This Month's Installment
As always, the italicized parts are what I'm unsure about. I was able to finagle my clauses so that the end of this month's installment is also the end of chapter six.
He could not continue talking. His words had fallen like a spark of fire in the small gathering. "War!?" cried Hans. "How do you get to war all of a sudden?"
"War!" the pastor said at the same time, and - his hands instinctively folded in his manner - he added: "God in mercy keep us from it!" The pastor's frail wife, however, had become deathly pale,
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a stuttering twitch ran over her bloodless lips, she wanted to say something, but the word died away before she could utter it.
Hanna noticed it and caressed her hand reassuringly: "Don't bother, Grandmother. The captain is inclined to be very belligerent to-day; he has been since his entrance, but he means no harm."
"I don't at all know why the government gets so excited about my word. We certainly cannot always stay in peace, and being prepared means everything here. Or did we want to hide from ourselves that we are surrounded all around by a world of enemies, who wait only for the given moment while we are still here lulling ourselves to sleep in the most delightful dreams of love and fraternization?"
"If the war comes, it comes from God, and we have to get used to it," opined the old priest. "To think about it now is possibly a little premature."
"I don't even know how you suddenly come up with these thoughts, Fritz," and with a quick, rebuking look, Hans pointed out the pastor's old wife; fear peered out of every feature of her wilted face.
Now Fritz saw what he caused. "You're right," he said, relenting, "it was just a silly idea that this peaceful evening gave me. Since we like to live and think in opposites."
Fun Word I Happened Upon
- der Gurtmuffel - seatbelt offender; ein ~ sein to hate wearing seatbelts [der Muffel by itself means something like stick-in-the-mud]
Grammatical Minutiae
I had to change the word order a bit in the clause "Die schwächliche Pastorsfrau aber was totenbleich geworden." Pastorsfrau is one word in German, but it becomes two in English: pastor's wife. I couldn't keep the adjective where it was because that would result in "the frail pastor's wife," which could be incorrectly understood as "the wife of the frail pastor." Instead, I worded it as "the pastor's frail wife." Mostly I'm noting this just because I think it's interesting; it doesn't really require a grammatical explanation.The same situation also showed up in a later sentence.
Although it's not the context in which I'd usually use the word, I followed my dictionary's suggestion to translate "kriegerisch" as "belligerent," because they have the same core, as it were. Kriegerisch is related to der Krieg (the German word for war), and belligerent comes from bellum (the Latin word for war).
I translated "meinte" (in "meinte der alte Pfarrer") as "opined." My dictionary suggests translating meinen as to think, to believe, or to mean. To say is listed at the bottom, and that's the sense here, but since meinen is obviously related to die Meinung (opinion), I felt opine was appropriate. Opine is translated as meinen in the English to German section of my dictionary.
Wohl can be translated so many different ways that I don't know whether I have the correct sense in the sentence "Jetzt an ihn zu denken, ist wohl ein wenig verfrüht." I translated this as "To think about it now is possibly a little premature," but probably or truly might work instead of possibly.
