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

T-szent-peter-esernyoje-R04-v1 — Mikszáth, Szent Péter esernyője, ch. 1, lead close translation

Source. As T-szent-peter-esernyoje-R06-v1: Mikszáth Kálmán, «Szent Péter esernyője» (1895), Part I «A legenda», ch. 1 «Viszik a kis Veronkát», whole, 16 paragraphs, 650 Hungarian words. Copy-text workshop/translations/szent-peter-esernyoje/span-1-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-v1 at commit 4617b00 before this revision began. Cost $0; never ledgered.

Contamination: none. Measured, not asserted — see E-20260807c-two-hands §2. No English rendering of this chapter was read before this artifact and its log were committed.

Lineage. Revision of T-szent-peter-esernyoje-R06-v1. Paired by construction (R06 §"The pairing property").

¶1 A schoolmaster's widow died at Haláp.

¶2 When it is only a schoolmaster that dies, the gravediggers are left thirsty. And what when the widow goes after him? She had nothing left in the world but a goat, a goose that was being fattened, and a two-year-old girl child. The goose had another week's fattening to go at the most, but it seems the poor rector's wife could not wait even that out. As far as the goose went she died too early, as far as the child went too late. That one need never have been born at all. Would that the Lord God had taken her to Himself when He took her poor husband. (Lord, what a fine voice that man had.) The little brat was born after her father's death, but not long after — a month, two at the outside. I should deserve to have my tongue cut out if I spoke ill. I neither say it nor think it.

¶3 A good, honest woman she was — but what good was this scrap of a thing to her now? She would have gone to the next world more easily taking the burden with her than leaving it behind.

¶4 And besides, it was not even seemly; may God not lay it to her as a sin.

¶5 For, bless my soul, the schoolmaster's people had a grown son already, a chaplain. A good lad, to be sure; a pity he could not help his mother yet, for so far he was himself no more than chaplain to some very, very poor parish priest, far off in the Slovak country — but now, a fortnight ago or so, the news beats it about that he has got a parish of his own in a little village called Glogova, somewhere among the mountains of Selmecbánya and Beszterce. And there is a man alive in the village, Master János Kapiczány, who in his ox-driving days once passed through the place, and he says it is a loathsome hole.

¶6 And now, just when the priest son might have begun to be some little help to her, the cantor's wife had to go and die.

¶7 But no amount of lamenting will raise her up again, and so all I want to tell is (be it to the credit of the noble commune of Haláp) that they buried the good soul decently. Not that enough money came in for the funeral charges — the goat had to be sold as well to make it up. But the goose was left over, and as there was no maize left to go with it, it grew thin; in place of its slow panting its ordinary breathing came back, and the heavy gait its great belly had given it it exchanged for its old nimbleness. In a word, it escaped the death that was near it, and escaped it by the death of another creature. It is God's wise decree that even where it puts out a life it may save one; for believe me, in the ledgers of heaven the unreasoning beasts are entered just as the reasoning beasts are, and there is care taken for these perhaps as much as for kings and princes.

¶8 God's holy majesty is good and wise and mighty, no question — but his worship the judge is no trifle either. Directly after the burial he ordained that the mite of a girl (Veronka is her christened name) should take her turn among the village farmers, the tithing-man carrying her every day to a different house, where she was to be afforded suitable maintenance.

¶9 "And how long is this to go on, your worship?" the councilmen asked anxiously.

¶10 "Until I am pleased to order otherwise," Mihály Nagy answered shortly.

¶11 So it stood for some ten days, until word suddenly went round that Máté Billeghi and Ferenc Koczka, their worships, were taking their wheat to Besztercebánya to sell (because they say the Jews out that way are not so sharp yet as ours here).

¶12 Mihály Nagy caught at the good chance.

¶13 "Well, if they are taking their grain out there, then let them take the child too, to her brother the priest at Glogova. That Glogova lies somewhere out that way."

¶14 "It does not lie that way at all, not at all," they objected.

¶15 "It has to lie that way, and that is flat," the judge settled it.

¶16 Their worships made difficulties and reasoned this way and that, that it was a long way round and a great inconvenience on the road, but it had to be. An order is an order. On a Wednesday they set a basket on top of the sacks on Master Billeghi's cart, and Veronka in the basket, and the goose too, for the goose went with her as her inheritance. The womenfolk of the upper end baked scones and fritters for the orphaned little creature for the road into the terrible strange world, and packed a shoulder-bag full of dried pears and plums; and when the heavy cart started, they even wept over the tiny child, who did not know where she was being taken or why she was being taken, and only saw, smiling broadly, that the gee-gees were moving off and she was not stirring from the top of her sack, out of her basket, but the houses, gardens, fields and trees were coming nearer.

Translator's log

Frozen with the artifact, before any evaluation of it was designed and before any other hand's rendering of this chapter existed. The R06 log carries the twenty-one first-pass decisions and the registered sixteen-locus prediction; that prediction is not restated or revised here — it stands as frozen at 4617b00. This log records only what the revision pass did.

What the self-revision changed, and why

Twelve sites. Every one was found by reading the English against the Hungarian, not by reading the English alone.

What the revision did not touch, having considered it

• The three titles (tanítóné / rektorné / kántorné) stay three. The revision re-read them as a set and left them, on the R06 log's reasoning.
• ¶7's archaism. The revision considered putting back English archaic morphology (there is care had unto these, it waxed thin) and did not: it would have marked the lift more sharply than the Hungarian does, since -ék past forms were merely bookish in 1895, not medieval.
• ¶11's aside about the Jews stands as drafted.
• gee-gees. Re-read and kept; the alternatives (horsies, the horses) either infantilise further or lose the child's frame.

One thing the revision found that the draft could not

Reading ¶7 against the Hungarian a second time, the paragraph turns out to be built on a bookkeeping metaphor that runs from nem gyűlt be (did not come in) through megmaradt (was left over) to be vannak jegyezve a mennyei jegyzőkönyvekben (are entered in the ledgers of heaven) — money, then a surviving goose, then God's accounts, all in the same vocabulary. The draft had rendered each of the three without noticing they were one figure. R04 keeps came in, left over and ledgers deliberately. internal-judgment-only: no claim is made that the result is better, only that the figure is now a decision instead of an accident.