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

T-sandmann-R06-v1 — the storyteller cannot begin, single pass

Source. E. T. A. Hoffmann, «Der Sandmann» (1816), the narrator's address to the reader, first paragraph, 337 German words, read in German. Copy-text de.wikisource.org (transcription following Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben Bd. 3, Aufbau 1994 — modernised orthography), fetched 2026-08-06; the working span is workshop/experiments/E-20260806f-persona-crossing/materials/sources.json (sandmann, sha256 544d29aee64c…).

Regime. R06 — the R04 draft, stopped before self-revision and frozen as its own artifact (R04 §Procedure 2a). Cost $0 — lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Contamination: none — measured on the R04 revision of this draft (8-token longest run, 0 shared 12-grams, against J. T. Bealby 1885, PG #31377). Figures on the R04 page; no comparator was read before this draft was written (R04 §Procedure 1).

Nothing stranger or more outlandish can be invented than what befell my poor friend, the young student Nathanael, and what I have undertaken to relate to you, kind reader! Have you, most gracious of readers, ever lived through anything that filled your breast, your senses and your thoughts wholly and entirely, driving out all else? It fermented and seethed in you; kindled to a boiling glow, the blood leapt through your veins and coloured your cheeks the higher. Your look was so strange, as though it would seize in empty space shapes that no other eye could see, and your speech ran away into dark sighs. Then your friends asked you: "How are you, my dear sir? — What is the matter, my dear fellow?" And now you wanted to speak the inner image out, with all its glowing colours and shadows and lights, and you laboured to find words merely to begin. But it seemed to you that in the very first word you must gather up together everything wonderful, glorious, appalling, comical, ghastly that had happened, so that it should strike everyone like an electric shock. Yet every word, everything that speech is capable of, seemed to you colourless and frosty and dead. You search and search and stutter and stammer, and your friends' sober questions strike like icy gusts of wind into your inner glow until it is on the point of going out. But if you had first thrown down the outline of your inner picture with a few bold strokes, like a daring painter, then you laid the colours on with little effort, ever more glowingly, and the living throng of manifold shapes carried your friends away, and they saw themselves, as you did, in the middle of the picture that had come out of your soul! — Nobody, as I must confess to you, kind reader, actually asked me for the story of young Nathanael; but you know very well that I belong to that odd tribe of authors who, when they carry something in them of the sort I have just described, feel as though everyone who comes near them, and the whole world besides, were asking: "What is it, then? Do tell us, dearest sir!"