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

T-szent-peter-esernyoje-R06-v1 — Mikszáth, Szent Péter esernyője, ch. 1, lead single pass

Source. Mikszáth Kálmán, «Szent Péter esernyője» (1895), Part I «A legenda», ch. 1 «Viszik a kis Veronkát» — the whole chapter, 16 paragraphs, 650 Hungarian words. Copy-text workshop/translations/szent-peter-esernyoje/span-1-source.txt, from Magyar Elektronikus Könyvtár MEK-00954 (https://mek.oszk.hu/00900/00954/00954.htm, ISO-8859-2, decoded to UTF-8).

Regime. R06 v1.0 — lead single pass, source only, no return pass. Cost $0; never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Contamination: none. Basis: measured, not asserted — tools/dependence_check.py against B. W. Worswick's 1900 English (Project Gutenberg #31945), reported in workshop/experiments/E-20260807c-two-hands/design.md §2. No English rendering of this chapter was read before this draft and its log were committed. The lead knew the novel's English title and that a Worswick translation exists; it had not read its text.

Lineage. This draft is the frozen R06 output; T-szent-peter-esernyoje-R04-v1 is its self-revision (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 at most another week's fattening to go, but it seems the poor rector's wife could not even wait that out. As far as the goose went she died too early, as far as the child went too late. That one ought never to have been born at all. If only the Lord God had taken her 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 do not speak it and I do not think it.

¶3 A good, honest woman she was — but what use to her now was this scrap of a thing? She would have gone to the other world more easily if she could have taken the burden with her than by leaving it here.

¶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 already had a grown son, a chaplain. A good lad, to be sure; a pity he could not help his mother yet, for up to now he was himself no more than a 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 a little help to her, the cantor's wife had to go and die.

¶7 But we shall not raise her up again with any amount of lamenting, 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. There was not money enough gathered for the burial charges, the goat had to be sold as well to make it up; but the goose was left over, and since there was no maize left to go with it, it grew thin, in place of its slow panting its ordinary breathing returned, and it exchanged the heavy gait its great belly had given it for its old nimbleness — in a word, it escaped the death that was near it, and by the very death of another creature. God's wise ordinance, that when it puts out a life it may save a life; 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 at all events — 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 go the round of the village farmers, the tithing-man taking 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, when 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 along the road."

¶14 "It does not lie along it at all, not at all," they objected.

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

¶16 Their worships excused themselves and argued this way and that, that it was a great detour 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 it, and the goose too, for that goes with her, being an 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 set off 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, with a great smile, that the gee-gees were moving off and she was not stirring from the top of a sack, out of her basket, but the houses, gardens, fields and trees were coming nearer.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written, decision by decision, and frozen with it. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

The thing that organises the chapter

The narrator is not the author. He is a villager talking — he gossips, hedges, corrects himself, swears he means no harm, addresses the reader in the plural, and twice climbs into a register that is not his own (the mock-theological ¶7, the officialese of ¶8 and ¶10) and back out again. Almost every hard decision below is a decision about how far to let English follow him up and down.

