This Month's Installment
What's italicized is what I'm unsure about:She had freed and set in place her dark hair from the felt hat, whose only ornamentation was a bold feather.
"You play chess. I can tell by looking at you, one can tell by looking at all people. In the same way that you are a priest."
"I've always been told that I don't look like a priest at all."
"On the contrary! From the first glance. Certainly, you wear a light gray suit, also your beard is secular. But it is something in your movements, in your bearing, that betrays your profession. Yester-day evening I saw it right away."
"Yester-day evening? I don't remember noticing you there."
"I believe that. I was here in the social room and made my studies through the open door. There's certainly nothing else to do now. You sat directly across from me, and I said to myself: officer? No, his face is too pallid for that. Farmer? Same reason. Businessman or civil servant? Too much of the cerebral in his features. Artist or author? Too civilly proper. So, priest."
"You seem to spend a lot of time with people."
"I get around the world a lot; I observed quite a few people there; I - well, didn't you agree to a game?"
She had taken the game board out of a closet, distributed the pieces that she set up
---59---
and made the first move. Everything went so quickly that he, without really knowing it, was all of a sudden in the most enthusiastic match. She was a master at the game.
Grammatical Minutiae
I flipt the voices of the verbs in both clauses of the sentence "Man hat mir sonst immer gesagt, daß man mir den Geistlichen gar nicht ansieht" so they're passive instead of active. "I've always been told..." seems more natural than "One has always told me...." I'm not even sure how I would render the second clause with an active verb. (My dictionary doesn't provide a translation of ansehen with quite the same sense that it's used with here, which complicated things.) Maybe something like "one can't tell at all by looking at me that I'm a priest." It's unwieldy, and "that I don't look like a priest at all" flows much better.I've mentioned this before, but I still don't really know how to translate "doch," even though I understand the sense. I translated "Doch, doch! Auf den ersten Blick" as "On the contrary! From the first glance," and I feel that I have to justify a few things about this. I included only one of the "doch"s and translated it as "on the contrary." Having this twice ("On the contrary, on the contrary!") is unnatural and seemed like overkill. As something in the way of compensation for omitting one of the "doch"s, I exaggerated my translation of "Blick." Instead of simply "look," I translated it as "glance." Hopefully, this conveys something of the same impact of the double "doch" in the original.
I took the indefinite pronoun out of "Man hat jetzt ja nichts andres zu tun" so instead of a more literal translation ("One certainly has nothing else to do now"), I translated it as "There's certainly nothing else to do now." It's a more natural rendering.
