This Week's Installment
As always, the italicized parts are what I'm unsure about:
“I must still have some good establishment with you because although we were neighbors often enough, our circles have met little.”
“They had better things to do,” she casually retorted, as she removed the riding cap from her hair.
“Not better,” he replied quietly and frankly, “but more important, I willingly grant it. I was until today, and perhaps still am to a certain degree, burdened with the illness that destroys each harmless
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pleasure: taking life and its duties seriously. I believe it is Egmont who once said, ‘If you take life a bit too seriously, what is it?’ Very true - but one can just not do differently, that is the misfortune.”
“You have also received your reward for that: You’d find he’d become a well-known man, like your brother Fritz first explained it to me a few days ago. I for my part read little, even your books and writings I don’t know, but with them I say the same.”
“I am well-known only in a very small circle; that my life was accompanied by exceptional luck I can hardly say.”
She looked at him, for the first time. He had no resemblance with his younger brother. His pale face was clever and charming, but the strong and energetic excitement that made Fritz’s features so dear to her was missing from him; too much of the dreamy and pensive lay in this face, and she loved the hard, angular brows in men more. The act was for her that which granted value to men, not the idea. It had always possessed something subordinate for her.
“You know that Fritz is about to change jobs,” said Hans Warsow, well in the wish to give the conversation an objective turn. But for her it was as if he would have read out of her gaze what she had just felt in the stillness. “And do you also know well that he already settled into his new job in Bärwalde?”
“He notified me of it when he appeared here unexpected one evening.”
The thought of this evening, of Fritz’s arrival high on horseback, here on the veranda woke up in her with such vividness that a cheerful smile
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flit across her pretty mouth. She recounted the incident. But he didn’t show an interest in her cheerfulness; on the contrary, he became even more serious, and in the gently entering dawn his face appeared to her a shade paler and gloomier than it had so far.
“That’s like him! Although he is old enough to wean himself from such tricks.”
She was annoyed at his words. That was Hans Warsow, exactly as he stood in her memory, as she had often heard her father, who favored him little, describe him: full of himself and from a higher vantage point judging the actions of others condescendingly and disparagingly.
Interesting Words I Came Across
- das Bauchknöpfchen - belly button
- der Kasus - case [in the sense of grammatical case; the case in sense of container is der Kasten. More then a few times, my Latin professor impressed upon us students the importance of recognizing multiple meanings of a word in a particular context. He complained that the textbook used "in this case" where "in this instance" would have been better suited because otherwise it could easily be misconstrued that grammatical cases were being talked about when they really weren't. So it's interesting that - for this particular word, at least - that ambiguity wouldn't occur in German.]
- im falschen Zug sitzen - be barking up the wrong tree [literally: to sit in the wrong train]
Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary
Originally, I thought that something had happened that resulted in a cataclysmic shift in Edith and Warsow's relationship because the pronouns that they use had changed. I even wrote:It seems like something has caused a rift between Warsow and Edith in the break between chapter one and chapter two. There's her stinging remark about how their social circles had better things to do than mingle with each other, which she "casually retort[s]," but there's something else that indicates this change too. A few months ago, I noticed that Warsow and Edith were using the informal du to address each other, but here, Warsow uses the formal pronouns (it would be Sie in the nominative case, but since all the instances so far are in accusative, it's Ihnen). He says, "Ich bringe Ihnen" ("I bring you") and "bei Ihnen" ("with you").It wasn't until weeks later that I realized that it wasn't Fritz Warsow; it's Hans Warsow, his brother. I guess tunnel vision is a side-effect of translation a novel one sentence at a time.
Fritz and Edith's relationship seems to be the same then, but the formal German pronouns that Hans and Edith use with each other still illustrate something about the characters that my English translation can really only hint at.
Warsow (Hans Warsow) quotes Egmont ("I believe it is Egmont who once said, 'If you take life a bit too seriously, what is it?'"). I haven't read it and amn't even familiar with it, but I'm assuming that Goethe's play Egmont is Warsow's source.
I think "Sie find ein bekannter Mann geworden" is subjunctive, but mostly it just confused me. Because "sie" starts the sentence, I don't know if it's capitalized or not, so I don't know whether it's the formal you or they or she. The conjugation of the verb could help narrow those options, but it doesn't seem to agree with any (it'd be "sie finden" or "sie findet"). "Geworden" is a past-tense of "werden," which also complicates things. I eventually translated that section as "You'd find he'd become a well-known man," but I'm extremely dubious of the accuracy, especially because I had to stick in that he pronoun myself.
Die Dämmerung can be translated as either "the dawn" or "the twilight." So far in this chapter, there hasn't been anything that indicates the time, but since it starts out with der Reckensteiner doing work on the grange, I translated it as "the dawn." Farmers are known for getting up really early.
I'm not sure how useful it is to try to write commentary on the novel as I'm translating it, but this sentence seems to portray Hans Warsow as unnatural. As the dawn comes in, he becomes "paler and gloomier."
