AMD 2: Ryen

Initially, I wanted to look up Herman Melville's Moby Dick in English and German. I found it just fine in English, but I could not find it in German (i.e., every German website was either unhelpful or porn). So then I tried to do the same thing for Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery." Also no luck. Finally, I found a website that provided dual-language editions of obscure poems. I first chose a poem called "The White Wolf", or "Die Weisse Woelfin". (The umlaut can be replaced by an "oe", right?). I read the poem several lines at a time, first in English, then in German. Based on the English, my present knowledge of German, and intuition, I could deduce the contextual meaning of just about every German word. A few quotations:

"Beautiful and deadly, fierce and furious, the White Wolf stalks the forest."

"Schoen und toedlich, wild und wuetend, die Weisse Woelfin pirscht durch den Wald."

Matching colors are matching nouns, adjectives, or verbs. I am guessing that "stalks" and "pirscht durch" possess the same unit of meaning. And apparently "der Wald" is accusative, so it becomes "den Wald."

"She can be the Hunter and the Hunted."

"Sie kann einmal Jaegerin, einmal Gejagte sein."

Here is a place where wording does not match up so well. "Sein" functions as "to be," of course, and "kann" seems quite obviously to be "can." It seems like I've encountered "einmal" somewhere before, but I cannot figure out an English correlation in this context. Now for the last lines in the poem (skipping over a large portion in the middle):

"She will be here till the end of time. She watches over her Soul Children. She watches over all of us."

"Sie ist bei uns bis zum Ende aller Zeit. Sie behuetet Ihre Seelenkinder. Sie behuetet uns alle."

This is a bit more complex. We are introducing a future-tense verb, "will be." I think "ist bei" is the equivalent, but I am not sure. I cannot figure out the function of "uns", either, since it is used in two significantly different sentences. "Bis zum" and "aller" also confuse me a bit.

So that is what I did for AMD 2. Next week: I hope to find a physical copy of a dual-language novel and scan through it.