Decisions taken, with the live alternatives

1. ¶1 «Özvegy tanítóné» — the woman is named by her husband's office three times and by three different offices: tanítóné (¶1, schoolmaster's wife), rektorné asszony (¶2, rector's wife), kántorné (¶6, cantor's wife). In a Hungarian village these are one man's three names. Live options: (a) collapse to one English title throughout; (b) keep three distinct titles and let the reader work out they are one woman; (c) vary loosely (the widow, the poor woman). Chose (b) — schoolmaster's widow / rector's wife / cantor's wife. What is given up: an English reader may briefly think three women. What is kept: the narrator's habit of naming people by office, which is the same habit that produces bíró uram and tizedes.
2. ¶1 word order. Hungarian fronts the predicate: Widowed-schoolmistress died at Haláp. English cannot front it without sounding like a headline. Chose the plain order and lost the opening thump.
3. ¶2 «Mikor tanító hal is meg» — the is does the work: even when it's just a schoolmaster. Options: When a mere schoolmaster dies; When it is only a schoolmaster that dies. Chose the second, which keeps the cleft the Hungarian has.
4. ¶2 «poronty», ¶3 «vakarcs» — two coarse words for the child. poronty is brat/sprog; vakarcs is the last scraping of dough, used of a runt. Options: match both coarsely (brat / runt); soften both; keep one. Chose the little brat and this scrap of a thing — the second is softer than vakarcs, and the dough sense is gone entirely. Recorded as a loss.
5. ¶2 «(Istenem, micsoda szép hangja volt annak.)» — the parenthesis is the whole characterisation of the dead man (he was the cantor; his voice was his office). Kept as a parenthesis, kept short.
6. ¶4 «Isten bűneül ne vegye» — a set formula. Options: God forgive her; may God not count it against her; may God not lay it to her as a sin. Chose the third for the legal flavour bűneül vegye has.
7. ¶5 «uramfia» — an interjection with no content: bless me / lord love us / why. Chose bless my soul. Any of the three would do; this is a pure translator's choice and I expect other hands to differ here.
8. ¶5 «Tótországban» — the old Hungarian name for the Slovak lands, faintly disparaging in this mouth. Options: Slovakia (anachronistic and neutral), the Slovak country (kept), Tótország with a note (rejected — the regime files no notes).
9. ¶5 «úgy verik a hírek» — literally the news beats it about. Kept the oddity rather than flattening to word has it. Present tense kept through this sentence: the Hungarian slips into the present as the gossip warms up, and English can follow.
10. ¶5 «utálatos egy fészek» — a vile nest. Options: a filthy hole, a loathsome hole, a god-forsaken hole. Chose a loathsome hole; the nest image is lost, and English has no idiom that carries it.
11. ¶7, the goose paragraph. The Hungarian lifts into archaic literary forms in the middle of it — lesoványodék, menekedék (the old past tense), gond vagyon ezekre (vagyon for van) — and this is the joke: a village gossip narrating a goose's weight loss in the language of scripture. Options: (a) mark the lift with English archaism (there is care had unto these); (b) mark it with biblical cadence but no archaic morphology; (c) let it go. Chose (b) — in the ledgers of heaven, there is care taken for these, God's wise ordinance. What is given up: the morphological jolt, which English has no equivalent slot for; what is kept: the cadence and the register lift. This is the largest deliberate loss in the chapter.
12. ¶7 «az oktalan állatok, mint az okos állatok» — the unreasoning animals as the reasoning animals, where "the reasoning animals" means us. Options: dumb beasts … rational beasts; brute beasts … reasoning beasts; explicitate to … as men are. Chose the unreasoning beasts … the reasoning beasts, keeping the pun unexplained.
13. ¶8 «illendő ellátásban részesítendő» — pure chancery Hungarian (a future passive participle) dropped into a sentence about feeding a two-year-old. Options: match with English officialese (is to be afforded suitable maintenance), or normalise (and given a proper meal). Chose the officialese.
14. ¶10 «Míg nem méltóztatom másképp intézkedni» — méltóztatom is the self-applied honorific: the judge deigns. Options: Until I see fit; Until I am pleased to order otherwise; Until it shall please me to direct otherwise. Chose the middle, which keeps pleased doing the honorific work without going full Victorian.
15. ¶11 the aside about the Jews. The Hungarian is the villagers' talk reported in the narrator's free indirect voice, and it is offensive. Translated straight, in the parenthesis where Mikszáth put it. Softening or cutting it would remove the narrator's ventriloquism, which is what the chapter is made of; the alternative was considered and rejected.
16. ¶15 «punktum» — a Latin tag used as a full stop in speech. Options: and that's flat; full stop; and there's an end of it. Chose and that is flat.
17. ¶16 «őkelmeik», «uram», «tizedes» — the chapter's honorific furniture. uram after a name is Master X; őkelmeik is their worships, faintly mocking; tizedes is the village tithing-man. Kept all three, at the cost of an English surface that is more archaic than the Hungarian.
18. ¶16 «cocók» — a small child's word for horses. Options: gee-gees, horsies, the horses. Chose gee-gees; it is the child's word and the sentence is being seen from inside the child.
19. ¶16 «szeredás», «marcifánk», «pogácsa» — realia. szeredás is a shepherd's shoulder-bag (a Slovak loan); pogácsa a scone-like biscuit; marcifánk a fritter. Chose shoulder-bag, scones, fritters — all three flattened toward English kitchen words, all three losses.
20. ¶16 the last clause. «a házak, kertek, mezők és fák idébb jönnek» — the child is not moving; the world is coming nearer. Kept the child's frame of reference exactly, including she was not stirring, because reversing it (the cart moved off past the houses) destroys the sentence.
21. ¶16 «a libát, mert az mint örökség, vele jár» — kept the legal word inheritance for a goose.

Registered prediction, frozen here before any other hand's rendering exists

internal-judgment-only. Sixteen loci, fixed from the Hungarian alone, eight where I predict any independent competent hand will diverge from mine, eight where I predict hands will converge. The D/C assignment is made now, before the published English has been opened and before any panel rendering has been called.

The reason for the split, in one sentence: the D loci are places where the Hungarian marks something English has no slot for (an honorific morphology, an archaic tense, a dialect word, a child's word), so each hand must invent a device and the inventions need not agree; the C loci say something English can simply say.

What the regime forbade and what it cost

R06 forbids a return pass. Three things were left standing that I would have gone back to: ¶2's that one ought never to have been born at all (the Hungarian Annak meg se kellett volna születnie is colder), ¶7's long middle sentence, which runs on further in English than in Hungarian, and ¶16's for that goes with her, being an inheritance, whose participle is clumsier than the Hungarian. They are recorded here rather than fixed, and the R04 revision may take them.