Laura Freeburn Translations LLC

Author: lefreeburn

  • Does Yoda use German syntax?

    Long, long ago, I read a list of rules for a Star Wars drinking game. “Take a drink every time Yoda speaks in German syntax,” it decreed.

    But how often does Yoda actually use German syntax? Let’s go through some of his words of wisdom and see how many drinks that rule would get us, assuming we take one drink per German-inspired sentence, and don’t count sentences where the English and German word order would be identical. Sentences with distinctive Yoda syntax are in bold.

    Yoda: Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealously. The shadow of greed, that is.

    I don’t think we get any drinks out of this one. (Real German syntax: Mourn them not. Miss them not. The shadow of greed is that.)

    Yoda: Yes, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they [yes!]. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will [nope], as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.

    We get 1 drink. German syntax for the second bolded phrase is “forever will it your destiny dominate, it will you consume.”

    Yoda: Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.

    0 drinks! It should be “Powerful have you become, the dark side sense I in you.”

    Yoda: Ready are you? [I think that’s German enough. “Bereit bist du?” works if “ready/bereit” is the word you want to emphasize, and you’re kind of skeptical: “Oh, you’re ready, are you?” 1 drink.] What know you of ready? [2 drinks.] For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. [close but no – “trained” needs to go at the end.] My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained [close again – but now the conjugated verb, “is”, belongs at the end]. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. [“This one have I a long time watched” would be more German.] All his life has he looked away [“looked” should be last]… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. [I don’t think so.] Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. [I’ve encountered this word order in German, so we could take a sip, but “A Jedi craves these things not” would be more conventional.] You are reckless.”

    2.5 drinks, I guess.

    Yoda: Truly wonderful the mind of a child is. [Nope. “Truly wonderful is the mind of a child.”]

    0 drinks.

    Yoda: Size matters not. [1] Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. [2]

    2 drinks.

    So to sum up, with six Yoda speeches, including some long ones, you only get five drinks, maybe six. If I remember this game correctly, “a drink” was a swig of beer, not a shot of 80 proof vodka, so you can listen carefully to Yoda’s syntax for quite a while and still drive home.

    People associate Yoda with German syntax because they’ve heard that in German “the verb goes at the end.” In fact, it’s more complicated than that. Depending on what else is going on in the sentence, German verbs bounce around like students at a drinking party.

  • The sound of German

    What does German sound like to your average speaker of English? Not great, apparently.

    In Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel White Noise, which I’m currently reading on the recommendation of a friend, the main character attends a German lesson and behold: “When [the teacher] switched from English to German, it was as through a cord had been twisted in his larynx. An abrupt emotion entered his voice, a scrape and gargle that sounded like the stirring of some beast’s ambition. He gaped at me and gestured, he croaked, he verged on strangulation. Sounds came spewing from the base of his tongue, harsh noises damp with passion. He was only demonstrating certain basic pronunciation patterns but the transformation in his face and voice made me think he was making a passage between levels of being.”

    Whoa, whooooa Don, calm down! It’s just another West Germanic language.

    In Neither Here nor There, Bill Bryson describes German as “coarse and bestial” (offering “Lebensgröße” or “life-sized” as supporting evidence) and declares that German words for food sound like “the noises of a rutting pig.” Examples include “Portion Schlagobers,” which is a portion of whipped cream.

    Is “whipped cream” really a term of such delicate beauty that it puts “Schlagobers” (or the more usual “Schlagsahne”) to shame? If your native language is English, you might think so. But that’s only because when you say “whipped cream,” you picture a delightful dessert. Say it a few times and try to forget what it means. “Whipped cream.” That’s a heck of a consonant cluster in the middle – ptcr – and we usually don’t consider those aesthetically pleasing. “Toilet brush” sounds prettier than “whipped cream.” Now consider that “Schlagobers” sounds lovely to German speakers for the same reason “whipped cream” does to English speakers: because of the light and fluffy concoction they envision when they say it.

    One of the reasons I enjoyed deleting my F***b*** account was that my so-called friends kept pasting this video on my wall:

    I could respond to this at length, but instead, here’s a perfect video response from “Easy Languages”:

    It all depends on how you say it. Well, that and some other things. What determines whether we find another language beautiful or not?

