at ../../../experiments/E-20260806-published-loss/materials/scene-{herse,luther}-de.txt.

Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source-only, no marking brief. Cost $0; lead translation is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Scene rule, fixed before translating and not adjusted afterwards: the tale's two long dialogue scenes, taken whole. They were chosen because the address asymmetries are sustained in them; the individual sites were selected from the German afterwards, by the machine selector at ../../../experiments/E-20260806-published-loss/materials/sites.py, and no scene boundary was moved once a site list existed.

Contamination: high, and it is MEASURED, asymmetric, and was measured before a single site was chosen and before a word was translated. A 163-word gate rendering of a narrative span outside every site (Gegen Mittag kam Herse …) was written from the German alone and put through tools/dependence_check.py against both published English translations of the same span:

The shared run is "a village cart kohlhaas sighed deeply at this news he asked whether the horses had been fed and when" — nineteen consecutive tokens with one proper name in it, the second-highest figure this project has recorded against a published human translation (the record is 24, S079). Figures and inputs: ../../../experiments/E-20260806-published-loss/materials/gate-*.

The lead reproduces one of the two published translations and not the other, and both are equally public domain and equally on Project Gutenberg. That is the boundary CLAUDE.md's standing rule draws — measured overlap, not the comparator's fame — and it is why this artifact is a labelled subject in E-20260806-published-loss and is not an independent second opinion of anything. The gate's consequence was applied to the design before the design was frozen: the census's admission condition is carried by the two published translations, not by this rendering.

One prior exposure, declared. While locating section boundaries, ~150 words of King's opening paragraph and ~60 words of King's rendering of Luther's first outburst were printed to the console. Neither is a site; the outburst had already been excluded by the selector's 15-word condition.

Ordering, declared. E-20260806-published-loss's design was frozen before this translation was written, which inverts continue-prompt.md §5.4's ordering. The reason is that the design's stage 0 is the brief: the forced rendering exists only because a design asked for one. No datum of any kind existed when either rendering or either log was written, and no published English was read at any site until both were committed.

The translation

Scene 1 — Herse's report

"What have you been doing at the Tronkenburg?" asked Kohlhaas, as Lisbeth came into the room with him. "I am not altogether pleased with you."

The man, on whose pale face a red came out in patches at these words, was silent a while; and then: "You are right there, sir," he answered; "for a sulphur match which by God's providence I had about me, to set fire to that robbers' nest I had been driven out of, I threw into the Elbe when I heard a child crying inside, and thought: let God's lightning burn it to ashes; I will not."

Kohlhaas said, taken aback: "But how did you bring the expulsion from the Tronkenburg on yourself?" Thereupon Herse: "By a bad piece of business, sir" — and wiped the sweat from his forehead — "but what is done cannot be undone. I would not have the horses ruined on the field-work, and said they were still young and had never been in draught."

Kohlhaas answered, trying to hide his confusion, that in this he had not told quite the truth, since the horses had been a little in harness at the beginning of the past spring. "You might," he went on, "on the castle, where after all you were a sort of guest, have shown yourself obliging once or twice, when there was urgent need to get the harvest in."

"That I did do, sir," said Herse. "I thought, when they pulled sour faces at me, it will not cost the blacks anything after all. On the third forenoon I put them to, and brought in three loads of corn."

Kohlhaas, his heart rising in him, dropped his eyes to the ground and returned: "Nobody told me of that, Herse." Herse assured him it was so. "My want of obligingness," he said, "was in this, that I would not put the horses into the yoke again when they had barely finished feeding at midday; and that when the castellan and the steward proposed to me that I should take free fodder for them and put into my pocket the money you had left me for feed, I answered — I would do them some mischief; and turned round and went off."

"But it was not for that want of obligingness," said Kohlhaas, "that you were driven off the Tronkenburg."

"God forbid," cried the man, "it was for a godforsaken crime! For in the evening the horses of two knights who had come to the Tronkenburg were led into the stable, and mine tied up at the stable door. And when I took the blacks out of the hand of the castellan, who was quartering them there, and asked where the beasts were to go now, he pointed out to me a pigsty built of laths and boards against the castle wall."

