Repository path: workshop/translations/szent-peter-esernyoje/R06-span2-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-szent-peter-esernyoje-R06-span2-v1 — Mikszáth, Szent Péter esernyője, ch. 2, lead single pass

Source. 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, ISO-8859-2, decoded).

Regime. R06 — lead single pass, source only. This artifact is the frozen draft that R04 §Procedure 2a requires: it is committed before the R04 revision of the same span begins, and it is a first-class R06 output in its own right. Cost $0; never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Contamination: none — asserted here, measured before evaluation. No English rendering of this chapter has been read at the time of this commit. The comparator (B. W. Worswick, 1900, Project Gutenberg #31945) is stored unread in a scratch directory and is opened only after this file and R04-span2-v1 are committed; the measurement is filed on the experiment page. Span 1 of the same work measured 2 shared 7-grams, longest run 8 tokens against the same comparator.

Lineage. Second span of the work whose first span is T-szent-peter-esernyoje-R06-v1 / R04-v1. House conventions carried over from span 1: paragraphs numbered ¶N; Hungarian personal names given in English order; «uram» rendered Master.

¶1 Glogova was not seen by Master Kapiczány alone; the writer of these lines has been there himself. It is a lean, bleak country, and the little village lies flattened into 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 inside is 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 soil 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 hardly be seemly to spoil such rocks with curlicued mansions whose towers would hide them.

¶6 Juniper and elder fill 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, cocking 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 had a fondness for playing 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 did instead.

¶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 woke 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 at us enormously 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. Sitting 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. A János Bélyi, or some such name. The magistrate, I remember well, observed:

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

Translator's log

Written during the single pass, frozen at this commit, before the R04 revision began and before any comparator was opened. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

The chapter's shape. It is a frame: a first-person narrator (the author, travelling with a district magistrate in 1873) describes the village, then reports one exchange, and the exchange is a joke whose punchline is the chapter's last line. Everything before ¶16 is landscape; everything from ¶16 is the joke being loaded. The load-bearing items are three, and I translated the rest around them: the children's uniform nut-brown eyes (¶19), the schoolmaster's «olyan magam vagyok … mint az ujjam» (¶25), and the repeated «méltóztatik érteni» (¶25, ¶27).

¶2 «kávémasina». Literally coffee machine — nineteenth-century Hungarian slang for a small branch-line steam engine. English has no period slang for this that a reader will read as slang. Options: a coffee-mill (keeps the joke, risks being read as a literal appliance), a little puffing engine (explains it away), a railway of sorts (drops it). Took coffee-mill — the sentence's own frame («jár valami … között», some sort of X runs between) does enough work to signal that a vehicle is meant.

¶3 «anya / anyós / anyóka». The paragraph runs a three-term morphological chain: the earth is no anya (mother) but an anyós (mother-in-law), and its white grass is like grey hairs on the chin of an anyóka (little old woman). English has mother and mother-in-law and then nothing: old woman breaks the chain at its third term. I could have forced grandmother to keep a family word, but the Hungarian word is not a kinship term at that point, it is age. Chain broken deliberately; the first two terms kept because the sentence is built on them.

¶3 «árvalányhaj». Stipa, feather-grass, whose Hungarian name means orphan-girl's hair. Mikszáth writes the plain word first and then supplies the name in parentheses, so the parenthesis is his own gloss and not a botanical note. Kept the structure — white grass, then the name — because dropping to feather-grass would delete the only tender thing in a hostile paragraph.

¶11 «hányta szemükre». Idiom, literally threw it on their eyes. English has an idiom in the same register with a different body part: threw in their teeth. Took it. The alternative, reproached them with, is accurate and flattens a spoken register to a written one.

¶14 «tanférfiú». A Reform-era coinage, man of the schools, slightly pompous already in 1895. Took schoolman, which is archaic in the same direction, though it carries a medieval-philosophy sense in English that the Hungarian does not.

¶15 «zsindelyig csak maga az Isten vitte fel Glogován». The hardest sentence in the chapter and the one I am least sure of. Felvinni — of God — is a fixed idiom for raising someone in the world; zsindely is a shingle roof, which in this landscape is a status marker above thatch. So the sentence says at once only God had got on well enough for shingles and only God's roof was shingled. English had risen as far as shingles holds both, but it holds the idiom faintly. Alternatives considered and rejected: only God Himself had come up in the world enough for shingles (explicit, and twice the length); only God's own house ran to shingles (natural, drops the rising).

¶16 «hítták», ¶23 «mondá», ¶26 «kérdé», ¶19 «híják». Archaic verb forms scattered through the narration. English has no morphological equivalent that is not costume — quoth would be a different century and a different class. Carried none of them; the register is instead let to sit in the syntax (If I remember rightly he was called, how comes it). This is a deliberate loss and it is a systematic one: four separate places where the Hungarian marks period and the English does not.

¶18 «Vitajtye panyi, vitajtye!» Slovak in the original, glossed by the author in a Hungarian parenthesis. This is the only place where the book lets its Slovak villagers speak their own language on the page. Kept the Slovak exactly, kept the parenthetical gloss, italicised the Slovak so the code-switch survives a reader who does not notice the parenthesis. Sirs for panyi (Hung. urak) — gentlemen is too long for a shouted classroom greeting.

¶21 «amice», ¶23 «domine fráter». Latin vocatives, the ordinary shop-talk of the Hungarian county gentry and clergy. Left in Latin and italicised, as the Hungarian leaves them. Englishing them (my friend, brother) would delete a whole social layer — these two men are placing each other by using Latin at each other.

¶25 «tekintetes uram», ¶25 and ¶27 «méltóztatik érteni», ¶27 «kérem alássan». The chapter's politeness system, and the joke runs on it. Tekintetes uram is a rank-specific address, your worship the nearest English office-address. Méltóztatik is an honorific auxiliary — does your worship deign to — with no English verb behind it; I took does your worship take my meaning, which keeps the deference in the address rather than the verb. Kérem alássan is the servile formula, literally I beg humbly: if you humbly please, which is slightly wrong English on purpose, because the Hungarian is a fossil formula and not a sentence. The whole joke's hinge is that ¶27 repeats ¶25's phrase back at the magistrate, so both had to be word-for-word identical in English, whatever else was lost.

¶25 «olyan magam vagyok itt egész őszig, mint az ujjam». A fixed simile — as alone as my finger. English does not have it. Options: as lonely as can be (drops the simile), the only cock in the yard (supplies an English idiom that says something the Hungarian does not, and says it lewdly, which pre-empts the joke the schoolmaster is only implying), as much alone as my own finger (kept the strangeness). Took the third: the simile is odd in English, but the schoolmaster is being coy, and an odd phrase is what a coy man produces. The punchline in ¶30 depends on this line having been heard.

¶8 and ¶14 «szolgabíró», «a hagyaték fölvétele». Szolgabíró is the county's district administrative officer and judge; district magistrate loses that he is not primarily a judge. Hagyaték fölvétele is the legal act of inventorying a decedent's estate; taking up his estate keeps the officialese, taking the inventory of would be plainer and less like the errand it was.

¶19 «hány az Isten». The catechism question, literally how many is God. How many Gods there are is the sense; the Hungarian is a formula a child would have chanted.

What I noticed myself failing to carry. The archaic verb endings (four), the anya/anyós/anyóka chain (one), the diminutive affection in tótocskákat (¶7) — poor little Slovaks takes the diminutive onto an adjective and loses that the noun itself is fondly deformed — and the frequentative in elismételgettük (¶28), we kept saying it over and over, where English has to spend three words on a suffix.