    Partly the sound patterns we’re accustomed to from our native language. English speakers seem to really dislike the voiceless velar fricative – the “ch” in “Bach.” Many languages have it but we generally regard it as a strike against them in the beauty department. It’s the reason why Bryson calls Dutch “a series of desperate hacking noises.” But to people who grow up with it, it’s just another sound in their language, which can give off friendly, elegant, tragic, cute, derisive or angry vibes according to the speaker’s mood.

    In the case of German, we’re also influenced by the countless films where German soldiers goosestep into Poland barking orders at terrified civilians, or smack brave resistance fighters with their leather gloves before torturing them mercilessly. You know the drill. But if you need a reminder of that sound, here’s the late Bruno Ganz (RIP) yelling in Downfall.

    Now let’s hear something totally different, sticking with Bruno Ganz for the sake of comparison.

    Does this German sound as “scary” or “ugly” to you as the Downfall scene? If so, could that be based more on your feelings about history than the actual sounds coming out of his mouth? What if we could get some input here from an English speaker whose opinions were completely unaffected by WWII because it hadn’t happened yet? Here’s one that’s readily available: Mark Twain in The Awful German Language, 1880. He spends most of the essay arguing that German grammar and syntax are needlessly complex and convoluted, but here’s what he has to say about the sound of it:

    “I think that a description of any loud, stirring, tumultuous episode must be tamer in German than in English. Our descriptive words of this character have such a deep, strong, resonant sound, while their German equivalents do seem so thin and mild and energyless. Boom, burst, crash, roar, storm, bellow, blow, thunder, explosion; howl, cry, shout, yell, groan; battle, hell. These are magnificent words; the have a force and magnitude of sound befitting the things which they describe. But their German equivalents would be ever so nice to sing the children to sleep with, or else my awe-inspiring ears were made for display and not for superior usefulness in analyzing sounds. Would any man want to die in a battle which was called by so tame a term as a Schlacht? Or would not a consumptive feel too much bundled up, who was about to go out, in a shirt-collar and a seal-ring, into a storm which the bird-song word Gewitter was employed to describe? And observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for explosion — Ausbruch. Our word Toothbrush is more powerful than that. It seems to me that the Germans could do worse than import it into their language to describe particularly tremendous explosions with. The German word for hell — Hölle — sounds more like helly than anything else; therefore, how necessarily chipper, frivolous, and unimpressive it is. If a man were told in German to go there, could he really rise to the dignity of feeling insulted?”

    Well, well, well. So German’s not harsh enough.

    These attempts to try to pin down a definite “feel” for the sound of a given word are pretty futile, by the way. If the sound of “hell” were as intrinsically dreadful as Twain implies, we wouldn’t name sweet little girls “Helen.”

    I could go on for a few more pages, but I should probably stop here with some closing advice: try to appreciate each language on its own terms. They all sound different, and everyone thinks their own language sounds nice.

    Also, here are a few of the words that (IMHO) sound nicer in German than in English:

    dragonfly Libelle
    chocolate Schokolade
    love Liebe
    paper Papier
    pretty schön
    branch (of a tree) Ast
    branch (of a company) Filiale
    egg Ei
    microwave Mikrowelle
    instruction Anleitung











  • I’m slightly acidic

    While cleaning out a desk drawer I found these amusing machine translation errors I’d noted down months ago. So here they are (sorry about the line breaks within words):

    Mensch das ist super lieb.Human that is super nice.Man, that’s really nice.
    Ich war nur ehrlich und habe jetzt den Salat.I was just honest and now I have the lettuce.I was just being honest and now I have to deal with the consequences.
    Liebe Frau KnopfDear Mrs. ButtonDear Mrs. Knopf
    Ich bin leicht sauer.I’m slightly acidic.I’m a little angry.
    Darüber bin ich sehr erbost und weiß aber auch das [sic] Fehler passieren können.I’m very angry about that and white but also the mistakes happen.I’m very angry about it, but I also know that mistakes happen.

  • Let’s Go: tenth-century Germany

    Long before Berlitz, Lonely Planet and Let’s Go – long even before Baedeker – there was this handy German phrasebook for travelers from Francia, with the German translated into Vulgar Latin:

    I can show you all this thanks to Wilhelm Braune’s Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, which is in the public domain.

    You might think this doesn’t look like German. Well, it was a very long time ago. It’s hard to think of anything that looks the same now as it did in the tenth century.

