This Month's Installment
As always, the italicized parts are what I'm unsure about.
Blue-green, as if boiled, the water rolled under them, stretcht itself up to them with swelling crests, reeled back in the deep in thundering collapse - a sight of indescribable grandeur, on which the range of hills all around the shore lookt down silently and rigidly.
Hans stood fascinated. Even his companion couldn't take her eyes off the raging elements; she had pulled up the collar of the fur-garnished jacket, her hand held it firmly claspt, she had pushed the felt hat tightly down to her forehead, under it her bright cheeks shone. Suddenly she wriggled around.
"There is something in the air around us," she said with a voice whose serious tone befit her wonderfully, "something big, foretelling disaster. And do you even know what is it? It's the war!"
For a long while they didn't speak a word, not even as they rose from the bridge behind the Kur house up the steep path paved with rough stones, which at first went between low houses with neat, flowering front gardens and later went through a small yet dense and dark forest up to the summit of the cliff.
The rain-heavy clouds had dropt very low. Soon they settled on the hills and mountains with pressing force, soon they settled like a cap made of gauze on the chief of the two foothills that jutted out directly in front of them into the sea.
---73---
"Here it's almost like in the mountains when one has finally reached a height with effort and sees nothing," she said with the bad mood of a child, one which obstinately destroys a pleasure that has long pleased it. "But," she lookt for her way of consoling, "it is like that everywhere. We never see without a haze, not in our whole life... I don't see you and you don't see me. What do we two know of each other? And if we went on such a hike together for a whole summer long, would we therefore become closer?"
"See," he thought to himself, "she is not at all so unintellectual, like you thought, she philosophizes in her own way, and what she just said there didn't sound so insensible at all." Aloud, however, he replied: "You are right. We know nothing of others and least of all of ourselves. The nearness withdraws, the far off brings near, that is the wonderful law of life that we will never explore and would be to us the age of the sea or of the eternal mountain."
But now she was already no longer concentrating.
"It is becoming cold up here," she said while she beat the ground with her sturdy shoes, "and you are devoted to your thoughts and don't for a moment care if I, poor child here next to you, am freezing to death. We'll want to look for a sheltered little place for ourselves in the forest, then you can continue to philosophize on my account. Although I would prefer to hear something funny from you - I think you can't be funny at all."
They had found the wished for place of rest: a small moss-covered hill under a low beech tree whose branches shut behind them like a door.
---74---
"And now come and warm me up a little with your big loden coat!"
She moved close to him, took half of his coat, threw it around her shoulder and, now with
her teeth chattering perhaps more deliberately than involuntarily, crouched by his side. He felt the warm rush of her blood, which - enlivening - flowed over to him; he had never felt a feminine body so close.
Above them, the storm caught its song in the branches of the trees.
Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary
I'm not very good at phonetics, but I think the sentence "Gebannt stand Hans" exhibits assonance. The repetition of the vowel sound portrays something of his standing still in awe."Unheilschwangeres" is literally something like "pregnant with disaster." Between its being an odd word and being used as a substantive adjective ("etwas Großes, Unheilschwangeres"), I didn't know quite how to translate this. I went with "foretelling disaster," which - while not as striking or imaginative a phrase - at least gives the same sense.
The sentence beginning with "For a long while they didn't speak a word..." provided a challenge. The whole paragraph is this single sentence, and in the original formatting, it's eight lines. The verb for the last clause ("hinaufführte") appears only once in the original text, but I included it twice in my translation ("went... up") to give something of a signpost in between the thickets of description. I was glad that I was able to retain the alliteration of "dichten und dunklen Wald" - "dense and dark forest."
I was a bit underwhelmed when I found that my dictionary translates "Lodenmantel" as "loden coat" because I still had no idea what it meant. Loden is "a thick woolen cloth used for outer clothing."
