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

T-kronenwaechter-heilung-R06-v1 — Arnim, «Die Kronenwächter», the opening reflection of Die wunderbare Heilung

Source. Ludwig Achim von Arnim, «Die Kronenwächter», Erster Band, Zweites Buch, Erste Geschichte: Die wunderbare Heilung (1817) — the chapter's opening paragraph, entire, from «Die Gewohnheiten und der Schmuck des täglichen Lebens…» to «…sondern mit der ganzen Stadt.»: 604 German words in ten segments, read in German, stored at ../source-de-segments.txt.

Relation to the two earlier spans. T-kronenwaechter-sturm-* (S141) rendered 694 words of Erstes Buch, 7. Geschichte: Der Sturm, and T-kronenwaechter-abschied-* (S146) the 751 words that close the same chapter. This is the first paragraph of the next book, immediately after them. The three spans do not overlap by a word.

Why this paragraph. It is the novel's discursive voice rather than its narrative one — Arnim on why domestic life changes faster than church art — and it is built out of the German constructions that a foreignizing translation would have something to carry: three verb-first conditionals, a fronted dative object with its subject held to the end, correlative so … als, two compounds with no English counterpart, and an impersonal es … zu sehen. The span was chosen for that density before any English was written, and what follows from it is E-20260810f's materials.

Copy-text. Projekt Gutenberg's digitisation of the Reclam text (chapter 10 of its «Kronenwächter» sequence), collated in full against the 1857 Bettina von Arnim edition scanned at archive.org (diekronenwchte01arni), whose OCR is Fraktur; the comparison collapses f/s, folds umlauts and drops non-letters (../../experiments/E-20260810f-carriage-naming/collate.py). 10 of 10 sentences are present in the witness; character-ratio min 0.8896, median 0.9358, max 0.9622. This bounds omission and does not certify orthography.

Two copy-text errors were found and corrected against the witness, and both changed the text.

The second is not cosmetic: it is a sentence boundary, and restoring it makes the span ten segments rather than nine. The witness also reads Hyeronimus and Kranach where the copy-text modernises to Hieronymus and Cranach; the copy-text spelling is kept and the variant recorded.

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).

Contamination — declared before any evaluation was designed

none, and the basis is that there is nothing to be contaminated by. No English translation of «Die Kronenwächter» is reachable from this container in any edition, anthology or catalogue; a search run this session returned German editions and German scholarship only, and S141 and S146 recorded the same result for the two preceding spans. tools/dependence_check.py was therefore not run: it takes a pair, and there is no second member. Per the standing rule, a contamination: declaration without a measurement is a placeholder — so this one says exactly what it rests on, which is the absence of a comparator and not a measured overlap. What that leaves open is stated plainly: an unpublished or uncatalogued English rendering could exist and be in training data, and nothing here would see it.

The translation

The habits and the ornament of daily life change sooner, in the destroying and creating hand of time and of man, than does the Sunday, churchly order; art in particular tries itself first in the life of the world and outlives most of its errors there, before what has been consecrated undergoes the change; indeed it seems that now and then, having reached a certain height, under the influence of eternal intimations, art turns away from the sacred circle altogether, in order to come near it again from another side with fresh and newly founded strength. It is easy, at the sight of older churches, to carry ourselves back into the times of Luther, Dürer, Raphael; it is harder to find the domestic life of that age still preserved undisturbed anywhere. The building of our houses has altered as completely as our commerce; we believe we live more comfortably. In the building and adornment of churches, on the other hand, no essential progress has been made among believers of any confession. If one part of Christendom has been ashamed of art in churches (the Reformed), another, by applying it without meaning (compare all the magnificent Jesuit churches), has neither furthered it nor glorified the service; and both will vanish before a new art whose rays warm us out of the twilight. Perhaps the work will go on undisturbed where Cranach, Dürer and Raphael laid down their brushes, where the noble pictures faded before dead eyes under dust or candle-smoke, or where blind fury tore them down. But before that time can come, the everyday and the Sunday, house and church, must be formed out of one piece, as they were then, when our Dürer set Saint Jerome with his lion in his own living room, when Cranach led Melanchthon to the baptism and Luther to the crucifixion of Christ. The heavenly was not yet carried off so far from the earth then, but lived on familiar terms among the truthful; the artist did not need to screw himself up into another world, he looked at his own people in a heightened sense. Whoever has looked into Luther's living room at Wittenberg must recognize the inward, particular development of that age; as leaf and blossom, crown and root of a plant point to one another, so naturally does that age feel itself penetrated outwardly as well by its inner riches, without knowing it itself; for though Luther lived, by every account, plainly and without splendour, the wainscoting, the artful stove ornamented with noble images of the sciences and arts, is nevertheless infinitely better, more at one with the style of the whole building, than we should now find the rooms of a clergyman. The same taste prevailed in the northern as in the southern part of Germany; only the latter was then, through the nearness and traffic of many rich free trading cities, still more richly fertilized, visited and adorned by artists of every kind; and since art was only then beginning to divide itself by peoples, and put out fewer merely mechanical sham-blossoms, it did not yet disturb one so unpleasantly as it did later to see Netherlanders and Italians working beside German artists at the painting or the ornamenting of the same house. Many of these foreigners were driven to Germany by affairs of state, others by gain, still others by blood unhappily shed in the unbridled passionateness of that age, and by family vengeance; for the same reason German artists too went abroad, without exactly striving through these journeys after cultivation and instruction, without hitting on the folly of today, as though art were hatched only in Rome. The German artists knew and could do everything that was asked of them, and no one asked more than they were able to perform; each town, too, held its artists dear, because God had bestowed on it these and no others, and sought to employ them to the honour of the town; and if the artists did sometimes go hungry even then, they went hungry not as artists, but along with the whole town.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written and frozen with it (R06 §3–§4). Decisions and alternatives; no quality claims. The one evaluative sentence in §5 below is flagged.