    But take a close look and sound it out – you’ll see it’s German. It starts with a list of body parts, moves on to some polite questions like “Where did you find a place for the night, friend?” (15) “What country do you come from?” (20) “What did you do there?” (22), then veers into more dangerous territory with “Hit him in the neck” (38), “Go out” (40), and “Dog’s ass in your nose!” (42). Then the accusations start flying: “Why did you not come to matins?” (60) “You lay down with a woman in your bed” (62) “Upon my head, if your lord knew you were sleeping with the woman he would be truly angry at you.” (63) A trip to tenth-century Germany can go south pretty quickly.

  • Fun with syntax

    Here’s a nice example of a common sentence structure in written German:

    Obwohl er eine andere Vorlage geplant hatte, erschien ihm die in ihrer Verdoppelung die Bildfläche vertikal teilende geometrische Form interessant genug, um sie weiterzuverfolgen.

    Literally: Although he an other template planned had, seemed to him the in its doubling the picture surface vertically dividing geometric shape interesting enough, to it further to follow.

    Decent translation: Although he had planned the template differently, the doubled geometric shape dividing the picture vertically seemed interesting enough for him to continue working with it.

    (If you have any quibbles about that final version, bear in mind this sentence was part of a paragraph and my adjustments made sense in context.)

    For Mark Twain, these kinds of sentences were among the targets of his ire; see this example from “The Awful German Language”:

    Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide gehüllten jetzt sehr ungenirt nach der neusten Mode gekleideten Regierungsräthin begegnet…

    But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed) government counselor’s wife met…

    By the way, “The Awful German Language” does contain some errors, one of which you might spot in the sentence above. I’ve never gotten around to writing about them, though, because I expect such a piece would be tedious to write and equally tedious to read.

    Far from being awful, this sentence structure is actually useful in German because it saves you from choppy sentences broken up by relative pronouns and commas. So although I found it a little irritating at first, I’ve come to appreciate it.

  • They Thought They Were Free

    This 1955 book by Milton Mayer, reissued in 2017 by University of Chicago Press with a helpful afterword by Richard Evans, is worth your time if you are interested in human beings.

    Mayer, a Chicago native, worked as a freelance journalist and taught Great Books seminars with Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins (he gets a few mentions in Alex Beam’s excellent survey A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books). Descended from German Jews who had fled to America after the failed revolutions of 1848, he also belonged to the Society of Friends and coined the phrase “Speak truth to power.”

    They Thought They Were Free  is based on a project he undertook in Germany with the support of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (Theodor Adorno et al). He settled in Marburg (called “Kronenberg” in the book) and conducted a series of lengthy interviews with ten former Nazis in the area, hoping to get a detailed sense of how “a typical German of small status” developed into a National Socialist.

    He told them he was a Professor from America who wanted to learn about what life had been like in Germany during the war. His approach was friendly and humble — he arrived at their homes on foot, bringing gifts, and listened sympathetically to whatever they had to say. Sometimes their children played with his. He never told them he was Jewish or that he had access to their denazification records, which would have been a bit of a conversation killer. Surprisingly, he didn’t speak much German and believed this to be an advantage: if his subjects could feel they were talking down to him, teaching him to say “auf Wiedersehen” and whatnot, they would feel less intimidated and be more likely to speak freely (he did bring along an interpreter).

    The resulting book has compelling personal stories and valuable insights. It is definitely worth reading. However, it also gets bogged down in musings on national character that will seem tiresome and cliché to most readers nowadays. I actually lost patience with the second half and didn’t finish it.

    At its best, though, the book offers the kind of individual moral histories that everyone can learn from:

    But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. […] But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

    And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in – your nation, your people – is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

    You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. […] Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department and the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

  • Senta spinnt

    The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra put on an excellent concert performance of Der fliegende Holländer (The  Flying Dutchman) last week. Soprano Melody Moore brought the house down with her powerful singing and her spirited characterization of Senta.

    Speaking as someone with a degree in Complaining About Wagner, I must admit I really like this opera. It’s probably my favorite Wagner opera — and yes, I know that means I’ll never win the Wagner Snob of the Year award, but that’s OK. Superfans who attain enlightenment by boring themselves to death at Tristan und Isolde or Parsifal are welcome to it.

