This Week's Installment
Hans Warsow received an invitation for a trial sermon at the St. Nicolaus church in Rodenburg. The church attendance in Rodenburg was not up to scratch. Even this time, the great church was not filled in all its parts but still saw a bigger and more considerable gathering than on other Sundays. In the patron seat sat the first mayor with his wife, the [Dezernent] for school and church and a few other town councilors. Even Edith, who in these days had come to Rodenburg in order to speak with the doctor about her father, had turned up there and smuggled in Fritz.
One waited for the new preacher even at the liturgy. But he didn't come. Deacon Brettschneider, the much-loved second priest at St. Nicolaus', held it to the old tradition. That heightened the tension. Finally the liturgy was over. The well-schooled church choir sang its motet: "Alles, was Odem hat," the principle tune came in, the last verse was sung, Hans Warsow ascended to the pulpit.
The pale, fine-featured face with the serious, almost severe features and the dark, dreaming eyes, which no one in the large congregation saw but which lookt completely inwards, immediately made an impression on the people. Now he read the text; now he began his sermon.
He spoke with a rather rough but very clear voice in short, concise sentences, each carefully filed and of firm structure. Like
---27---
well-hewn stones were they, that he piled up into a tightly ordered construction. Visibly, he rose upwards in front of the listeners; everywhere, one noticed the keen thinker. Eloquent like his mouth, his hand spoke: a long, almost overly-slender hand with fine, cerebral lines; they alone explained his gestures. But even they only with quiet, interpreting movements.
"How did you like his sermon?" asked Frau Lisa, who had invited Hans Warsow and his brother to lunch with a few other guests. She had done it out of consideration for her relationship with the Reckenstein family and was now occupied with the arrangement of the table, with which Edith was helping her.
The Stoltzmanns lived in a newly built villa outside of the city, which architecturally was built with taste and was very spacious in the interior. The city had made it for its mayor as a public gift, as he had unceremoniously refused the invitation of a big city in the west to take on - at a close vote - the vacant lord mayor position there.
Edith was silent a moment. "As you know, I've never had much sense for sermons," she said then, "but I admit, it was rather suitable in this. Sometimes it struck me more like a lecture; then again, it seemed to me as if it would please even the simpler people. I haven't yet seen such a devotion at St. Nicolaus."
"Yes, you too have had little opportunity for that, my soul," Frau Lisa threw down a little derisively, and while she put out the glasses: "He must lead me. It will not go differently. Although I'm even less cut out for the sermon
---28---
than you and would much prefer his younger brother. But all the same, it's a pity that he's taken off his uniform. It suits him so well!"
Interesting Words I Happened Upon
- pauken - to play the timpani [I thought it interesting that there's a word for this specifically. There's also the phrase "mit Pauken und Trompeten durchfallen," which my dictionary translates as "to fail miserably," but which literally means "to fail with timpani and trumpets."]
- der Galgenvogel - good-for-nothing [literally "gallows-bird"]
- die Feinkost - delicatessen [this led me also to die Kost - food. This was familiar to me because of frokost, which is breakfast in Norwegian but lunch in Danish. According to Wiktionary, they are related, etymologically.]
Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary
I found an-other word that I couldn't find in my dictionary, on Google Translate, or by referencing Wiktionary. A sentence describes the mayor's wife as "der Derzernent." The closest I could find is das Dezernat, which means department, and which doesn't make sense in this context. Based on the phrase it's in ("der Dezernent für Schule und Kirche und einige andre Ratsherren"), I think it might be secretary ("the secretary for school and church and a few other town councilors"), but I couldn't find anything in my dictionary that's even close to that. Besides, that seems like an absurd amount of work for one person.
The title of the motet the choir sings ("Alles, was Odem hat") lookt familiar to me, so I did some research. First of all, the text is Psalm 150:6. Bible Gateway provided me with Luther's translation: "Alles, was Odem hat, lobe den HERRN! Halleluja!" My Bible renders this as "Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!"
