This Month's Installment
The italicized parts are what I'm unsure about:
In the withered features of the old uncle also lay something like a celebrating peace and a gleaming, despite his dim eyes that couldn't see much any more, but when they were young had lookt out on this blessed landscape in the same way, this peacefully lookt after property with its old but well-maintained buildings and trees. Nothing that happened on the large farm escaped his keen eye in those days.
The old man had a strange nature. Usually he sat silently, indifferently, when the others spoke around him. Then at once he cut in in the conversation, and immediately one knew that he had heard and well understood everything. Now he expressed his view, and then what he usually said in short, concise words made complete sense and hit the nail on the head. Above all Hans talked about intellectual things with no one as gladly as with the old man, and it was difficult to decide who of the two gave or received more.
The old gentleman could not endure the stay in the open air for a long time. Although he sat in a winter coat, he soon shivered; then one went into the house. There Miss Hutemach has prepared supper in the meantime. She was Lithuanian by birth; from
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her earliest youth on, brought to the most varied places in the world, she had acquired a comprehensive education, much talent and tact in dealing with people, and a good dose of personal bravery, which never left her. As the brother of the Bärwald resident, the old privy councillor in Berlin, searched for an associate, luck could lead him to no one more suitable than this. Now for a number of years she shared the loneliness of Bärwald with the frail lord of the manor, lookt after the house and yard for him, wrote his letters, read him his newspapers in the morning and evening, kept him to regular hours that had to be kept to the second, walkt in the big, well-tended garden or on the country lane depending on the condition of the weather, and took great care of him. A wife could not have done it better.
Even now at dinner she say next to the "Captain" - as the Reckenstein citizen and other neighbors still called him, with the title of the long-ago military time - reached the dishes for him, gave him what was easily digestible for him, and prepared it for him with great care.
Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary
The phrase "hit the nail on the head" is actually in the German text, although it has a different verb: "traf den Nagel auf den Kopf." It's literally "met the nail on the head," but it's close enough. The other idiom in that sentence doesn't have an English equivalent: "[es] hatte alles Hand und Fuß." Literally, it's "[it] had all hand and foot." My dictionary tells me that "Hand und Fuß haben" means "to make sense," so I translated "alles" as "complete," resulting in "it made complete sense."Back in July, I was confused by "Hutemach." I thought it was an occupation, but in translating a sentence this month, I discovered that it's actually a name: "Da hatte Fräulein Hutemach inzwischen das Abendbrot bereitet."
