This Week's Installment
The italicized parts are what I'm unsure about:
Frau Lisa was only half listening. She lookt over the table with an examining gaze and counted the glasses.
"Are you ready with everything?" askt Stoltzmann. "It's almost time!"
The bell, which announced the arrival of the first guests, proved him right. Hans Warsow and his brother appeared punctually on time; the others followed soon afterwards.
There were still two other priests invited to Rodenburg for the trial sermon, who also pleased. But the first mayor spoke out for the choice of Hans Warsow with resoluteness,
---30---
and because he had an influence in the city like no one else before him, so would it be carried out with considerable consensus.
Now Hans Warsaw had achieved his goal; he had a great vicarage in the middle of a thriving city that lay in the heart of his beloved home: he could work and be active.
And he did it. His job was not easy. His predecessor, an older, sicker gentleman, had left the larger part of the work to his younger colleague, and Deacon Brettschneider had created a rich field for himself in the congregation. But Hans Warsow was in a better position than all his colleagues: his sermons had a strong attraction that increased church attendance. People who were usually never seen in the church now appeared; one spoke of his sermons, which had never happened in Rodenburg until now.
But all that, as beautifully as it started, lasted only a short time. The interest in his sermons certainly did not stop, but still lost its liveliness, as the novelty value there and his job was a little bit familiar. Moreover, because his character changed that balance that let itself bring neither through obtrusiveness nor through affectation of many of his feminine [Schutzbefohlenen] out of the composure, because as a thinker he was too often occupied with all kinds of questions and contemplations, in order to come to meet every visitor, every one of his congregation members on the street alike with every ready kindness, whom one now wanted of "his" priests, so maintained the public interest that he had excited in the beginning, not on his peak.
---31---
"Certainly, he's clever, and what he says is beautiful," opined a lady of the better circles, who at first built doors for him with an enthusiastic hand, "but I can't help myself: Mr. Brettschneider is so very much nicer; it all comes out from him so sincerely and so lovingly."
"He's earned himself a little bit of credit. The intellectual people are always like that," voiced an-other, with whom he had a very stimulating conversation at a baptismal party, but whom at a later occasion he had not recognized and consequently had paid little attention to.
"He can do sermons, but he can't comfort!" said a more modest old woman, who had taken offense to the new priest, that after a half-hour complaint of all of her grief in succession he was not more completely with the concern.
Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary
While I was translating "Frau Lisa hörte nur mit halbem Ohre zu," I figured that it contained an idiom. It's slightly different in my dictionary ("er hört nur mit halbem Ohr hin"), but in German the phrase "to only half listen" is literally "to listen with only half an ear."
My dictionary has the exact same phrase as an-other sentence in the text, but they're used in different ways. My dictionary translates "prüfender Blick" as "searching look," but that doesn't really make sense in the context of the sentence: "Sie überschaute mit prüfendem Blick die Tafel und zählte die Gläser." The context (Frau Lisa's looking over the table) calls for a phrase that evokes more scrutiny than just a "searching look," so I translated prüfendem as examining. Prüfendem (in dative case in the text) is an adjectival form of the verb prüfen (to examine, test, etc.). It seemed redundant then to say, "She lookt over the table with an examining look," so I translated Blick as gaze. "She lookt over the table with an examining gaze and counted the glasses."
"It is the highest time," which is how I've translated "Es ist die höchste Zeit" doesn't seem to make that much sense in the context, so I'm suspicious that "Es ist die höchste Zeit" is an idiom of some kind. My dictionary wasn't any help. Google Translate suggested "It is high time," which sort of fits but which I'm still dubious about adopting.
As I mentioned before, because these sentences are linked in a narrative, they can act as checks and balances of each other and help in determining whether I've translated something correctly. The sentence after "Es ist die höchste Zeit" confirmed my suspicion that it means something like "It's almost time," which is what I've revised it to.
That sentence itself - "Die Glocke, die das Kommen der ersten Gäste meldete, gab ihm recht" - has a couple things of its own that I want to comment on:
- I had to look up Gast to make sure that Gäste really is the plural. Going just by the article der, I thought it was singular. In genitive case, der is the article for feminine singular; the genitive plural article is den. I'm not sure what's going on with that discrepancy.
- I couldn't find the phrase "gab ihm recht" (or the present tense "gibt ihm recht" or even just "recht geben") in my dictionary, but I'm pretty sure it's comparable to "recht haben" (to be right), so I translated it as "proved him right."
I wanted to translate Einstimmigkeit as unanimity because they have the same prefix (both the German "ein-" and the Latin "unus-" mean "one"), but the modifying adjective ziemlicher (considerable, quite) prevents that. There aren't shades of meaning to unanimity; it's all or nothing, so I can't say "considerable unanimity." Instead, I went with "considerable consensus," which I guess has the benefit of being alliterative.
I couldn't find Amtbruder in my dictionary, but since Amt is office and Bruder is brother, it's something like office-brother, which I translated as colleague.
In that same sentence, there's the word Diakonus. I was pretty sure that this is deacon, but I lookt it up anyway. My dictionary has only Diakon. The -us ending made me curious though, so I lookt it up in my Latin dictionary, and I'm pretty sure that Diakonus is the Germanized form of the Latin diaconus (2nd declension masculine).