"You mean," Kohlhaas interrupted him, "it was so poor a lodging for horses that it was more like a pigsty than a stable."

"It was a pigsty, sir," answered Herse; "really and truly a pigsty, with the pigs running in and out of it, and I could not stand upright in it."

"Perhaps there was no other shelter to be found for the blacks," said Kohlhaas; "the knights' horses came first, in a manner of speaking."

"The place was narrow," the man answered, letting his voice drop. "There were seven knights lodged at the castle by then. If it had been you, you would have had the horses moved a little closer together. I said I would try to hire a stable in the village; but the castellan returned that he had to keep the horses under his own eyes, and that I was not to make so bold as to lead them off the yard."

"Hm!" said Kohlhaas. "What did you say to that?"

"Since the steward said the two guests would only stay the night and ride on the next morning, I led the horses into the pigsty. But the following day went by without its happening; and when the third broke, word was that the gentlemen would be staying some weeks yet at the castle."

"In the end it was not so bad, Herse, in the pigsty," said Kohlhaas, "as it looked to you when you first put your nose into it."

"That is true," the other answered. "When I swept the place out a bit, it did. I gave the maid a groschen to put the pigs somewhere else. And in the course of the day I managed it so that the horses could stand upright, by taking the boards off the laths above at daybreak and laying them on again in the evening. They looked out over the roof now like geese, and looked round for Kohlhaasenbrück, or anywhere else where it is better."

"Well then," asked Kohlhaas, "why in all the world did they drive you off?"

"Sir, I will tell you," the man returned, "because they wanted to be rid of me. Because as long as I was there they could not ruin the horses. Everywhere, in the yard and in the servants' room, they made me spiteful faces; and because I thought, pull your mouths till you put them out of joint, they took the first pretext that came to hand and threw me off the yard."

"But the occasion!" cried Kohlhaas. "They must have had some occasion or other!"

"Oh, certainly," answered Herse, "and the justest in the world. On the evening of the second day I had spent in the pigsty I took the horses, which had got themselves filthy in it, and meant to ride them to the watering-place. And just as I am under the castle gate and mean to turn, I hear the castellan and the steward, with men, dogs and cudgels, come rushing out of the servants' room behind me, and shout: 'Stop, the thief!' — 'Stop, the gallows-bird!' — as if they were possessed. The gatekeeper steps into my path; and when I ask him and the raging crowd running at me, 'What is the matter?' — 'What is the matter?' answers the castellan, and takes both my blacks by the bridle. 'Where is he off to with the horses?' he asks, and grabs me by the breast. I say, where am I off to? Thunder of heaven! To the watering-place I am going. Does he suppose that I—? 'To the watering-place?' shouts the castellan. 'I will teach you, you rogue, to swim on the high road to Kohlhaasenbrück!' — and he and the steward, who has got hold of my leg, fling me with a spiteful murderous jerk off the horse, so that I measure my length in the mud. Murder! Hail! I shout — harness and blankets are lying, and a bundle of linen of mine, in the stable; but he and the men, while the steward leads the horses away, are on me with feet and whips and cudgels, till I sink down half dead behind the castle gate. And when I say, the thieving hounds! Where are they taking my horses? and get up: 'Out of the castle yard!' shouts the castellan; and 'At him, Kaiser! At him, Jäger!' rings out, and 'At him, Spitz!' — and a pack of more than twelve dogs is on me. Then I break — whether it was a lath, I do not know what — off the fence, and stretch three dogs dead beside me; but as I have to give ground, tormented with pitiful mauling: a whistle shrills; the dogs into the yard, the gates together, the bolt across: and I sink down senseless in the road."

Kohlhaas said, pale in the face, with forced drollery: "You did not want to make off, though, Herse?" And as the man, with a dark flush, looked down before him: "Own it to me," he said; "you did not like it in the pigsty; you thought, the stable at Kohlhaasenbrück is better after all."

