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

T-ved-vejen-R06-v1 — Bang, «Ved Vejen» ¶829–852, the dawn movement

• Source. Herman Bang, Ved Vejen (1886), paragraphs 829–852 — ../source-unit.txt, 503 Danish words in 24 paragraphs. Provenance and copy-text on ../README.md. Public domain.
• Language pair. Danish → English. The project's first translation from Danish, and its seventeenth source language.
• Regime. R06 v1.0 — lead, source-only, single pass, no return pass. Written straight through; where a choice was unresolved at the moment of writing, the option written is the one below and the alternative is in the log.
• Contamination: none, and this is a reachability statement rather than a measurement. No English translation of «Ved Vejen» is in the public domain or otherwise reachable — Project Gutenberg holds twelve Danish Bang titles and zero English ones, and the only English rendering in existence (Christophersen, Katinka, 1990) is in copyright and was not consulted. There is no comparator, so tools/dependence_check.py could not be run; device-census.md §4 says so, and says why this run's validity does not turn on it.
• Cost. $0. Lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• Lineage. The base rendering. T-ved-vejen-R14-v1 is this text with the Class A operator table applied; T-ved-vejen-R14odd-v1 is that text with the unlicensed-markedness table applied.
• Evaluation. E-20260808d-carriage-decoupled / RS-20260808d-carriage-decoupled.

The translation

[1] It had been quieter at their place too, this last while. Huus did not come so often now, in the spring. There was so much to do, he said.

[2] When he did come, his mood was so uneven as well. Time and again it was as though he did not see at all how glad Katinka was to see him, and he talked mostly with Bai, though Katinka had had so much to say to him and to ask about.

[3] Just now in the spring, when there had been so much to arrange and to alter everywhere....

[4] But there was something the matter. Perhaps he was not content at the farm at Kiær's either; it was said that he was so odd to work with.

[5] Her own mood, for that matter, was heavy now and then too.

[6] That came perhaps of her sleeping too little.

[7] She stayed in the sitting room in the evening, while Bai was undressing. He drifted about half naked for so long, and sat on the edge of the bed and kept up a talk and was never done.

[8] It was so wearisome to Katinka that he never settled and never made an end of it.

[9] And when she came to bed herself and lay in the dark beside Bai, who slept deeply, she could not fall asleep and felt an unease, so that she got up again and went into the sitting room. There she would sit by the window. The night train rushed past, and the great stillness lay over the field again. Not a sound, not a breath of wind in the summer night. The first grey glimmer of day came; and a cold, damp air struck up from the meadows.

[10] And it grew lighter and lighter, while the larks began to sing.

[11] Huus was so fond of seeing the morning come, he said.

[12] He had told how it was in the mountains when morning came. It was like a mighty golden-red sea, he said, half so of gold and half of roses — about all the summits. And the peaks sailed like islands in the great sea....

[13] And then, little by little, he said, all the mountain tops stood on fire....

[14] And then the sun came.

[15] And rose.

[16] And swept the darkness out of the valleys as with a great wing.

[17] He often told such things now, such things from his travels.

[18] He talked more altogether now — when he talked at all.

[19] ... It grew quite light, and Katinka was still sitting by the window. But she had better go to rest.

[20] The air was heavy in the bedroom, and Bai lay there and had thrown the blankets off himself.

[21] When Huus came in the evening, they mostly sat in the elder arbour.

[22] They watched the eight o'clock train go. A solitary farmer had trickled out onto the platform and greeted them as he went past and drifted off home.

[23] Then they went down into the garden. The cherry trees stood in bloom. The white petals slid like a bright glittering rain through the summer air down onto the lawn.

[24] They sat quiet and looked out at the white trees. It was as though the evening's awaited silence over the plain wrapped itself about all things. Up in the town one heard a gate being slammed to. The cattle called out across the fields.

English words: 563.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written, decision by decision, and frozen with it. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. R06 forbids a return pass, so where the entry says unresolved the text above carries the option written first and the alternative was not gone back for.

The thing the whole passage turned on

Bang's paragraph is his sentence. The largest decision was made once, at ¶14, and then governed everything: Og saa kom Solen. / Og steg. / Og fejede Mørket ud af Dalene som med en stor Vinge. are three paragraphs, and the second is two words with no subject. Every instinct that has produced readable English in the earlier sessions of this project wanted to write Then the sun came up, rose, and swept the darkness out of the valleys like a great wing. That sentence is available, it is better English by any ordinary standard, and it destroys the passage: the point is that the sunrise takes three separate breaths and that the middle one is almost nothing. So the paragraphing was kept exactly, and the bare And rose. was kept, and the Og was kept at the head of five consecutive units where an English editor would delete four of them.

What is worth recording is that this cost nothing. English takes the three-beat paragraphing and the sentence-initial And without protest — they are ordinary equipment of English prose since at least the 1920s. That is a decision made at translation time and before any design existed, and it is the observation the study limb was built on.