I can't seem to figure out the grammar in "die sonst nie in der Kirche zu sehen gewesen," but based on the context, I'm pretty sure it's "who were usually never seen in the church." Later in the sentence, there's the verb einstellen, which my dictionary translates as appear and turn up. I chose appear because it continues the visual theme that sehen sets up.
That same sentence ends with "was in Rodenburg bisher nie geschehen war" ("which had never happened in Rodenburg until now"), which is very similar to the novel's opening line: "Was lange nicht in Reckenstein geschehen war, das geschah heute" ("What had not happened for a long time in Reckenstein happened today"). So there's a second instance of something that hasn't happened for a long time (or ever). I'm not sure if these two things are supposed to be connected, but the phrase stuck out to me.
The sentence that starts with "Da seinem Wesen zudem jenes Gleichgewicht abging..." totally thew me. It was no help that that one sentence is an astonishing thirteen lines long! I broke it up over several days, but even that didn't seem to help in understanding it. I got one section that I'm reasonably confident about, but most of it is still a jumble for me.
There's inversion in "klug ist er," and the translation in that order ("clever is he") almost seems to imply that Hans Warsow is the embodiment of intelligence, but actually translating it that way is awkward.
The verb in that sentence is meinen. A lady says that Warsow is clever. My dictionary doesn't really give me anything for meinen that goes very naturally with a direct quotation. There is "say," but since meinen is clearly related to die Meinung (opinion), I translated it as opine (or opined, since it appears as "meinte" in the text).
There are some words in dialogue ("Predigten kann hei, aber trösten kann hei nich!") that I can't find in my dictionary. Because of those two qualities (their being in dialogue and their not being in my dictionary), initially I'd assumed that they're informal or abbreviated words. I'm suspicious that "nich" is an abbreviation of "nicht." There's parallel structure there (although the second clause is negative where the first isn't), which seems to suggest this too.
I wasn't sure what to make of "hei" at first, but then I realized it's somewhat similar to the Dutch hij, which is the third person singular masculine pronoun (he). (Dutch is the language I'm focusing on right now on Duolingo, and - over the two years or so I've been learning it - I've found many similarities between it and German.) So now I'm wondering if it's just a different dialect. Translating "hei" as I would er does make a sensible sentence: "He can do sermons, but he can't comfort!" It's not a translation I can justify by pointing to the corresponding words in my dictionary, but I think it's at least close to what's intended.
I couldn't find Amtbruder in my dictionary, but since Amt is office and Bruder is brother, it's something like office-brother, which I translated as colleague.
In that same sentence, there's the word Diakonus. I was pretty sure that this is deacon, but I lookt it up anyway. My dictionary has only Diakon. The -us ending made me curious though, so I lookt it up in my Latin dictionary, and I'm pretty sure that Diakonus is the Germanized form of the Latin diaconus (2nd declension masculine).
I can't seem to figure out the grammar in "die sonst nie in der Kirche zu sehen gewesen," but based on the context, I'm pretty sure it's "who were usually never seen in the church." Later in the sentence, there's the verb einstellen, which my dictionary translates as appear and turn up. I chose appear because it continues the visual theme that sehen sets up.
That same sentence ends with "was in Rodenburg bisher nie geschehen war" ("which had never happened in Rodenburg until now"), which is very similar to the novel's opening line: "Was lange nicht in Reckenstein geschehen war, das geschah heute" ("What had not happened for a long time in Reckenstein happened today"). So there's a second instance of something that hasn't happened for a long time (or ever). I'm not sure if these two things are supposed to be connected, but the phrase stuck out to me.
The sentence that starts with "Da seinem Wesen zudem jenes Gleichgewicht abging..." totally thew me. It was no help that that one sentence is an astonishing thirteen lines long! I broke it up over several days, but even that didn't seem to help in understanding it. I got one section that I'm reasonably confident about, but most of it is still a jumble for me.
There's inversion in "klug ist er," and the translation in that order ("clever is he") almost seems to imply that Hans Warsow is the embodiment of intelligence, but actually translating it that way is awkward.
The verb in that sentence is meinen. A lady says that Warsow is clever. My dictionary doesn't really give me anything for meinen that goes very naturally with a direct quotation. There is "say," but since meinen is clearly related to die Meinung (opinion), I translated it as opine (or opined, since it appears as "meinte" in the text).
There are some words in dialogue ("Predigten kann hei, aber trösten kann hei nich!") that I can't find in my dictionary. Because of those two qualities (their being in dialogue and their not being in my dictionary), initially I'd assumed that they're informal or abbreviated words. I'm suspicious that "nich" is an abbreviation of "nicht." There's parallel structure there (although the second clause is negative where the first isn't), which seems to suggest this too.
I wasn't sure what to make of "hei" at first, but then I realized it's somewhat similar to the Dutch hij, which is the third person singular masculine pronoun (he). (Dutch is the language I'm focusing on right now on Duolingo, and - over the two years or so I've been learning it - I've found many similarities between it and German.) So now I'm wondering if it's just a different dialect. Translating "hei" as I would er does make a sensible sentence: "He can do sermons, but he can't comfort!" It's not a translation I can justify by pointing to the corresponding words in my dictionary, but I think it's at least close to what's intended.