"Thunderbolt!" cried Herse. "Harness and blankets I left behind, did I not, and a bundle of linen, in the pigsty. Would I not have put into my pocket three imperial gulden that I had hidden behind the crib in a red silk neckcloth? Lightning, hell and the devil! When you talk like that I could go and light again the sulphur match I threw away!"

"Now, now!" said the horse-dealer. "It was not meant unkindly. What you have said — look, word for word, I believe you; and if it comes to the question I will myself take the sacrament on it. I am sorry that things have gone no better with you in my service; go, Herse, go to bed, have a bottle of wine given you, and take comfort: justice shall be done you!"

Scene 2 — the Luther interview

"Away, far away from me!" — and as he rose from his desk and hurried toward a bell, he added: "Your breath is a pestilence and your nearness ruin!" Kohlhaas, drawing his pistol without stirring from where he stood, said: "Reverend sir, if you touch that bell this pistol will lay me lifeless at your feet. Sit down and hear me; among the angels whose psalms you write out you are no safer than you are with me." Luther, sitting down, asked: "What do you want?" Kohlhaas answered: "To refute your opinion of me, that I am an unjust man. You told me in your placard that my sovereign knows nothing of my case: very well, get me a safe-conduct and I will go to Dresden and lay it before him."

"Godless and terrible man!" cried Luther, at once confounded and calmed by these words. "Who gave you the right to fall upon the Junker von Tronka in pursuit of judgments of law you had passed on your own authority, and, when you did not find him in his castle, to visit with fire and sword the whole community that shelters him?" Kohlhaas answered: "Reverend sir, nobody — from this day on. A report I had out of Dresden deceived me, led me astray. The war I am waging with the baseness of mankind is a crime the moment I was not, as you gave me your assurance I was, cast out of it."

"Cast out!" cried Luther, looking at him. "What frenzy of the mind took hold of you? Who could have cast you out of the community of the state you were living in? Indeed, where is there a case, so long as states have existed, of anyone whatever being cast out of one?"

"Cast out," answered Kohlhaas, closing his hand tight, "is what I call the man to whom the protection of the laws is refused. For I need that protection if my peaceable trade is to prosper; it is the very thing for whose sake I take refuge, with all I have got together, in this community; and whoever refuses it me thrusts me out among the savages of the wilderness; he puts into my hand — how will you deny it? — the club that protects me myself."

"Who refused you the protection of the laws?" cried Luther. "Did I not write to you that the complaint you lodged was unknown to the sovereign you lodged it with? If servants of the state suppress lawsuits behind his back, or otherwise make a mock of his sacred name in his ignorance, who but God may call him to account for his choice of such servants? — and are you, God-damned and terrible creature, entitled to judge him for it?"

"Very well," Kohlhaas returned, "if the sovereign does not cast me out, then I too will return into the community he shelters. Get me, I say it again, a safe-conduct to Dresden: I will let the band I have gathered at the castle of Lützen disperse, and will bring the complaint I was turned away with once more before the tribunal of the land."

Luther, with a look of vexation, threw the papers lying on his table one over another, and said nothing. The defiant position this strange man occupied in the state annoyed him; and, weighing the sentence of law Kohlhaas had issued from Kohlhaasenbrück against the Junker, he asked what it was, then, that he demanded of the tribunal at Dresden. Kohlhaas answered: "Punishment of the Junker according to the laws; restoration of the horses to their former condition; and compensation for the injury which I, and my man Herse who fell at Mühlberg, suffered by the violence done to us."

Luther cried: "Compensation for the injury! Thousands upon thousands you have raised, from Jews and Christians, on bills and pledges, to cover the cost of your wild private revenge. Will you put that sum down on the reckoning too, when the accounting comes?"

"God forbid!" answered Kohlhaas. "House and farm, and the prosperity I once had, I do not ask back; no more than the cost of my wife's burial. Herse's old mother will produce a statement of the doctor's charges and a specification of what her son lost at the Tronkenburg; and the damage I suffered through not selling the blacks, the government may have valued by an expert."