The individual places

1. ¶1 Der havde ogsaa været mere stille hos dem. Quieter at their place against things had been quieter with them. Chose the first: hos dem is domestic and locative, and with them drifts toward the relationship, which the Danish has not said yet. Unresolved: quieter at the station would have been clearer and adds a fact the Danish does not state at this point.
2. ¶2 #Naar#. The spærret emphasis sits on the conjunction. Rendered as italic When. English italic on a subordinator is exactly the same gesture — the concession is grudging and the stress is on the condition, not on him. Kept for #var# (¶4) and #naar# (¶18) on the same reasoning.
3. ¶2 uens i Humør / ¶5 tungt Humør. Bang uses Humør for both of them, three paragraphs apart, and it is the only word connecting his unevenness to her heaviness. Rendered his mood was so uneven and her own mood… was heavy to hold the repetition. Alternative not taken: he was so changeable / she was low, which reads better and cuts the thread.
4. ¶3. A subordinate clause standing as a paragraph with no main verb, closing on four dots. Kept as a fragment. Alternative: supply And this at the head. Refused — the fragment is Katinka's thought breaking off, and completing it makes the narrator the one thinking.
5. ¶4 der sagdes, at han var saa sær at arbejde med. He is ambiguous in the Danish: Kiær, the employer, is the likelier antecedent, and Huus is the nearer one. Kept ambiguous — it was said that he was so odd to work with is ambiguous in English in the same way and at the same place. Per the compelled-specification rule on wiki/goodness-senses.md's accuracy entry this is a mitigation, not an evasion: English permits the open option, so resolving it would have been an avoidable over-specification. sær → odd rather than difficult, which would name a complaint the Danish only implies.
6. ¶7 drev saa længe om halvnøgen. Drifted about half naked. drive om is aimless motion, and drifted also sets up ¶22's drev hjem (drifted off home), which is the same verb. Kept the same English verb at both sites deliberately.
7. ¶8 langsommeligt. Literally slow-making, i.e. tedious. Chose wearisome: the word has to carry irritation without Katinka ever admitting to irritation, which is the whole register of the passage. Alternative: tiresome, rejected as too close to complaint.
8. ¶9, the 79-word paragraph. One long period, then four short ones. Held the ratio: the first sentence is 45 words in English and the last four are 8, 15, 11 and 19. Ikke en Lyd, ikke et Vindpust kept as Not a sound, not a breath of wind — the asyndetic negation pair is the only place in the span where Bang repeats a structure inside one sentence.
9. ¶9 Der sad hun saa ved Vinduet. Written There she would sit by the window — English has no habitual past tense and the iterative has to be carried by a modal. The Danish is iterative throughout (naar frames at ¶2, ¶9, ¶21), and would is the only equipment English has for it. This is an obligatory target-side specification, not a choice.
10. ¶12 halvt saadan af Guld og halvt af Roser. Half so of gold and half of roses — saadan is a spoken hesitation inside a reported sentence and so keeps its awkwardness. Unresolved: half of it gold and half of it roses is smoother and loses the fact that a man is talking.
11. ¶12–13, sagde han inside the clause. Both interrupting tags kept where Bang put them, mid sentence. Moving them to the front is the obvious English move and would make the reported speech a frame rather than an interruption.
12. ¶12 Tinderne sejlede. The peaks sailed. Not seemed to sail, not floated. The verb is doing the work and hedging it is the standard way such an image dies.
13. ¶16 som med en stor Vinge. As with a great wing — the agent of the wing is unnamed in the Danish and stays unnamed. Like a great wing would attach the wing to the sun; as with keeps it instrumental and ownerless.
14. ¶17 saadan noget… saadan noget. Such things… such things. The repetition is the sentence.
15. ¶19, the initial four dots. Kept at the head of the paragraph. It is a resumption mark — the narration comes back to the window after the mountains — and there is no other signal that we have returned.
16. ¶19 Men hun maatte vel til Ro. Free indirect: it is her thought, not the narrator's report. But she had better go to rest keeps the modal and the shrug. Alternative: But she supposed she must go to bed, which is more clearly marked as thought and therefore less like Bang.
17. ¶22 var drysset ud. dryssе is what happens to grains or petals. Had trickled out onto the platform for one farmer. Unresolved: the Danish verb is the same family as ¶23's falling blossom and English cannot hold both with one word; trickled takes the farmer and the blossom gets slid.
18. ¶23 Blade. Petals, not leaves — cherry trees in bloom. A false friend of the plainest kind.
19. ¶24 Aftenens biede Tavshed. bie is to wait, archaic even in 1886. The evening's awaited silence. Unresolved and the hardest phrase in the passage: awaited is passive where the Danish participle is doing something closer to long-expected; the alternative the silence the evening had been waiting for states the personification the Danish only implies, and the personification is already carried by svøbte sig (wrapped itself) in the next clause.
20. ¶24 Stilhed / Tavshed. Two different Danish words, ¶9 and ¶24. Rendered stillness and silence to keep them distinct; a single English word for both would have made the frame look deliberate in a way the Danish does not.
21. ¶24 hørte man. One heard. Unresolved: you could hear is far more natural contemporary English and puts a second person into a passage that has none.

What was given up

Nothing in the propositional content, so far as the draft can tell. What was given up is smoothness at exactly six places — ¶3, ¶10, ¶14–16, ¶18, ¶19, ¶24 — where an English editor would join, delete or complete, and where joining, deleting or completing would remove the only formal thing Bang is doing. Whether that cost anything a reader can detect is the study limb's question, and this log was frozen before that design existed.