I thought I knew this because of a Bach work, but I lookt in my music collection, and the only work with "Odem" in a title of one of its movements is Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 52 "Lobgesang." When I searched for a motet with "Alles, was Odem hat" on the internet, I discovered that this text is actually used in a Bach work. It's near the end of Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, BWV 225. I'm not sure if that section of this Bach motet is what the choir is intended to be singing, but I suppose it's possible.
I kept the title of the motet in German. Translating something like that (and calling it "Everything That Has Breath") just seems wrong somehow.
In that same sentence, I was very surprised at the meaning of one of the words. I assumed that die Kanzel meant chancel, but I lookt it up anyway. I'm glad I did because it actually means pulpit (chancel is der Altarraum).
I'm not too happy with my translation of "Das bleiche, feingeschnittene Gesicht mit den ernsten, beinah strengen Zügen...." For "feingeschnittene," my dictionary gave me "fine-featured," but - of the possible translations for "Zügen" - the best one in this context is "features," so I ended up with the redundant-sounding "The pale, fine-featured face with the serious, almost severe features...." Literally, "feingeschnittene" is "finely-cut," which is also in my dictionary, but I don't think that's the best choice here.
For (I think) the first time in the year and a half I've been doing this, I ran across the letter X. When I first started doing this, I had to consult charts of German fonts pretty regularly just in order to copy out the sentences. I think I've gotten used to the type font now, and while encountering an X didn't utterly confused me, I went back to the charts just to make a comparison. It seems that the lowercase German X is written as an r with a tail. It's in "Text," fourth line from the bottom:
I think there's a Biblical reference in the sentence "Like well-hewn stones were they, that he piled up into a tightly ordered construction." (I'll admit that there's an odd sentence structure there, but I kept close to what the original had.) Because this is a sermon, this stone metaphor reminded me of Psalm 118:22 - "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone." In that text, it refers to the coming Messiah. In Ephesians 2, Paul writes that the fellowship of believers is "built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone" (Ephesians 2:20). The stones represent different things, but the metaphor of building up stones is certainly common to both.
In translating one sentence, I discovered that I'd mis-translated a section of the previous sentence. I couldn't understand what "Sie [Frau Lisa] hatte es... getan" ("She had done it") referred to. But then I lookt at the previous sentence and realized that my translating "Frau Lisa, die Hans Warsow and seinen Bruder mit einigen andern Gästen zu Mittag geladen" as "Frau Lisa, whom - with a few other guests - Hans Warsow and his brother invited to lunch" was wrong. Part of the past perfect verb is missing there; instead of "die hatte [Hans Warsow und so weiter] geladen," it's just "die [Hans Warsow und so weiter] geladen." There's no good way to represent this in English because if you take out the "had" in "she had invited them," you're left with "she invited them." Past perfect tense becomes simple past, but it's still understandable. (I hadn't realized that until encountering this, but that was mind-blowing and an-other way in which English is stupid.) Anyway, I should have translated "Frau Lisa, die Hans Warsow and seinen Bruder mit einigen andern Gästen zu Mittag geladen" as "Frau Lisa, who had invited Hans Warsow and his brother to lunch with a few other guests." The "es" to which "Sie hatte es... getan" refers then becomes obvious: it's Frau Lisa's inviting these people to lunch.
This situation also reveals something I hadn't considered before: if I mis-translate something in a sentence, there might be something in the following sentences that will illustrate my error simply because the narrative doesn't make sense. Most of the translation work I did in my foreign language classes consisted of isolated sentences, where there wasn't this sort of over-arching narrative. But here, each sentence builds on the last, so there's a sort of safety net in that the sentences have to make sense when they're read together.
Unsurprisingly, I couldn't find freigewordene in my dictionary. I knew frei is free and gewordene is a past tense, adjectival form of werden, to become. Together, they mean something like free-become, so I translated freigewordene as vacant. This is also a note to say that that sentence ("The city had made it for its mayor as a public gift...") gave me a lot of problems, the second half in particular. I still don't think my translation is a very fluid one, but it's the best I could do.