Luther said: "Raving, incomprehensible, terrible creature!" and looked at him. "After your sword has taken on the Junker the grimmest revenge that can be conceived, what drives you to insist on a judgment against him, whose edge, when it does at last fall, will strike him with a weight of so little consequence?"

Kohlhaas answered, a tear rolling down his cheek: "Reverend sir, it has cost me my wife. Kohlhaas means to show the world that she did not die in an unjust quarrel. Give way to my will in these points, and let the court speak; in everything else that may be in dispute, I give way to you."

Luther said: "Look here — what you demand, if the circumstances are as public report gives them out to be, is just; and had you known how to bring the quarrel before the sovereign's decision, before you proceeded on your own authority to private revenge, your claim would have been granted you, I do not doubt, point for point. But would you not, all things well weighed, have done better — for your Redeemer's sake — to forgive the Junker, take the blacks, lean and worn as they were, by the bridle, mount, and ride them home to your stable at Kohlhaasenbrück to be fattened?"

Kohlhaas answered: "It may be!" — stepping to the window — "and it may be not! Had I known that I would have to bring them onto their legs again with blood out of my dear wife's heart, it may be I should have done as you say, reverend sir, and not grudged a bushel of oats. But since they have once cost me so dear, let it take its course, I think: let the judgment speak as is my due, and let the Junker fatten me the blacks."

Luther said, reaching among various thoughts for his papers again, that he would enter into negotiation with the Elector on his behalf; meanwhile he should keep quiet at the castle of Lützen; if the sovereign granted him a safe-conduct it would be made known to him by public placard. "Though," he went on, as Kohlhaas bent down to kiss his hand, "whether the Elector will let mercy go before justice I do not know; for he is gathering a body of troops, I hear, and is on the point of taking you up in the castle at Lützen: meanwhile, as I have told you already, it shall not be for want of my trying." And with that he stood up and made ready to dismiss him.

Kohlhaas said his intercession entirely set his mind at rest on that point; whereupon Luther saluted him with his hand, but the other suddenly sank a knee before him and said he had one more request on his heart. At Whitsuntide, when he was accustomed to go to the Lord's table, he had missed church on account of these warlike undertakings of his; would he have the goodness, without further preparation, to receive his confession, and in exchange to grant him the benefit of the holy sacrament?

Luther, after a short reflection, looking at him sharply, said: "Yes, Kohlhaas, that I will do. But the Lord whose body you desire forgave His enemy." And, as the other looked at him disconcerted, he added: "Will you forgive the Junker too, who wronged you — go to the Tronkenburg, mount your blacks, and ride them home to Kohlhaasenbrück to be fattened?"

"Reverend sir," said Kohlhaas, reddening, and taking his hand — "Well?" — "the Lord did not forgive all His enemies either. Let me forgive the Elector, and my two lords the castellan and the steward, and the gentlemen Hinz and Kunz, and whoever else may have injured me in this business: but the Junker, if it can be, let me compel to fatten me my blacks again."

At these words Luther turned his back on him with a look of displeasure and pulled the bell. While a famulus, called by it, announced himself with a light in the anteroom, Kohlhaas rose from the floor disconcerted, drying his eyes; and as the famulus worked in vain at the door, the bolt being shot across, and Luther had sat down again to his papers, Kohlhaas opened the door for the man. Luther, with a short sidelong glance at the stranger, said to the famulus: "Light him out!" — whereupon the latter, a little taken aback at the visitor he saw, took the house key off the wall and withdrew, waiting for him to leave, under the half-open door of the room. Kohlhaas said, taking his hat with emotion between both hands: "And so, most reverend sir, I cannot have the benefit of being reconciled, that I asked of you?" Luther answered shortly: "With your Saviour, no; with your sovereign — that stands over for an attempt, as I promised you!"

