This Month's Installment
As always, the italicized parts are what I'm unsure about:After dinner, they went into the living room, and the conversation turned itself to less important things. Some innocent happiness was in the air and on the faces. Fritz had started a little banter with the pretty Hanna, in which her Samaritan function again played a
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rôle. And she answered him so quickly and with such good wit, that this humorous duel gave him a growing joy. Both their eyes shone with a pleasure for fighting. The entrance of the serious men, who didn't immediately know how to find themselves in the changed atmosphere, disturbed them little; they barely paid attention to it and continued making jokes in the nonchalance of their youth.
Their cheerful sense even passed over the worries and sorrows of the old woman, who sat in the corner of the ancient sofa with her tired head leaning on a cushion. Only now and then a short, compassionate look from the youthful eyes of the girl flew over to her. Why did she make so many heavy thoughts for herself? Life was so beautiful and rich! One just had to see it properly and approach with good confidence. Her fate too had really been no easy thing. Orphaned and destitute from early childhood on, only to obtain the charity of grandparents - not everyone would take it so calmly. But she had never lost courage. And if she sometimes had to stand there totally alone, she didn't want to be afraid of the struggle. If the grandmother still thought about Fritz's serious words earlier in the garden? But she had been right, she already believed him well enough to know: he really hadn't meant any harm. He also belonged to the strong and courageous, who, when it depended on it, would yield to no enemy.
Grammatical Minutiae
The first sentence in this chapter (chapter seven) has a singular indefinite pronoun as the subject. It's "nach dem Abendessen ging man in das Wohnzimmer...." To translate this literally as "After the dinner, one went into the living room..." seemed a bit too formal and stiff, so I changed it a bit to get "After dinner, they went into the living room...." As far as word-for-word translation, it's not strictly accurate, but I think it provides a better sense of what's going on.My dictionary tells me that the phrase "ich habe es nicht böse gemeint" means "I didn't mean any harm," although it literally means "I didn't mean it badly." In the novel text, however, it appears as "er hatte es so böse nicht gemeint" (my emphasis). The so modifies an adverb in the German, but in the translation my dictionary provides for this phrase, there is no adverb. Instead, it's become a direct object ("any harm"). In order to retain something of the original sense, I translated this as "he really hadn't meant any harm." Hopefully, the intensification of so comes across in really.
