Repository path: workshop/translations/szent-peter-esernyoje/R04-span2-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-szent-peter-esernyoje-R04-span2-v1 — Mikszáth, Szent Péter esernyője, ch. 2, lead close translation

Source. As T-szent-peter-esernyoje-R06-span2-v1: Mikszáth Kálmán, «Szent Péter esernyője» (1895), Part I «A legenda», ch. 2 «Glogova régen», whole, 30 paragraphs, 726 Hungarian words. Copy-text workshop/translations/szent-peter-esernyoje/span-2-source.txt (MEK-00954).

Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source only: draft, then self-revise against the source in the same session. The draft was written out and frozen as R06-span2-v1 at commit b583be6 before this revision began. Cost $0; never ledgered.

Contamination: none. No English rendering of this chapter was read before this artifact and its log were committed. Measured against the comparator on the experiment page.

Lineage. Revision of T-szent-peter-esernyoje-R06-span2-v1. Paired by construction (R06 §"The pairing property"). Second span of the work whose first span is R04-v1.

¶1 Glogova was not seen by Master Kapiczány alone; the writer of these lines has been there himself. A lean, bleak country it is, and the little village lies crouched in a narrow valley among bare hills.

¶2 Far, far from here there is not so much as a decent highroad, let alone a railway. Lately, it seems, some sort of coffee-mill runs between Beszterce and Selmecbánya, but even that does not touch Glogova. Five hundred years will be wanted before Glogova stands where the villages stand that fall along the civilised line. The soil is clayey, barren and obstinate. It says it is willing to feed only certain plants — oats, say, and potatoes — and will not undertake the rest; and even these must be coaxed out of mother earth, one might almost say by force.

¶3 But this earth is no mother; a mother-in-law rather. Its insides are full of stones, and it is slashed open by ugly cracks and gullies, along whose edges a white grass (orphan-girl's hair, they call it) straggles, like grey bristles on a decrepit old woman's chin.

¶4 Is the earth too old, then? But it cannot be older than the rest. It has only used itself up sooner. Down below, the golden-eared plain has raised nothing but blades of grass these many thousand years, while here giant oaks and turkey-oaks grew. No wonder it tired first.

¶5 There is poverty here, and want, and yet something charming as well, some sweet poesy. The ugly hovels are made beautiful by the mighty rocks that look down on them. It would almost be unseemly to spoil these fine rocks with curlicued mansions whose towers would hide them.

¶6 The scent of juniper and elder fills the air. There is no other flower here. At most a hollyhock blooms in one little garden or another, this one white, that one red. A barefoot, hemp-haired Slovak girl waters it out of a milk-jug.

¶7 I have the little Slovak village before me even now, out of the year 1873 (when I passed through it): I see its cottages, the gardens sown with lucerne and planted with maize, a plum tree here and there among them, propped up with poles. For the fruit trees do their part. As though they had agreed together: "Let us feed the poor little Slovaks."

¶8 When I was there the priest had just died, and we were taking up his estate, the district magistrate and I. There was not much work in it; worn furniture and bad cassocks were what he had left behind.

¶9 The villagers wept for the old priest.

¶10 "He was a good man," they said, "but he had no head for managing. It is true there was not much to manage with."

¶11 "Then why do you not pay your priest better?" my chief threw in their teeth.

¶12 A big Slovak with a pigtail answered, jauntily hitching the money-belt higher on his belly:

¶13 "The priest is not our servant, but the Lord God's. Let every man pay his own servant."

¶14 After the estate had been taken up, while the coachman was harnessing, we walked across for a minute to look at the school — for my magistrate liked to play the schoolman.

¶15 The school was a low, battered little house, thatched with straw, of course — in Glogova God alone had risen as far as shingles; but even His house was a modest one, and there had been nothing left over for a tower; a bell-cote down below served in its place.

¶16 The schoolmaster was waiting for us in the yard. If I remember rightly he was called György Majzik. He was a robust, strong man in the prime of his manhood, with a sensible, intelligent face, straight and true in his speech. He roused one's liking at once.

¶17 He led us in to the children; the schoolgirls sat on the left, the little boys on the right, all nicely combed. They all rose with a great rustling and cried out in a singsong:

¶18 "Vitajtye panyi, vitajtye!" (Be welcome, sirs!)

