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

T-kronenwaechter-sturm-R06-v1 — Arnim, «Die Kronenwächter», the storm scene, no rule set

Source. Ludwig Achim von Arnim, «Die Kronenwächter», Erster Band, Erstes Buch, Siebente Geschichte: Der Sturm (1817) — the span from «Während er noch so wohlgefällig sprach…» to «…daß ein feurig rotes Antlitz so bleich werden könnte!»: 694 German words in eight segments, read in German, stored at ../source-de-segments.txt.

Copy-text. zeno.org's digitisation, collated in full against the independent digitisation at projekt-gutenberg.org (chapter 9). Sequence-match ratio per paragraph 1.0000 / 0.9995 / 1.0000; the two variants are both punctuation and neither touches a word: projekt-gutenberg prints a colon before »Im Namen meines Grafen!« where zeno does not, and has one further sentence-final point zeno lacks. The zeno reading is adopted.

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).

Order. Rendered first of the three lead arms, frozen before R08 and R07 were begun. The order for this run is R06 → R08 → R07, which is deliberately identical to E-20260808c's rather than crossed against it: this run's primary is an interaction between this source and that one, and an order that differed between the two halves would confound it. The cost is that the two halves share whatever order effect exists; that is stated as a limit and it is the lesser of the two.

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» could be found in any edition, anthology, or catalogue reachable from this container: the work is the standard example of the untranslated Arnim, and the Arnim titles that are in English (Isabella of Egypt, The Mad Veteran of Fort Ratonneau, Melück Maria Blainville, The Marriage Blacksmith) do not include it. The search is recorded in the design's §2 and is falsifiable: a single located English rendering of this chapter voids the run's manipulation.

So tools/dependence_check.py cannot be run on this artifact — there is no comparator to run it against — and this is said on the artifact rather than left as a silent none, as CLAUDE.md §Contamination requires. The absence is not evidence of the lead's independence in general; it is the manipulation this experiment turns on, and the design measures it a second way (§2's retrieval probe) instead of assuming it.

Note (bhb) check, run before the section was selected: the repository contains no prior lead rendering of any Arnim text. The single occurrence of the name in the repo is an Arnim poem printed on the same 1810 newspaper page as Kleist's «Bettelweib von Locarno», recorded in workshop/canon/bettelweib-locarno/manifest.md as page matter excluded from that story.

The translation

S1

While he was still speaking so complacently, the Prior came in and warned him anxiously that the mayor was having the house surrounded on every side by armed townsmen. The stranger supposed it was on account of the daughter, but the master builder shook his head, and the Prior said he had heard him speak very violently of a woman who gave herself out to be the heiress of a reigning house, but who was being pursued as an impostor by the relatives of that house.

S2

"I know what they want," sighed the stranger, "the precious stones out of my father's inheritance; give it to them. I possess diamonds of a purer water in the tears of joy that I weep. Let them in, those envious souls; they shall feel that they can take nothing from me so long as I hold my beloved son in my arms. He is mine, and no force parts me from him."

S3

The master builder stepped between them and tried to convince her that the possession of those valuables could only be a pretext, that the implacable ones would not grant her the son, so as to avenge on her still the offence of her unhappy husband. "You know him well kept now, and amply provided for," he said; "you are not parting from him for ever, your vow is discharged, fulfil the wishes of my fidelity, reward my many years of service! What is the princely name to you, of which many hold you to have been deprived on account of your mother's unequal birth and of your marriage with the unknown knight? As my wife you can be protected by the free city of Strasbourg."

S4

But the stranger lifted up the skull of her beloved husband and said: "Everything I could make you a gift of, and would still requite your services only poorly; and the one thing you ask, my heart, my hand — the two of them are not mine. No resolve parts me from my husband, from my son; only the force that tears me out of life can separate me from them. Leave me to the destiny of my heaven."

S5

At that moment the angry mayor thrust the stranger's people, who wanted to hold him back, impatiently aside and stepped in with the cry "In the name of my Count!" But at the moment when he was about to declare the stranger a prisoner, the master builder led the trembling Apollonia forward to meet him. This inexplicable apparition threw the violent man off his balance; had he caught sight of Berthold, his anger would have found its explanation, but the stranger was still holding him in her arms. "You here?" the mayor asked, stammering, and Apollonia, sobbing, could not answer. After a moment's reflection he took her by the arm; Berthold wanted to hold her back, but she herself in her fear drew away from him the hand he had seized as she turned away.

