Monday, January 14, 2019

Month 46: Pages 61-62

This Month's Installment


As always, what's italicized is what I'm unsure about:
He spoke of his home, he told her about Bärwalde, also about Rodenburg.  Now she became more attentive; now and then she interrupted him with a question about their soil conditions and their location that showed her interest in the places that were dear to him.
     But all of a sudden she was no longer listening.  "The sun!" she shouted.  "Look, the sun!"
     A golden, long not seen stream of light broke through the window across the room and filled the big room with its warm, soft shine.
     They had stept into the clear.
     Slowly the elms began to be revealed, in sharply outlined [goldgeränderten] lines the hills emerged, first the Adlershorster, then also the farther Ozhöfter.  To the wide sea there lay, released from all the gray haze and all oppressive pressure, the sunshine, glorious as on the first day.
     "Wonderful!" Hans said, lost in devotions.  He had always loved the sea, and through all of these rain-heavy days felt an irresistible longing to see it in its glowing color and the gleaming play of its light as it showed itself now from flashing silver gray all the way down to deep, steel blue that shimmered over there against the almost black horizon.
     "Very beautiful!" the young girl at his side replied.  But the bright enthusiasm that it had seized with the first breakthrough of the sun already appeared [verloht].  Here in the open, in the incorruptible light of the day, he saw that she wasn't quite as young as he had estimated her at first sight in the hall.  Something hard lay in her profile and around her mouth was a 
---61---
peculiar, almost shifty feature whose sharpness even the radiant, cherry-red lips could not redeem.  But the saucy snub nose with freckles on it gave her again something youthful, almost childlike.

Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary

I'm not sure if "Sie waren ins Freie getreten" is meant to be taken literally or not.  I translated it as "They had stept into the clear," but it might be more metaphorical, referring to the sun's shining through the clouds again.

The only comment I have this month is that I'm assuming Adlershorster and Ozhöfter to be geographical names.  At first, I translated Adlershorster as eyries, but when I couldn't find a translation for Ozhöfter, I reconsidered this and left it as it was.