Month 12: Pages 18-19

This Week's Installment

As always, the italicized parts are what I am unsure about:

As I passed my tests, I received a bigger scholarship that puts me in the standing to do studies in Greece and Italy.”
     “I heard about it from your brother.  How many of the beauties you must have seen!”
     “No doubt.  I don’t misjudge that either.  I saw unforgettable things in Athens, Florence, and Rome.  Just at the age in which one is most receptive to it, the treasures of the world opened themselves to me.  My knowledge increased; my artistic sense received rich stimulation.  And still on all these voyages I never came to a true pleasure.  I tried to force it, was annoyed and outraged at myself - it was all futile.  As a sick person, I wandered through the marvelous Uffizi and the old buildings of the cities.” 

---18---

     “It was the continuous reception of new impressions; that touches the soul.  I have experienced something like it, if only in smaller scale.  When Father took a trip with me to Italy soon after the death of Mother, I too had not nearly the pleasure that I had promised myself.”
     “I saw that it did not go on like that and lookt for a permanent place of residence.  First I stayed a year in Rome, then a second in Florence, for a while I lived in Switzerland, in Zürich and Bern, busy with a bigger effort about the beginnings of Christianity in Rome - finally I went back to Germany.”
     “You let yourself go lower in Bonn?”
     “Yes, my work had appeared, and one encouraged me to give lectures there.”
     “And now you came to rest?”
     “No - I didn’t come here to rest either; I felt just as peaceless as there in the south.  I have worked a lot in this time; I may well claim it.  It was like a self-defense against that which seethed in my core.  And now I want to tell you too what it was.”
     He became quieter, but with a move away that trembled through each of his words:  “We people up here from the northeast cannot thrive in the south, and also not in the west.  There everything is soft, smoothed, even; with us it is uneven, sharp, and square.

Interesting Word I Ran Across By Happenstance

• der Friedhof - cemetery, graveyard [literally peace-yard]

Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary

I'm very confused by the sentence "Unvergeßliches empfing ich in Athen, Florenz, und Rom," particularly the "unvergeßliches" ("unforgettable").  I think it's a substantive adjective, but I'm not sure of the noun that it's standing in the stead of.  Whatever it is, it's a singular neuter, indicated by the "-es" ending.  I substituted "things" (so, "I saw unforgettable things in Athens, Florence, and Rome"), but I know that's not right (obviously, because it's plural).

I don't think there's a way to translate this to English so that it maintains the same grammar, but apparently in German, one can use "sick" as a substantive adjective.  The last sentence on page eighteen starts with "Wie ein Kranker...."  Literally, it's "As a sick [person]."

I'm not exactly sure what sense "lassen" has in "Sie ließen sich in Bonn nieder?"  Based on the other words, I think there's an implied infinitive there.  I inserted "go," so it becomes "You let yourself go lower in Bonn?" but I'm still not sure if that's really the intended meaning.

I didn't know how to translate "friedlos," and it wasn't in my dictionary.  Because I know der Frieden is peace and -los is -less, I could tell that it meant "please-less," but it wasn't until I lookt up "peace-less" in an endeavor to find a synonym that's an actual word that I discovered that peaceless is a word in English.