S6

An indeterminacy had seized them all, which paralysed each of them, and just as illnesses in a person send such forebodings of exhaustion on ahead, so this time a violent event in the air seemed to work upon all the inhabitants like a general sickness of the constellations. A storm was shuddering through the lanes of the town, which those inwardly shaken had failed until now to hear. With rising violence the veins of the air throbbed; the falling ranks of roof tiles, the rattling windows, the screaming of people who no longer believed themselves safe in their swaying timber houses, all became audible only now, when the storm wind burst open a badly fastened window of the room where they were all still standing, drove straw and branches in, and carried on its mad game with everything movable in the room.

S7

From every side voices were calling for the mayor; the order was demanded of him that all fires on the hearths be put out, so that a general conflagration should not fill up the terror. The man was little used to decisions as quick as that; in his embarrassment he called for the town hall, but he did not let his daughter out of his hand, just as the stranger, through all the storm, pressed the skull and her son ever more tightly to herself. And so the mayor now marched off with his daughter, the grim butcher with the shattered lamb over which the safe fold had collapsed.

S8

Now, when he had gone, the Prior came out of his hiding place; he had been praying for his name and for his office, that he might not be held to account as the abductor of the daughter. He used the first moments to escape — who would have believed that a fiery red countenance could turn so pale!

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

Written as the draft was written, decision by decision. R06 has no rule set, so there are no coverage codes here; what is recorded is the fork, the options that were live at the moment of writing, and what was taken. No return pass was made: three places below record an option I would have gone back for, and did not.

The forks, in the order they occurred

1. S1 «wohlgefällig» — of the Baumeister's own speech a moment earlier. Options: complacently / with satisfaction / so pleased with himself. Took complacently: it carries the self-satisfaction and the faint authorial dryness at once, which the neutral options drop.

2. S1, the whole segment is Konjunktiv I. «lasse … umringen», «wäre», «habe … sprechen hören», «ausgäbe», «würde» — five verbs marking reported speech by morphology alone. English has no morphological exponent for this and must do it with that-clauses and sequence of tenses, which is what I did (warned him … that the mayor was having, said he had heard). The marking is continuous in the German and intermittent in the English: after the first that, English lets the reader forget it is still inside the Prior's report, and German does not. Nothing here recovers that; it is the same shape as the project's ты→вы finding — a device carried grammatically in the source with no English exponent to carry it.

3. S2 «gebt es ihnen» — the antecedent is genuinely open. es is singular and «die edlen Steine» is plural, so es is either a slip for the stones or, more likely, a pronoun for «das Erbe» two words earlier. Options: give it to them (leaves the ambiguity where the German leaves it) / let them have them (fixes on the stones) / let them have it (fixes on the inheritance). Took give it to them. Not a decision to preserve ambiguity — I did not have a rule telling me to — but because it was the word that came, and rereading the clause I could not see which reading to prefer.

4. S2 «Diamanten von reinerem Wasser» — the jeweller's Wasser, which English has too (a diamond of the first water). Options: of a purer water (the English idiom, dated) / purer diamonds / finer diamonds. Took of a purer water, because the metaphor is doing work: she is answering stones with tears, and the idiom is the hinge between them. A rendering that says finer diamonds cuts the hinge.

5. S3 «trat zwischen» — absolute, no object. Options: stepped between (bare, as the German) / stepped between them. Took stepped between them. Writing stepped between full stop reads in English as an unfinished phrase rather than as a stylistic withholding.

6. S3 «Ihr / Euer / Euch» — the Baumeister addresses her throughout in the early-modern respectful plural. English has one you, so the entire deference layer of this speech disappears; the only thing left carrying it is the diction (fulfil the wishes of my fidelity, reward my many years of service). Same problem as fork 2 and no better solution.

7. S3 «…für verlustig achten.» — printed with a full stop although Was ist Euch … is interrogative in form. Options: keep the full stop / write a question mark. Took the question mark. English punctuation does not have the German licence here and the sentence read as broken without it. This is a place where I silently repaired the source and I am recording it as a repair, not as a reading.