I'm not quite sure how to translate what Edith says: "Ich habe, wie du weißt, nie viel Sinn für Predigten gehabt." Somewhat literally, it's "As you know, I've never had much sense for sermons." That sounds kind of stilted though. My dictionary also has: "sie hat keinen Sinn dafür she has no appreciation for that kind of thing; dafür habe ich keinen Sinn it doesn't mean anything to me (do anything for me), it's not really my thing (or my cup of tea)." It would certainly be easier to translate this dialogue with that meaning, but I feel that that would take too much liberty with the text. I'm also hesitant to translate it like that because "Sermons have never been my cup of tea" is a vastly different meaning from "I've never had much sense for sermons."
In that same sentence, I'm not sure I have Eignes translated correctly. It wasn't in my dictionary, but I think it's a noun form of sich eignen, to be suitable.
There's an interesting use of verbs in "Manchmal kam sie [die Predigt] mir mehr wie ein Vortrag vor, dann wider schien es mir...." Initially, I translated both kam... vor and schien as "seems," but I wasn't satisfied with that. There's alliteration between vorkommen and Vortrag (lecture) that implies (through the similarity) that - like a lecture - the sermon was boring. Translating both verbs as seems was redundant and didn't give a sense of that wordplay, so I lookt up vorkommen again and found the very phrase that's in the text, which my dictionary translates as "it strikes me." It doesn't provide the same sense of a lackluster lecture, but at least there's a distinction between the two verbs (that mean essentially the same thing) and a bit of wordplay. Instead of the the dullness that the resemblance between the two German words implies, there's a suggestion of the sermon's physically assaulting the listeners.
I don't really understand what Frau Lisa is saying at the end of this section. She addresses "mein Herz," which I've translated as "my soul," but which could also be "my heart." I don't know if she's talking about herself or to Edith or what. The rest of her dialogue is confusing too.
The title of the motet the choir sings ("Alles, was Odem hat") lookt familiar to me, so I did some research. First of all, the text is Psalm 150:6. Bible Gateway provided me with Luther's translation: "Alles, was Odem hat, lobe den HERRN! Halleluja!" My Bible renders this as "Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!"
I thought I knew this because of a Bach work, but I lookt in my music collection, and the only work with "Odem" in a title of one of its movements is Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 52 "Lobgesang." When I searched for a motet with "Alles, was Odem hat" on the internet, I discovered that this text is actually used in a Bach work. It's near the end of Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, BWV 225. I'm not sure if that section of this Bach motet is what the choir is intended to be singing, but I suppose it's possible.
I kept the title of the motet in German. Translating something like that (and calling it "Everything That Has Breath") just seems wrong somehow.
In that same sentence, I was very surprised at the meaning of one of the words. I assumed that die Kanzel meant chancel, but I lookt it up anyway. I'm glad I did because it actually means pulpit (chancel is der Altarraum).
I'm not too happy with my translation of "Das bleiche, feingeschnittene Gesicht mit den ernsten, beinah strengen Zügen...." For "feingeschnittene," my dictionary gave me "fine-featured," but - of the possible translations for "Zügen" - the best one in this context is "features," so I ended up with the redundant-sounding "The pale, fine-featured face with the serious, almost severe features...." Literally, "feingeschnittene" is "finely-cut," which is also in my dictionary, but I don't think that's the best choice here.
For (I think) the first time in the year and a half I've been doing this, I ran across the letter X. When I first started doing this, I had to consult charts of German fonts pretty regularly just in order to copy out the sentences. I think I've gotten used to the type font now, and while encountering an X didn't utterly confused me, I went back to the charts just to make a comparison. It seems that the lowercase German X is written as an r with a tail. It's in "Text," fourth line from the bottom:
I think there's a Biblical reference in the sentence "Like well-hewn stones were they, that he piled up into a tightly ordered construction." (I'll admit that there's an odd sentence structure there, but I kept close to what the original had.) Because this is a sermon, this stone metaphor reminded me of Psalm 118:22 - "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone." In that text, it refers to the coming Messiah. In Ephesians 2, Paul writes that the fellowship of believers is "built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone" (Ephesians 2:20). The stones represent different things, but the metaphor of building up stones is certainly common to both.
