Steppenwolf & Friends

It's hard to get much done in this setting. For me at least, limited privacy and limited mobility mean limited productivity. I haven't done much recently beyond yardwork and Aikido. But I have translated a little more of Steppenwolf:

It pleased clever people to argue over whether he was really a wolf, or if he had once, perhaps before his birth, been magically transformed from a wolf into a person, or if he was born a person imbued and still possessed with the soul of a wolf from the steppes, or whether perhaps this belief that he was truly a wolf was merely a conceit or sickness. For example, it was of course possible that this man was in childhood wild, unruly, and disorderly, that his teachers had tried to slay the beast in him but that the best faith and imagination could do was to lay a thick coating of education and humanity over his true, bestial self.

The process of translation is fascinating to me. It's not at all like simply reading a book, in your first or second language. That goes considerably faster, and if there are words you can't define, you generally get them from context and keep going, sometimes looking up the essential words. In translation, that doesn't work, because you need to follow each sentence to completion, rather than gaining an overall knowledge and comprehension of the work. In addition, even a little foreign language study will tell you that one-to-one translation is generally a myth. In this passage, the phrase "in der Tat", which literally translates to "in the deed" but colloquially and contextually means "in truth" becomes the modifier "true" in the phrase "his true, bestial self". This phrase is in itself two phrase sewn together to shorten the sentence without sacrificing meaning. Why did I do this? Because a reasonable sentence length in German comes off as Thomas Pynchon on a bad day in English.

I get the feeling my current opinions will amuse me in the future. I'm so new at all of this...