S1

1. «Ahndungen» is Arnim's spelling of Ahnungen, presentiments — but the form is also the noun of ahnden, to punish. Chose "intimations." Alternatives live at the moment of writing: presentiments, forebodings, premonitions. The retributive reading is not carried and cannot be; no English word here holds both.
2. «das sonntägliche, kirchliche Wesen» — Wesen as the whole way or order of a thing, not "being". Chose "the Sunday, churchly order." Alternatives: the Sunday, ecclesiastical being; the Sunday and church side of life. The German's bare adjective pair is kept.
3. «sie» = die Kunst. Three clauses later the English pronoun would sit next to the sacred circle and a certain height. Supplied the noun — "art turns away" — where the German keeps the pronoun. A departure, and it is a supply of the kind R06 does not forbid and R08's rule 5 would.
4. «sich demselben … zu nahen» — nahen, the poetic short form of sich nähern. Chose "come near it again from another side." again is supplied; the German has only von andrer Seite. It was written to hold the returning motion of wendet … um … zu nahen and it is an addition.

S2–S3

5. «uns … zu versetzen» — "to carry ourselves back". Alternative at the moment of writing: transport ourselves.
6. «bei allen verschiedenartigen Glaubensbekennern» — literally among all the differently-kinded confessors of faith. Flattened to "among believers of any confession." The alternative that keeps the German's shape — among confessors of faith of every different kind — was live and was not taken.

S4

7. «Hat ein Teil der Christen sich … geschämt …, so hat ein andrer …» — verb-first conditional, no conjunction. Rendered with a supplied "If." The German construction is lost; English has Had one part been ashamed… but only in the counterfactual, which this is not.
8. «(man vergleiche alle prachtvolle Jesuiterkirchen)» — jussive subjunctive, and the uninflected prachtvolle. Chose "compare all the magnificent Jesuit churches." The uninflected adjective is not representable.
9. «vielleicht wird ungestört fortgearbeitet werden» — impersonal passive with no subject at all. Supplied one: "the work will go on." The subjectlessness is lost.

S5–S6

10. «muß Alltägliches und Sonntägliches, muß Haus und Kirche» — the verb repeats. One "must" governs both pairs in the English. The anaphora is lost; repeating it (must the everyday and the Sunday, must house and church) needs an inversion English no longer has outside verse.
11. «hinauf zu schrauben» — kept as a figure: "screw himself up into another world." Alternatives: wind himself up, hoist himself, and the flat raise himself.
12. «die Seinen» — "his own people". Alternative: the bare his own.

S7

13. «denn lebte gleich Luther … so ist doch …» — the second verb-first conditional, here concessive with gleich. Rendered "for though Luther lived … is nevertheless." Lost again.
14. «einiger mit dem Stil» — einig, at one with. Chose "more at one with the style." Alternative: more of a piece with.
15. «Getäfel» — "wainscoting". Panelling was the alternative and is the commoner word now.

S8

16. «letzteres» — a neuter pronoun for the masculine Teil. Arnim is thinking of the region, not the noun. Rendered "the latter", which hides the disagreement.
17. «Scheinblüten» — calqued: "sham-blossoms." Alternatives: mere show-blossoms, false blooms, and the flat empty flourishes. The compound is the point and the hyphen keeps it.
18. «so störte es … zu sehen» — impersonal es with an infinitive subject. Supplied "one": "it did not yet disturb one so unpleasantly … to see."

S9–S10

19. «Manchen dieser Fremden trieben Staatsverhältnisse nach Deutschland» — fronted dative object, verb second, subject last. Rendered as an English passive, which puts the elements in the German's order at the cost of the German's voice. The active with the German's order — Many of these foreigners, affairs of state drove to Germany — was live and was not taken.
20. «die Fremde» = foreign parts; and it is also the name the novel gives its central woman, who is called die Fremde throughout the preceding chapter this project has already translated twice. "went abroad" loses the echo entirely. Nothing was found that keeps it.
21. «ausgeheckt» — of a plot, hatched. Kept: "as though art were hatched only in Rome."
22. «weil sie ihr von Gott nicht anders beschert waren» — literally because they were bestowed on her by God not otherwise. Restructured: "because God had bestowed on it these and no others." The closer because they were given her by God and no otherwise was live.
23. «und hungerten zuweilen auch damals die Künstler, so hungerten sie …» — the third verb-first conditional in ten sentences. Rendered with a supplied if like the other two.

What the ten segments cost, as a pattern

24. The same construction was lost three times (7, 13, 23) and each loss was paid in the same coin, a supplied if or though. Two compounds were treated in opposite ways — Scheinblüten calqued at 17, Glaubensbekennern flattened at 6 — and the reason recorded at the moment of writing was that one is a figure and the other is a category name.
25. Four supplies were made where the German withholds (3, 4, 9, 18): a noun for a pronoun, an again, a subject for an impersonal passive, and a one for an impersonal es.

Evaluative sentence, flagged (internal-judgment-only): the rendering reads to its own translator as unremarkable English, which is what R06 is for and is also why it is usable as the ∅ pole of anything built on it.