8. S3 «Als meine Frau kann Euch die freie Stadt Straßburg schützen.» — the German fronts the condition and puts the city last. Options: keep the German order (As my wife, the free city of Strasbourg can protect you) / passive (As my wife you can be protected by the free city of Strasbourg). Took the passive, to keep As my wife attached to you; the active version momentarily reads as though the city were his wife. This is one of the three I would have gone back for: the passive is limp where the German is a closing offer.

9. S3/S4 «Straßburg» — took Strasbourg, the settled English form, without thinking about it at the time.

10. S4 «Alles könnte ich Euch schenken, und lohnte Eure Dienste nur gering» — the second clause is a Konjunktiv II with no conjunction and inverted order: and (I) would still requite your services only poorly. Options: supply and would still / break into two sentences / read lohnte as indicative past (it cannot be, but the reading is available at speed). Took supply and would still. The German gets the concessive from mood alone; English needs still to get it, so a word appears here that has no counterpart in the source.

11. S4 «sie beide sind nicht mein» — after a dash-joined pair. Took the two of them are not mine, keeping the resumptive pronoun the German has rather than folding it into neither is mine.

12. S4 «dem Geschicke meines Himmels» — the destiny of my heaven is not English, quite. Options: the destiny of my heaven / the fate my heaven appoints me / the fate Heaven has ordained for me. Took the destiny of my heaven: the possessive my on heaven is the strange thing in the German and the other two options delete it.

13. S5 «brachte den heftigen Mann außer Fassung» — options: threw the violent man off his balance / put the vehement man out of countenance / made the violent man lose his composure. Took threw … off his balance. heftig is vehement more than violent, and I took violent anyway because the vehement man is a phrase nobody writes; the second of the three I would have gone back for.

14. S5 «die Leute der Fremden» — the stranger's people — retainers, servants, escort. Took people, which keeps the German's vagueness about their status.

15. S5 «die er von der Abgewendeten ergriffen hatte» — a substantivised participle, the turned-away one, referring to Apollonia, whose hand Berthold had taken while she was facing away. Options: which he had seized from her as she turned away / which he had taken from the averted woman. Took the first: English has no comfortable substantivised participle and the second is a phrase in no register.

16. S6 «wie eine allgemeine Krankheit des Gestirns» — Gestirn is the stars collectively, and the whole clause is an astrological figure. Took like a general sickness of the constellations. Considered of the heavens; rejected because S4 already has heaven doing different work eight lines above.

17. S6 «pochten die Luftadern» — the strangest image in the passage: the air has veins, and they throb (as a pulse does, and as a hammer does). Options: the veins of the air throbbed / the arteries of the air pounded / a de-metaphored the gusts came in pulses. Took the veins of the air throbbed. It is not English and I wrote it anyway because the alternative is to delete the figure.

18. S6, the third sentence is 78 German words and one period. Options: keep it whole / break at hörbar. Kept it whole, with semicolons, because the sentence's construction is the storm arriving all at once; the parts have no separate news in them.

19. S7 «damit nicht eine allgemeine Feuersbrunst den Schrecken erfüllte» — erfüllen here is fill out, complete, make the terror whole, not fulfil. Options: so that a general conflagration should not complete the terror / … fill up the terror / … crown the terror. Took fill up the terror, and it is the third of the three I would have gone back for: complete was the more accurate reading and I wrote fill up because I was still hearing the German verb.

20. S7 «der grimmige Schlächter mit dem zerschmetterten Lamm» — the narrator's sudden verdict on the mayor, in apposition, unannounced. Took the grim butcher with the shattered lamb, apposition intact.

21. S7 «über das der sichre Stall zusammengebrochen war» — Stall against Lamm wants a sheep-word. Options: stall / fold / shed. Took fold, which pays for the lamb; the safe stall would have kept the German word and lost the figure.

22. S8 «wer hätte geglaubt, daß ein feurig rotes Antlitz so bleich werden könnte!» — comma- spliced onto the preceding clause in the German. Options: keep the comma splice / dash / new sentence. Took the dash, which is the nearest English has to the German's run-on exclamation without writing something ungrammatical.

What this rendering does not have

No return pass was made, so forks 8, 13 and 19 stand as written. R06 has no rule set and this log records no rule numbers; the whole of the above is what a careful single reading produced, which is the quantity this arm exists to supply.