¶19 The magistrate put a question or two to the pretty, chubby-faced children, who stared mightily at us out of their round-opened nut-brown eyes. Every one of them had nut-brown eyes. The questions of course were not hard — how many Gods there are, what this country is called, and more of the same — yet they cost the children some care and cudgelling of brains.

¶20 But my principal was not a severe man, and he clapped the schoolmaster's shoulder in a friendly way:

¶21 "I am satisfied, amice."

¶22 The schoolmaster bowed, and bare-headed he saw us out into the yard.

¶23 "Pretty children," said the magistrate genially when we were outside, "but how comes it, domine frater, that they are all of one face?"

¶24 The Glogova schoolmaster grew a little confused, and then a frank good humour spread over his healthy red face.

¶25 "Why, it comes of this, your worship: in summer the whole male population of Glogova scatters away down to the Lowlands for the field work, and at such times I am left here, right through to autumn, as much alone as my own finger." (A roguish smile appeared about his lips.) "Does your worship take my meaning?"

¶26 "And how many years have you been here?" asked the magistrate then, more briskly.

¶27 "Fourteen years, if you humbly please. I see by the question that your worship takes my meaning."

¶28 This little dialogue is what has stayed in my memory of Glogova to this day. Once we were up in the carriage we said it over and over, and always laughed at it. At home the magistrate told it in company for a long time afterwards, like some pleasant titbit.

¶29 Some two weeks later word came that the Glogova people had got a young chaplain for their priest. Some fellow called János Bélyi. The magistrate, I remember well, observed:

¶30 "At least the schoolmaster will not be alone in the summers any more."

Translator's log

The R06 log is frozen at b583be6 and is not repeated here. This log records only what the revision changed and why, which is the whole content of the R06/R04 difference.

One outright omission, caught by reading the Hungarian against the English rather than by reading the English. ¶6 «Boróka- és bodzaillat tölti meg a levegőt» — the compound is boróka-illat, juniper scent. The draft had Juniper and elder fill the air, which puts the shrubs in the air instead of their smell. Repaired to The scent of juniper and elder fills the air. This is the only place in the chapter where the draft said something the source does not say, and it survived a full pass of writing.

Two dropped modifiers. ¶5 «e szép sziklákat» — these fine rocks; the draft had such rocks and lost the adjective in a sentence whose whole point is that the rocks are beautiful and the hypothetical mansions would not be. ¶12 «hetykén» — jauntily; the draft had folded the manner adverb into the verb (cocking the money-belt), which is economical and deletes a word the source spends. Both restored.

Four changes of register, all in the same direction — away from the Latinate and toward the spoken. ¶14 had a fondness for playing the schoolman → liked to play the schoolman; ¶15 did instead → served in its place; ¶16 woke one's liking → roused one's liking; ¶28 Sitting up in the carriage → Once we were up in the carriage. The narrator of this chapter is a man telling an anecdote he has told many times, and the draft kept putting him in writing.

Two places where the draft was literal and the revision is not, or the other way round. ¶1 «meglapulva» — the draft's flattened into a narrow valley takes the participle's literal sense; crouched in takes the posture it means, which is what a village does. ¶19 «roppant megbámultak» — the draft's stared at us enormously put the intensifier where English does not take one; stared mightily at us keeps a degree word and moves it onto a verb that can carry it.

One dismissive particle recovered. ¶29 «Valami Bélyi János nevűt» — valami + name is dismissive, the narrator's magistrate not troubling to be sure of a chaplain's name. The draft's A János Bélyi, or some such name added a hedge the Hungarian does not contain in order to get the dismissiveness; Some fellow called János Bélyi gets it from the same particle the Hungarian uses.

What the revision did not touch, and this is the finding of the pass. Every one of the twelve places the R06 log had flagged as hard — the anya/anyós/anyóka chain, «kávémasina», «árvalányhaj», «zsindelyig … vitte fel», the four archaic verb endings, the Slovak greeting, the two Latin vocatives, «méltóztatik érteni», «kérem alássan», «mint az ujjam» — stands in the revision exactly as the draft left it. The revision repaired an omission, restored two modifiers, and lowered the register four times; it changed nothing at any site the draft had already recognised as a problem. A close pass over one's own draft finds the places one was not thinking about, not the places one was.