This Week's Installment
As always, the italicized parts are what I'm unsure about:
But just because it is so, we love this country with a tenacity and strength of which the people in the south and in the west have no idea. And if we separate ourselves from him and look for the area of southern Germany or even of flourishing Italy - certainly, we are not blind to the beauty there that presents itself to us step
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by step. But we can only enjoy all that and be glad of its being for a short time, for a holiday period. Then love for the home awakens only all the more strongly. Then in the midst of all of the softness of the air and lines, all of the agricultural and artistic splendor, our angular, gruff country only appears all the more lovely and wonderful. Then we must go back, northwards, in the high east, in the tempered, steel air without which we cannot thrive. And if we suppress this urge and do violence to it, then we become sick, as it has fared with me."
She had listened to him with growing interest; having spoken with such depth and sincerity out of every word, he had suddenly appeared to her a completely different man. "Wonderful" - but then she stopt; no, she couldn't say that to him -
"You had never confided all that to me," he completed her without any trace of sensitivity. "But that's the way it is, and I can't change it. For three centuries the Warsows have settled here. Bärwalde has never come out of their hands. They have kept it even in the most desperate times, the hardest misery of war, have gone without and suffered, simply in order to not yield an inch of the homely clod. In my history of East Prussia, the comprehensive chronicle of Bärwalde and of the Warsows is included. It is admirable in its power and in its suffering."
"Fritz has often told me about it. But I did not suspect that you knew even more and more precisely. I took you for a man of intellect, a hero of the pen, who found his fatherland there, where he could write and create."
"Certainly, I am a man of intellect. The
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problems of our time, the questions of belief and knowledge burn in my soul, and I want to proclaim them from the university chair or from the pulpit as long as I can. But I am before everything East Prussian with body and soul. And there is only one country in which my intellectual ability can develop itself fruitfully. The others don't understand that; therefore, they have often teased me. Only we know that the East Prussian blood was to carry many generations, that we have breathed this air from birth on and have fed from the marrow of this earth."
"That's why it was your wish to obtain a university chair in Königsberg?"
It was not very sensitive of her to say that to him, not right now.
Interesting Word I Ran Across by Happenstance
- blauäugig - blue-eyed; fig. starry-eyed, dewy-eyed, naive
Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary
I probably should have realized this at the end of what I translated for my last post, but I think some of Hans Warsow's comments are a response of sorts to World War I. The first sentence I translated for this month is: "But just because it is so [East Prussia is "uneven, sharp, and square"], we love this country with a tenacity and strength of which the people in the south and in the west have no idea." It's a nationalistic statement, and since this book was published in 1916 (and especially since it's dedicated to General-Fieldmarshall von Hindenburg), it's very possible that Warsow's nationalism is colored by the war. I haven't found anything in the book so far that indicates a particular time period, and - while the military has been mentioned - it hasn't been particularly prominent, so I don't think the novel is meant to be a novel about or set during World War I. Still, I think Warsow's comment here is indicative of when the book was written.I couldn't find a translation for "härtliche," but I found that härten" is "to temper" (as metal), so I translated "härtliche" as "tempered." Warsow also describes the air as "steel," so - while "tempered" seems to fit - I'm still unsure enough to italicize it.
I think I have the correct sense of one sentence, but my structure differs from the original. I'm not sure what to do with "es sprach eine solche Tiefe und Aufrichtigkeit aus jedem Wort." Literally, it's "it spoke such depth and sincerity out of every word," but I'm not sure of the antecedent of that "es." I should think it's referring to Warsow, but - if so - it would be the masculine "er" rather than the neuter "es." My other thought was that it could be anticipatory, but there's a problem with that too: it's singular, but what it would anticipate is plural ("Tiefe und Aufrichtigkeit"). In my translation, I rendered that part as "having spoken with such depth and sincerity...."
The only translation I could find for "eingesessen" is the adjective "old-established," but in the sentence in the text, it's a verb, not an adjective. I lookt up some derivatives and found "seßhaft," and - although that's also an adjective ("settled") - I think it provides enough credence to translate "eingesessen" as "settled." While it might not be a perfect translation, it makes sense in the sentence: "Seit drei Jahrhunderten sind die Warsows hier eingesessen" ("For three centuries the Warsows have settled here").
I can't seem to find a good way to phrase part of a sentence in English. In the original text, there's the indirect statement "daß Sie alles noch viel genauer wußten." I'm pretty sure that the "alles noch viel" is "even more," but "genauer" is "more exactly" or "more precisely." It's difficult to put those two phrases together because they both have "more," but one "more" is a substantive adjective where the other is an adverb. I can't say "that you knew even more more precisely" because two "more"s that are different parts of speech are directly next to each other. So I added an "and" between them to get "that you knew even more and more precisely."
