Repository path: workshop/translations/kohlhaas/R20-v2/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-kohlhaas-R20-v2 — the Luther interview with the excluded device admitted

Source. Heinrich von Kleist, «Michael Kohlhaas» (1810), the Luther interview, 1,421 German words, read in German. Project Gutenberg #6645; the working span is workshop/experiments/E-20260806-published-loss/materials/scene-luther-de.txt. Cost $0 — lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Regime. R20 v0.1, with one declared restriction that departs from the regime's own step 3 and is not concealed: the marking is carried by the archaic second-person pronoun and nothing else. Where the pronoun cannot reach, no other device is substituted, and the site is recorded below as a declared failure. R20 as written requires the marking to appear at every marking site by whatever device is available; this rendering restricts the device family on purpose, so that v1 and v2 differ in exactly one thing. It is therefore not an instance of R1 as framework/v0.1 §2 states it, and no figure about R1 may be read off it.

Why it exists. E-20260806-published-loss §5 excluded thou from the FORCE arm before translating, on the argument that the device is one-sided. RS-20260806e §4.3 found that the only published translator who carried Kleist's asymmetry — Oxenford 1844 — carried it with exactly that device. The release's §4 owes a line about R1's device categories, and a line about a device nobody in this project has tried is speculation. This rendering is the trial.

CONTAMINATION — declared and measured, and it is the worst on this work

contamination: high, and this rendering is the most exposed artifact in the run. Three exposures, all stated before the measurement rather than after:

0. This is a REVISION of R20-v1, not a fresh rendering of the German. It was made by taking R20-v1's Luther scene and changing the address device — the archaic pronoun in, the added address nouns out — and leaving everything else standing. That is deliberate: it holds every other variable fixed, which is the only way v1 and v2 can isolate a device family. It is also why the two share 174 contiguous tokens, and it means v2 is not a second opinion about anything (note (bhb)).

1. The standing dependence figure on this work. The S121 gate measured the lead's cold rendering of a 163-word narration probe against both published translations: 19 shared contiguous tokens and 8 twelve-grams against King 1914 (DEPENDENT?), clean against Oxenford 1844 (RS-20260806e §2).

2. NEW, and it is the decisive one. Unlike R04-v1 and R20-v1, this rendering was written after reading Oxenford's and King's English at five sites in this very scene — A1, A2, A4, A5, A6 — including the four sites where Oxenford's thou appears. The lead has seen a published solution to the exact problem this rendering addresses, at four of the places where it arises.

Measured after writing and before anything was claimed (tools/dependence_check.py, this scene only, all three pairwise): figures in ## Dependence measurement below.

What follows from it. This artifact is craft evidence about what the device costs, and it is not an independent rendering, not a baseline, not admissible to any census, and not comparable with OXEN or KING in any count. Nothing in E-20260806-published-loss is amended by it and no figure in RS-20260806e moves.

The lead does not judge this translation

Charter §5. No panel call was made on it and none is designed. Every evaluative sentence in the log below carries the page's internal-judgment-only flag, and the log records decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

The translation

"Away, far away from me!" — and as he rose from his desk and hurried toward a bell, he added: "Thy breath is a pestilence and thy 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 dost thou 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 thee the right to fall upon the Junker von Tronka in pursuit of judgments of law thou hadst passed on thy own authority, and, when thou didst 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 the assurance I was, cast out of it."

"Cast out!" cried Luther, looking at him. "What frenzy of the mind has taken hold of thee? Who was to cast thee out of the community of the state thou wast living in? Come: 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 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 — how will you deny it? — the club that protects me myself."

"Who refused thee the protection of the laws?" cried Luther. "Did I not write to thee that the complaint thou didst lodge was unknown to the sovereign thou didst lodge 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 art thou, 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 thou hast raised, from Jews and Christians, on bills and pledges, to cover the cost of thy wild private revenge. Wilt thou 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 thy sword has taken on the Junker the grimmest revenge that can be conceived, what drives thee 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 thou demandest, if the circumstances are as public report gives them out to be, is just; and hadst thou known how to bring the quarrel before thy sovereign's decision, before thou wentest off on thy own authority to private revenge, thy claim would have been granted thee, I do not doubt, point for point. But wouldst thou not, all things well weighed, have done better — for thy Redeemer's sake — to forgive the Junker, take the blacks, lean and worn as they were, by the bridle, get thyself up on one of them, and ride home to thy 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 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 his lordship granted him a safe-conduct, it would be made known to him by public placarding. "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 drawing together a body of troops, I hear, and is on the point of taking thee up in the castle at Lützen: meanwhile, as I have told thee already, it shall not be for want of effort on my part." And with that he rose and made ready to dismiss him.