In translating one sentence, I discovered that I'd mis-translated a section of the previous sentence. I couldn't understand what "Sie [Frau Lisa] hatte es... getan" ("She had done it") referred to. But then I lookt at the previous sentence and realized that my translating "Frau Lisa, die Hans Warsow and seinen Bruder mit einigen andern Gästen zu Mittag geladen" as "Frau Lisa, whom - with a few other guests - Hans Warsow and his brother invited to lunch" was wrong. Part of the past perfect verb is missing there; instead of "die hatte [Hans Warsow und so weiter] geladen," it's just "die [Hans Warsow und so weiter] geladen." There's no good way to represent this in English because if you take out the "had" in "she had invited them," you're left with "she invited them." Past perfect tense becomes simple past, but it's still understandable. (I hadn't realized that until encountering this, but that was mind-blowing and an-other way in which English is stupid.) Anyway, I should have translated "Frau Lisa, die Hans Warsow and seinen Bruder mit einigen andern Gästen zu Mittag geladen" as "Frau Lisa, who had invited Hans Warsow and his brother to lunch with a few other guests." The "es" to which "Sie hatte es... getan" refers then becomes obvious: it's Frau Lisa's inviting these people to lunch.
This situation also reveals something I hadn't considered before: if I mis-translate something in a sentence, there might be something in the following sentences that will illustrate my error simply because the narrative doesn't make sense. Most of the translation work I did in my foreign language classes consisted of isolated sentences, where there wasn't this sort of over-arching narrative. But here, each sentence builds on the last, so there's a sort of safety net in that the sentences have to make sense when they're read together.
Unsurprisingly, I couldn't find freigewordene in my dictionary. I knew frei is free and gewordene is a past tense, adjectival form of werden, to become. Together, they mean something like free-become, so I translated freigewordene as vacant. This is also a note to say that that sentence ("The city had made it for its mayor as a public gift...") gave me a lot of problems, the second half in particular. I still don't think my translation is a very fluid one, but it's the best I could do.
I'm not quite sure how to translate what Edith says: "Ich habe, wie du weißt, nie viel Sinn für Predigten gehabt." Somewhat literally, it's "As you know, I've never had much sense for sermons." That sounds kind of stilted though. My dictionary also has: "sie hat keinen Sinn dafür she has no appreciation for that kind of thing; dafür habe ich keinen Sinn it doesn't mean anything to me (do anything for me), it's not really my thing (or my cup of tea)." It would certainly be easier to translate this dialogue with that meaning, but I feel that that would take too much liberty with the text. I'm also hesitant to translate it like that because "Sermons have never been my cup of tea" is a vastly different meaning from "I've never had much sense for sermons."
In that same sentence, I'm not sure I have Eignes translated correctly. It wasn't in my dictionary, but I think it's a noun form of sich eignen, to be suitable.
There's an interesting use of verbs in "Manchmal kam sie [die Predigt] mir mehr wie ein Vortrag vor, dann wider schien es mir...." Initially, I translated both kam... vor and schien as "seems," but I wasn't satisfied with that. There's alliteration between vorkommen and Vortrag (lecture) that implies (through the similarity) that - like a lecture - the sermon was boring. Translating both verbs as seems was redundant and didn't give a sense of that wordplay, so I lookt up vorkommen again and found the very phrase that's in the text, which my dictionary translates as "it strikes me." It doesn't provide the same sense of a lackluster lecture, but at least there's a distinction between the two verbs (that mean essentially the same thing) and a bit of wordplay. Instead of the the dullness that the resemblance between the two German words implies, there's a suggestion of the sermon's physically assaulting the listeners.
I don't really understand what Frau Lisa is saying at the end of this section. She addresses "mein Herz," which I've translated as "my soul," but which could also be "my heart." I don't know if she's talking about herself or to Edith or what. The rest of her dialogue is confusing too.
