This Month's Installment
As always, what's italicized is what I'm unsure about.From under, however, the surge of the sea forced its way up to them like an organ tone in the deepest registers. From the nearby fields the strong draft carried the scent of the rye bloom, which united with the damp mossy and earthy smell.
Still she sat nestled close to him. "You Germans are everything: clever and rational and even good, yes very good. But gallant you are not, it is not given to you; you don't know the soft, delicate tenderness of the French, which one can have without thinking and wanting something wicked and which certainly does one good, especially when one is freezing to death - like I am now."
Her hand searched for his under the thick coat, ice-cold it lay between his fingers. Ardently it rose in his heart... all of a sudden she jumpt up, very quickly and abruptly: "Homeward!" she cried with a choked, alarmed voice. "The sun is already sinking, it will be night before we are in the 'seastar.'"
She didn't choose the well laid out path that they had gone up; dropping sharply, she rushed in zigzag through tree and brush, she jumpt down the slope with such an agility that he was not able to follow her. She ran as if a mob of pursuers
---75---
were behind her, as if hunted. But with a confidence at the same time, she infallibly went out of the way of every small obstacle, every tree root, and every stone. Finally at a sharp bend of the path she stopt in her wild run, sat on a boulder a few meters above the sea, and waved to him, who was far above her. Now she waited quietly although it was a short while until he had reached her vicinity.
"Why did you rush down the mountain like a maniac? And why didn't you choose the path that all people take?" he askt half indignantly, half joking.
"Because it suddenly came over me!" she answered, laughing.
"Came over you?"
"You even said it yourself: the maniac. My blood must have a diversion then, otherwise it becomes rebellious. No, don't look at me so shockt, now it is very calm and sensible again... support me, please, at least with this short descent here! I believe I've hurt my foot. But it's not worth mentioning."
"Look, the punishment for your recklessness! These uneven paths down the steep cliff are, if one doesn't know them exactly, not at all harmless, especially not in such a jumping step."
A short, flickering glance between the thick, silky eyelashes: "In my life I have walkt completely different paths that I knew even less and that were a good deal more dangerous."
"Yes, you explained earlier. You were in Switzerland a lot. Are you a mountain tourist?"
"She smiled her graceful, superior smile. "Oh no, I didn't mean that."
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Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary
I know next to nothing about plants, so I don't know if "rye bloom" makes any sense horticulturally. I had troubles with the relative clause in that same sentence: "der sich mit dem feuchten Moos- und Erdgeruch einte." "Einte" also appeared on page 71 ("das vielstimmige Blöken der Tiere einte sich mit dem aufgeregten Gekrächz der Raben"), and I couldn't find sufficient information about it then either. I think the infinitive form is einen, which simply looks like an inflected form of the indefinite article, so I couldn't even find it in my dictionary. I translated it last time (and this time) as united. I think last time I relied on the etymological relationship evident between this verb and ein; this time I did a bit of internet research, which supports my translation but still leaves me ignorant as far as the infinitive form.
I switched the order of two adjectives in the phrase "die feine, sanfte Zärtlichekeit der Franzosen." Instead of "the delicate, soft tenderness of the French," I went with "the soft, delicate tenderness of the French" because I thought it flowed better. In the same sentence, I translated "etwas Böses" as "something wicked." At the time, I was reading the end of Ezekiel 3, where wicked appears a lot.
As far as I can tell, there isn't an antecedent for the "es" in the clause "Heiß stieg es in seinem Inneren auf...," so I'm left with the unspecific "Ardently it rose in his heart...." I chose ardently because of its appearance in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: "'You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.'" (This is in chapter 34, which I'm mentioning because it took much longer to find than I'd anticipated.) I'm not sure this quite fits the context of Wie der Heimat liebt wie du, however.
I wish I could find a better translation for "Nach Hause!" than "Homeward!" but I wanted something with some directionality.
I have a couple comments about "sprang sie den Abhang mit einer Behendigkeit herunter, daß er ihr nicht zu folgen vermochte." I understood "daß er ihr..." as a purpose clause, so while it's really only "that he was not able to follow her," I translated it as "so that he was not able to follow her." For the same reason, I added a qualifier to "mit einer Behendigkeit," so that rather than just "with an agility," it's "with such an agility."
I won't go into detail, but I want to note that I rearranged a lot of phrases in the sentence "Finally at a sharp bend of the path..." to make it flow better in English. I also omitted a few words that I thought were a bit redundant in English (primarily because there wasn't a good place to put them in the sentence, which was already pretty long). For example, I didn't include "with her hand" because that's implied in "waved to him."
"Not at all harmless" doesn't seem the best description, but the almost double negative of "not" and "-less" is in the original too: "gar nicht so ungefährlich." I probably could have rendered the sentence better, but I didn't want to stray too far from what the original text has.