Kohlhaas said that his intercession set his mind wholly at rest on that point; whereupon Luther saluted him with his hand, but the other suddenly sank a knee before him and said that he had one more request upon 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 thou desirest forgave his enemy." — "Wilt thou," he added, as the other looked at him disconcerted, "likewise forgive the Junker who wronged thee: go to the Tronkenburg, get thyself up on thy blacks, and ride them home to Kohlhaasenbrück to be fattened?"

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

At these words Luther turned his back on him with a look of displeasure and pulled the bell. Kohlhaas, while a famulus summoned by it announced himself with a light in the antechamber, rose from the floor disconcerted, drying his eyes; and since the famulus worked at the door in vain, the bolt being shot, 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 man, a little taken aback at the visitor he saw, took the house key from the wall and, waiting for him to move off, withdrew under the half-open door of the room.

Kohlhaas spoke, taking his hat with emotion between both hands: "And so I cannot, most reverend sir, be made partaker of the benefit of reconciliation that I begged of you?" Luther answered shortly: "With thy Saviour, no; with thy sovereign — that remains reserved to the attempt I promised thee."

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-06 before anything was claimed from this rendering, and no evaluation of it is designed or intended (charter §8, A4). Decisions and alternatives. Evaluative sentences carry the page's internal-judgment-only flag.

1. What the device is, and what it actually costs

The brief was to mark Kleist's du/Ihr asymmetry with the archaic pronoun and with nothing else. The down-address is thou/thee/thy; the up-address is you, unchanged from R04-v1.

The pronoun is not one word. It is a paradigm, and it conscripts every verb it governs. Counted mechanically over this rendering: 41 pronoun tokens (thou 15, thy 13, thee 11, thyself 2) and 15 archaic verb forms, 56 in all, against zero in R20-v1. The verb forms, none of which the German makes archaic:

dost thou want · thou hadst passed · thou didst not find · thou wast living · thou didst lodge · art thou · thou hast raised · wilt thou be setting · what thou demandest · hadst thou known · thou wentest · wouldst thou not · thou desirest · wilt thou likewise forgive

This is the cost, and it is a cost in a different currency from the one the device was chosen to pay in. du/Ihr in 1810 German is a live, ordinary, everyday distinction: Kleist's Luther is characterised by the violence of his address, not by its antiquity — dein Odem ist Pest is plain contemporary German, not sixteenth-century German. English thou in 1810 was already liturgical and archaic; in 2026 it is nothing else. So the device buys the relation and pays for it by dating the speaker. The reader is told, in the same stroke, that Luther holds Kohlhaas beneath him and that Luther speaks like the Authorised Version — and the second is a claim about the character which the source does not make. (Whether that trade is worth making is a quality judgment, evidence class X3, and is not asserted here.)

R20 step 5 forbids a device that asserts a fact the source does not. This one does not assert a fact; it asserts a register. That is a weaker fault than the one step 5 names and it is a real one, and the regime's step 5 does not currently reach it.

2. The up-address gets nothing of its own, and the exclusion's argument was half right

E-20260806-published-loss §5 excluded the device because it is one-sided. Writing the scene settles what that means, and it cuts both ways:

• The argument was wrong about the pair. Once Luther says thou, Kohlhaas's ordinary you becomes the marked contrast term without a word being altered. The asymmetry is on the page. §5's claim that the device "would mark two of the four dyad-directions" is false for the two directions in this scene: it marks both, because marking one member of a contrast marks the other.
• The argument was right about the site. The marking is carried by the scene and not by the turn. Kohlhaas's you means nothing on its own; it means something only next to Luther's thou. Cut any one of Kohlhaas's turns out of the scene and every trace of the relation goes with the cut. That is a real and precise limitation, and it is what a site-based census cannot see.

3. The declared failure, and it is at the one site that mattered

A2 — Kohlhaas to Luther, Ihr — is a declared failure under R20 step 3 as restricted here. There is no archaic up-address pronoun in English, so the pronoun-only brief leaves that turn with plain you, exactly as R04-v1 has it. The two renderings are device-identical there.

