This Month's Installment
He noticed it immediately; so sure was she in her moves, that she made them seemingly mechanically and more in passing, meanwhile she continued chatting, undisturbed. "You are a priest, I am a governess, that is a type of relationship. Otherwise I wouldn't even approach you so easily. You are from East Prussia, close to the Russian border. Right? I read it in the guest book... no, I shouldn't keep talking, you can't pay attention at the same time... stop! Now you are lost. You can move as you want, there's nothing more to do... look here: checkmate! Here's how you should have moved: the queen, and then here..."
And with a small, white hand, in which everything lived, and on whose gold finger a big ruby glowed, she showed him the moves that would have been able to save him. Even now he wasn't concentrating; she felt that he had no inclination for a second match, she didn't seem too keen on it either, she liked to be used to better players. With a slight movement, she pushed the board from herself, leaned back in her wicker chair, took a little tobacco in tissue paper out of a small silver box, wound a cigarette with a fast talent, and lit it.
"Now it's your turn. Tell me about your life, please."
He tried to. But the words didn't quite come to his lips. She wasn't even listening with very great enthusiasm; her legs wrapt over one an-other with casual grace, she squinted at her feet, whose delicate build couldn't be hidden by the strong
---60---
shoes she chose for this weather.
Grammatical Minutiae
I think I've translated "Jetzt sind Sie verloren" correctly as "Now you are lost" rather than "Now you have lost." I know there's a group of words in German that use a form of sein instead of haben in the perfect tenses ("Ich bin gegangen," for example), but I don't think verlieren is one of them.
I've noticed before that the text uses commas rather than semi-colons to separate clauses. Especially in this installment, this caused some difficulty. I'm not sure whether to follow the grammatically confusing original and preserve this proclivity or amend this in some way, either by breaking up the clauses into individual sentences (which would probably seem too choppy) or replace all of these commas with semi-colons (which would result in extremely long sentences). For now, I retained most of the commas, but I did replace a few with semi-colons in order to aid in comprehension.
Like some other sentences I've encountered earlier, there are so many elements in "With a slight movement..." that I'm not sure I have them in the smoothest order. I'll also admit that "with a fast talent" isn't the best translation of "mit schnellem Geschick," but I couldn't come up with anything better.
I smoothed out "Aber die Worte kamen ihm nicht recht von den Lippen," although perhaps I shouldn't have. Literally, it's "But the words came to him not right from the lips" ("right" in the sense of "correctly"), but I translated it as "But the words didn't quite come to his lips." Maybe it's just that German isn't my first language, but the original seems a bit awkward to me. Since Hans is having trouble finding his words, though, this awkwardness might be intentional.
Like "With a slight movement..." there were a lot of elements to include in "She wasn't even listening...." I flipt the voice of the relative clauses "deren zierlicher Bau auch die starken Schuhe, die sie für dieses Wetter gewählt, nicht verbargen" so instead of the literal (and awkward) "whose delicate build even the strong shoes, that she for this weather chose, didn't hide" in active voice, I have the smoother "whose delicate build couldn't be hidden by the strong shoes she chose for this weather" in passive voice.