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-06 before any evaluation of this translation was run and before any published English was read at any site. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

The thing the whole scene is built on, and what English does to it

Kleist's two scenes run on an address asymmetry English cannot state. In the Luther interview, Luther says du to Kohlhaas in every one of his turns and Kohlhaas says Ihr to Luther in every one of his; the reformer never once yields the formal address to the man standing in his study with a pistol, and the horse-dealer never once takes the familiar one. In the Herse scene the same asymmetry runs the other way round the social ladder and means something different: Kohlhaas's du to his groom is the du of a master who trusts a man, and Herse's Ihr back is a servant's.

In this rendering all four of those become you. That is what a close translation into modern English does, and it is the whole reason the scene was chosen. I did not compensate anywhere in this version; the brief forbids it. The register of the two men is differentiated only by what they say and how they build a sentence — Kohlhaas's long subordinated periods against Luther's short imperatives — which is a real difference and is not the same difference.

Decisions, scene 1

• Roßkamm, Knecht, Schloßvogt, Verwalter. Groom was rejected for Knecht as too stable-specific for a man who is also Großknecht; I used the man and Herse's name, and the castellan / the steward for the two officials. Schloßvogt is a castle bailiff and castellan loses the pettiness in it.
• Schweinekoben. Pigsty throughout, though pig-pen is closer to the lath-and-board structure described; pigsty keeps the insult in the word, which Kohlhaas's next line turns on.
• Wo will Er hin mit den Pferden? / Denkt Er, daß ich—? This is the third-person Er address, the form a superior used downward to a servant, and it has no English counterpart at all. Because it sits inside Herse's reported narration, the English can keep the third person literally — "Where is he off to with the horses?", "Does he suppose that I—?" — and it reads as a man quoting someone who would not look at him. This is the one place in the close rendering where the German device survives into the English, and it survives by accident of embedding, not by compensation. It is not one of the scored sites.
• ich würde ihnen sonst was tun. Deliberately vague menace. I would do them some mischief keeps the vagueness; I would do something else to them is closer to the words and says nothing.
• zieht ihr die Mäuler, daß sie verrenken. Herse quoting his own unspoken thought at the household. Pull your mouths till you put them out of joint — kept as direct address because the German is.
• Blitz, Höll und Teufel! / Himmelschlag! Left as oaths of the same violence rather than domesticated (Lightning, hell and the devil!, Thunderbolt!).

Decisions, scene 2

• Hochwürdiger Herr / hochwürdigster Herr. Reverend sir and most reverend sir. Kleist escalates the honorific at the end, when Kohlhaas is refused the sacrament, and the English keeps the escalation.
• weiche fern hinweg! Biblical and archaic. Away, far away from me! — I rejected Get thee hence, which would have imported the pronoun contrast this version is required not to use.
• Verstoßen. The word the argument turns on, and it has to be one English word in all six of its occurrences: cast out. Outlawed is what it means legally and would give the argument away in the first line.
• gottverdammter und entsetzlicher Mensch. God-damned and terrible creature. Mensch here is contemptuous; man would be neutral.
• Rechtsschlüsse. Judgments of law … passed on your own authority — the point is that Kohlhaas has been acting as his own court, which decisions would blur.
• ob der Kurfürst Gnade für Recht ergehen lassen wird. The idiom is let mercy go before justice; I kept the sequence rather than the modern temper justice with mercy, which reverses which of the two is doing the yielding.
• Famulus. Left as famulus — a Wittenberg academic's servant-student, and the German word is the precise one.

What was lost, declared

1. Every address form in both scenes. Four dyad-directions, one English pronoun. This is not a difficulty overcome; it is a loss recorded, and it is the loss the companion rendering T-kohlhaas-R20-v1 is a deliberate attempt on.
2. Kleist's paragraph. The German runs the whole Herse scene and the whole Luther scene as single unbroken paragraphs of over a thousand words. I broke both into speech paragraphs. The breathlessness of the original page is gone, and English typography as this project uses it does not offer a way to keep it that a reader would read.
3. Ihr as a plural-of-respect with a singular referent carries an archaism in 1810 German that modern English cannot register without archaism of its own.

(No sentence in this log is a quality claim about this rendering or any other. Where a judgment of what an English option would do is asserted, it is internal-judgment-only.)