Repository path: workshop/translations/kohlhaas/R20-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-kohlhaas-R20-v1 — the same two scenes, under R1's brief

Source, scenes, contamination and prior exposure: identical to T-kohlhaas-R04-v1, which see. The measured figure is 19 shared contiguous tokens against King 1914 and clean against Oxenford 1844, taken before a site was chosen and before a word was translated. Cost $0.

Regime. R20 v0.1 (pilot) — the R1 brief applied to whole scenes rather than to isolated sites. Written from the German alone, in the same session as R04-v1 and before any published English was read at any site. This rendering is not independent of R04-v1 — it is the same hand rendering the same German a second time under a different brief, which is exactly what makes the pair a within-translator contrast and exactly what stops it being two opinions.

What the brief required. framework/v0.1 §2, quoted in R20 §Procedure step 2. Kleist marks the speaker–addressee relation with du / Ihr / third-person Er; English has one you. Under R1 the marking must appear somewhere English does mark such things. The pronoun device — thou against you — was excluded before translating, and the reason is registered in E-20260806-published-loss §5: thou can mark the down-address and English has no pronoun that marks the up-address, so it would mark two of the four dyad-directions and change the register of the whole scene rather than the site.

The translation

Scene 1 — Herse's report

"Now then, man — 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 in the right of it 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, man?" Thereupon Herse: "By a bad piece of business, sir, saving your presence" — 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 have shown yourself obliging, man," he went on, "once or twice — on the castle, where after all you were a sort of guest — when there was urgent need to get the harvest in. You might."

"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, sir," 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 your honour 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, man," said Kohlhaas, "that you were driven off the Tronkenburg."

"God forbid, sir," 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, sir," the man answered, letting his voice drop. "There were seven knights lodged at the castle by then. Had it been you, sir, you would have had the horses moved a little closer together — begging your pardon. 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. "And what did you say to that, man?"

"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, sir," 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, man," asked Kohlhaas, "why in all the world did they drive you off?"

"Sir, I will tell your honour," 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, sir," 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 the fellow 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 the fellow 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 now, man," he said; "you did not like it in the pigsty; you were thinking, the stable at Kohlhaasenbrück is better after all — were you not."

"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 your honour talks 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, man. 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. Be seated, sir, 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, man?" Kohlhaas answered: "To refute your opinion of me, sir, 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 your reverence gave me the assurance I was, cast out of it."

"Cast out!" cried Luther, looking at him. "What frenzy of the mind has taken hold of you, man? Who was to cast you out of the community of the state you were living in — you? Come: where is there a case, so long as states have existed, of anyone whatever being cast out of one?"

"Cast out, sir, by your leave," answered Kohlhaas, closing his hand tight, "is what I call the man to whom the protection of the laws is refused. For I have need of 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 — and you will not deny it me, sir — 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, sir," 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, man, from Jews and Christians, on bills and pledges, to cover the cost of your wild private revenge. And will you be setting that 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, sir, and let the court speak; in everything else that may be in dispute, I give way to you."

Luther said: "Look here, man. 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 your sovereign's decision, before you went off 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, get yourself up on one of them, and ride home to your stable at Kohlhaasenbrück to fatten them?"

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 your reverence says, 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, man, 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 his reverence 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, man — him that wronged you — go to the Tronkenburg, get up on your blacks, and take 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, man, 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 device, named per site, as R20 step 4 requires

Elsewhere in both scenes the same devices are distributed at every address turn, not only at the nine sites, as R20 step 3 requires: Herse gains sir and your honour throughout, Luther gains man at four further turns, and Kohlhaas gains sir and your reverence to Luther.

Three findings against the release, registered before the run

1. R1's address-noun category collapses to one word. Applied honestly across a whole scene rather than at one chosen site, the English down-address device is man, seven times, and it marks the direction of the asymmetry and not its kind. Luther's du is a reformer putting a criminal beneath him; Kohlhaas's du is a master keeping a trusted servant close. In this English they are the same word. framework/v0.1 §4 says five of R1's six categories have never been isolated; this is the first sustained application of the one that has, and the category is thinner than the list makes it look.
2. The up-address is harder than the down-address, and the release does not say so. sir, your honour, your reverence and by your leave are all available for Ihr, but every one of them is a courtesy formula the source did not write — Kleist's Ihr is a pronoun, and Herse already says Herr elsewhere when he wants a vocative. The down-address has the same problem in a milder form. R1's move is not neutral: it converts a grammatical marking into lexical material, which is candidate #5 in §5 — grammar-borne meaning transcodes into lexis and loses systematicity — and §5 records that R1 is "the one place this became an instruction". This rendering is what that instruction costs.
3. One site could not be marked without predicating, and is a declared failure under R20 step 3 and step 5. At the two Ihr sites the only devices strong enough to carry deference on their own were rank-naming (your reverence, your honour), which states that the addressee is a clergyman or a gentleman where the German states nothing of the kind at that turn. At A2 and A9 I therefore used rank-free sir plus a formula, which is weaker. If those two sites fail, the failure is this constraint and not the absence of a device.

What was given up

• The Herse scene's warmth is now audible as condescension. man, repeated, is a master's word; Kleist's du there is affectionate. The rendering buys the asymmetry and pays for it in the temperature of the relation, which is a straight voice cost. (This sentence is a judgment of what the English does and is internal-judgment-only.)
• Wo will Er hin mit den Pferden? — in R04 the embedded third-person Er survived literally as he; here I pushed it to the fellow, which marks harder and adds a noun the German does not have.
• Kleist's speed. The added vocatives and formulas lengthen almost every speech.

(No sentence in this log is a quality claim about this rendering or any other, except where marked internal-judgment-only.)