Go you indeed! Since you're already familiar with the English translation of Wilhelmine's memoirs, I'm curious: does the tone strike you as different due to the language, or the same?
This is where I admit my German is still at the stage where a lot of this happens:
A word: *is German* Me: I know that's a compliment. Which compliment, I forget, but that's good enough. Moving on!
That kind of plowing ahead when it's "good enough" is why my German is progressing so quickly: I trust that my future self will know the things my present self doesn't, and so far that's working out as planned. But it does mean things like tone are a little harder to pick up on at this stage.
Also, the tone of the English translation is partly masked by the translator's choice to render it in English that is not only a hundred years old now, but was an artificially lofty, learned style even then: the English of a great many Classical translations that were trying to be as stilted as possible (some much worse than the Wilhelmine edition I'm using) and that the modern-day Classics student gets stuck with, because they're public domain and easily accessible.
"Contributed to render me acquainted with the usages of society" is not how anyone talks now, not even my dissertation advisor, who has the most Latinate English of anyone I've ever known, and if you read other stuff from a hundred years ago, you can tell the man on the street wasn't talking like that back then, either. You had to learn to write like that.
So unfortunately I have to make a conscious effort to see past it and perceive a tone other than "sounds really stilted to the modern ear."
I can tell you the sarcasm comes through in both translations! Yesterday I got to the Wusterhausen part, and it was full of complimentary words, immediately after a description of just how terrible it was. "Such was the delightful place we were staying at. This is what the glamorous front hall looked like." That sort of thing. :D
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Re: Librarian update
Re: Librarian update
A word: *is German*
Me: I know that's a compliment. Which compliment, I forget, but that's good enough. Moving on!
That kind of plowing ahead when it's "good enough" is why my German is progressing so quickly: I trust that my future self will know the things my present self doesn't, and so far that's working out as planned. But it does mean things like tone are a little harder to pick up on at this stage.
Also, the tone of the English translation is partly masked by the translator's choice to render it in English that is not only a hundred years old now, but was an artificially lofty, learned style even then: the English of a great many Classical translations that were trying to be as stilted as possible (some much worse than the Wilhelmine edition I'm using) and that the modern-day Classics student gets stuck with, because they're public domain and easily accessible.
"Contributed to render me acquainted with the usages of society" is not how anyone talks now, not even my dissertation advisor, who has the most Latinate English of anyone I've ever known, and if you read other stuff from a hundred years ago, you can tell the man on the street wasn't talking like that back then, either. You had to learn to write like that.
So unfortunately I have to make a conscious effort to see past it and perceive a tone other than "sounds really stilted to the modern ear."
I can tell you the sarcasm comes through in both translations! Yesterday I got to the Wusterhausen part, and it was full of complimentary words, immediately after a description of just how terrible it was. "Such was the delightful place we were staying at. This is what the glamorous front hall looked like." That sort of thing. :D