This Month's Installment
The italicized portions are what I'm unsure about:
the rooster over it as a weathervane, and the bell in the [Dachgestühl], that called to work and announced the celebration. How familiar this sound was to him, how it spoke its own language that only he could understand! He and perhaps Fritz, but he (Fritz) was much younger than he (Hans) and had discovered only later what he (Hans) had experienced for a long time. And again in his way, because they both had their certain idiosyncrasy that united and divided them. Only in one thing were they the same: in the love of this property of their ancestors, to every building, every tree, every blade of grass on it. For them, Bärwald meant the center of the home in which they were rooted.
And in the act: this old property with its deep areas and ranges, its green meadows and rich pastures, the vast rings of ancient forests, that encompassed the whole horizon, the wide dikes that intersected it on its borders, and the bridges with the black and white railings, that led over it - it was like an excerpt of the fertile, blessed East Prussian country. And at darkening evening when Hans sat on the wooden bench on the veranda with the old uncle and the rustling poplars over them played the song of time, its eternal melody of growth and fading, when on the drive, on the other side of the oval plaza, the large herd came drawing homewards, the sound of their bells united with the contented bellowing, and behind them, the cutters with scythes and tools settled their houses on the farmstead, when over them all the sun stood like a glowing
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disc in the blazing sky and with them greeted the last light on the old Pronitten church over there on the distant horizon, on the other side of the large dyke. Then he was overcome by a wonderful silent, secret, happy feeling of security, and he felt nothing but blissful consciousness, now finally, after a long hike, to be back home again in the ardently loved, often missed East Prussian land! He spoke no word, any syllable would have been a desecration for him.
Grammatical Minutiae
I couldn't find Dachgestühl in my dictionary. I can put together Dach (roof) and Stühl (chair) to get a sense of the word (it's some kind of housing for the bell that's mentioned earlier in the sentence), but I can't think of a way to say that in English.I'm not sure rings is the best translation for Kranze in "dem gewaltigen Kranze uralter Wälder," but none of the words my dictionary suggested seemed to fit this context very well.
One of the sentences mentions "die alte Pronitter Kirche." I could tell that "Pronitter" was an adjective derived from a geographic location, so I lookt up "Pronitter" to see if I could find where it is. Apparently, it's Pronitten in German, but otherwise known as Slawjanskoje. Looking this up on Google Maps, however, I found that it's about 1,000 kilometers away from the three Barwälds I found last September, so I find it very unlikely that one can see the sun set on Pronitten from Barwäld, which is what happens in the book (at least, I think that's what happens; there was no preposition, so I supplied the "on"). I'm assuming then that Brausewetter made up one or the other of these places (or perhaps even both).
I couldn't find "heißgeliebten" (or even heißlieben) in my dictionary, but I did find that heiß can mean ardently. I knew that lieben is to love, so I translated as "heißgeliebten" as "ardently loved," subtly referencing Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy.