This is the site where the graded limb of E-20260806-published-loss found that both published translations and the lead's close rendering failed, and only the courtesy-formula rendering (FORCE, R20-v1: "Cast out, sir, by your leave …", "and you will not deny it me, sir") carried the relation (RS-20260806e §5). So the device that the published record showed working across four sites is precisely the device that cannot reach the one site where the run's own instrument found anything at stake.

The alternative was live and was refused on purpose. I could have written thou for Luther and kept v1's courtesy formulas for Kohlhaas, which would mark every direction and would probably be the better translation (internal-judgment-only). It was refused because a rendering that mixes both device families cannot tell anyone what either one does.

4. What the pronoun made redundant, which is the finding I did not expect

In R20-v1 the down-address was carried by an address noun, and the log recorded that it collapsed to one word: man, seven times. Counted over this scene, six of those seven were vocatives v1 added — "What do you want, man?", "has taken hold of you, man", "Thousands upon thousands you have raised, man", "Look here, man", "as I have told you already, man", "reserved for an attempt, man" — and all six are gone from v2, which needed nothing in their place. The seventh, "Godless and terrible man!", stays, because it renders Kleist's own Heilloser und entsetzlicher Mann, and is not a device.

The same on the up-address: v1 uses sir eleven times and v2 six, and v2's six are exactly the six places where Kleist writes hochwürdiger Herr. Every occurrence that was doing work as a device is gone; the word has reverted from being a device to being a translation of a vocative.

So: R1's device categories are not additive, and a device budget is the wrong model. Applying one category does not leave the others available to apply on top; it makes them redundant, and using them anyway produces an English that marks the relation two or three times in one sentence. The framework's §4 currently lists six categories as if a translator picked from a menu. On this scene they behave like alternatives, not like ingredients.

5. Two decisions inside sentences, recorded because they were close

• Wer hätte dich … verstoßen? — v1 pointed the contrast with an added dangling you: "the state you were living in — you?" That crutch is unnecessary here (thou wast) and was removed. The line is shorter than v1's and marks more.
• deinem Heiland, nein; dem Landesherrn … — the datives are of reconciliation with, not of promising to. Rendered "With thy Saviour, no; with thy sovereign …". The alternative, "To thy Saviour, no", reads as the addressee of the refusal and loses the parallel Kohlhaas has just asked for.

6. What this rendering is not evidence of

It is a single hand, a single scene, and it was written after reading two published solutions to its central problem (§Contamination). It shows what the device forces on the translator — the verb paradigm, the redundancy of the other categories, the unreachable up-address. It shows nothing about whether a reader recovers anything from it, and nothing about whether it is any good.

Dependence measurement

tools/dependence_check.py over the whole Luther scene in five renderings, run after this one was written and before anything was claimed from it. Inputs and figures: dependence/ beside this file (cells.json, dependence.json, and the five scene texts). The two published scenes were extracted from the same Gutenberg files the run used; the extraction bounds are in cells.json's inputs.

Three things in this table are worth more than this artifact is.

1. The lead's dialogue is far more King-dependent than the S121 gate showed. The gate ran on a 163-word narration probe and returned 8 twelve-grams and a 19-token run. On the 1,421-word dialogue scene the same pair returns 33 twelve-grams and a 23-token run. Amendment A6(iii) of the frozen design registered exactly this worry — "the dependence verdict covers narration; CLOSE and FORCE are dialogue and may be King-tinged" — and it is now a measurement rather than a worry.
2. The lead is not clean against Oxenford either, once the span is long enough. The gate said clean (0 twelve-grams, run 8); the scene says 13 twelve-grams and a 19-token run for the same R04 rendering. A contamination gate's verdict is a property of the probe length as well as of the pair.
3. The two published translations are not clean against each other on this scene — 6 twelve-grams and a 15-token run, where the narration probe returned 0 and 6. The 15-token run is "me a safe conduct and I will go to Dresden and lay it before him", a sentence of proper nouns and fixed idiom that both lead renderings also produce, which is what a source-constrained run looks like. It does not make them one translation — King has zero archaic pronouns in this scene and Oxenford has 48 — but RS-20260806e §2's "independent of each other" was measured on the narration probe and does not carry to this span unqualified.

This paragraph is method work under the subject rule and is recorded here and in RS-20260806e's limits, not in the backlog and not as an arm.