    One line jumped out at me from the spinning scene (go to 46:00 if it doesn’t take you straight there):

    Mary, who’s trying to keep the girls on task, says to Senta:

    Du böses Kind! Wenn du nicht spinnst,
    vom Schatz du kein Geschenk gewinnst.

    (You naughty girl, if you don’t spin,
    you’ll get no gift from your sweetheart. )

    It’s mildly amusing because in modern colloquial German, if someone “spins” it means they’re crazy. Du spinnst = you spin = you’re nuts! (Whereas in Wagner’s time a crazy person was “toll” but nowadays that would mean they’re cool.)

    I wondered how the best free machine translator, namely DeepL, would handle this. Behold:

    If you’re not crazy, from the treasure you don’t win a gift.

    And Google Translate says: If you are not crazy, from the treasure you win no gift. (wrong and awkward)

    This is a reasonable error for MT to make because it’s entirely possible that every single time it’s encountered “du spinnst” in a text, “you’re crazy” has been the correct translation. But it’s still wrong. I tried giving it some more context in case it had been programmed to recognize names from classic literature:

    MARY (to Senta): You evil child! If you are not crazy, from the treasure you don’t win a gift.

    No luck. You’ve probably also noticed the other big error here: “Schatz” does mean “treasure” but in this context it means “sweetheart.” In a similar vein, DeepL translates “I love my sweetie pie” as “Ich liebe meinen süßen Kuchen” (with “süße Torte” and “süße Pastete” as equally clueless alternatives).

    It’s interesting to consider how much effort you, as a human, have to expend to understand what is going on in this scene and determine what the correct translation of “du spinnst” would be — practically none. Whereas the best MT, despite its speed, has no idea what a spinning wheel is, no concept of how and why words acquire new meanings over time, and no ability to think, “Is this a proverb? Is it from a fairy tale? An opera? I’d better check.”

    And actually, you might come out of The Flying Dutchman thinking Senta’s a little crazy. But DeepL doesn’t think at all.

  • Pro tip: “der angelsächsische Raum”

    Today I wrote an email in German to tell someone the topic of their translation was practically unknown in the English-speaking world, so we needed to add a little explanation to the text. I wrote “im angelsächsischen Raum” for “in the English-speaking world” and then, as I often do, I second-guessed myself and Googled it to make sure it wasn’t a phrase I had just imagined or misremembered.

    It does mean what I thought it meant, but — and here’s why I’m writing this blog post for you — some of the translations on the Linguee page are not quite right:

    Neben der konsequenten Fortführung der bisherigen Strategie für Asien erweiterte PWM erfolgreich das Booking-Center-Angebot im angelsächsischen Raum. strategy for Asia, PWM successfully expanded the range of services offered by the booking center in the Anglo-Saxon area.
    Geschäfte vorantreiben, wobei insbesondere eine stärkere Präsenz im angelsächsischen Raum ganz oben auf unserer Agenda steht. internationalization of our businesses, with particular emphasis on strengthening our presence within the Anglo-Saxon markets.
    Sachwert- und Ertragswertverfahren – angeboten, wie auch das Residualverfahren und die angelsächsichen Methoden – Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) und Monte Carlo Methode – zur Ermittlung des Open Market Value (OMV). Both the – “Classic German Method” and the Anglo-Saxon Method – Discounted Cash Flow (DCF), as also the Monte Carlo Method for establishing the Open Market Value (OMV) can be provided.

    Although we sometimes use “Anglo-Saxon” in a colloquial way (e.g. WASPs or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), these days, in English, it’s usually a specific and rather academic term referring to people who shaped the culture and government of England from ca. 500-1066.  You can recognize Anglo-Saxons by their distinctive long hair and mustaches:

    So the “Anglo-Saxon area” mentioned above should extend from Northumbria down to Sussex. An “Anglo-Saxon market” sounds like a place where you go to purchase barley and rough woolen tunics, and if your accountant is using the “Anglo-Saxon method” of discounted cash flow she’s probably a very old lady with a name like Æthelthryth and you should fire her and hire someone who knows how to use a computer.

    The disambiguation page for “Anglo-Saxon” on Wikipedia does show the term “Anglo-Saxon world,” but if you click on it, you get redirected to “Anglosphere.”

    Which brings us to today’s translation tip, which is that if you run across “der angelsächsische Raum,” you should translate it as “the English-speaking world,” “English-speaking countries” or, if you like, “the Anglosphere,” but not “the Anglo-Saxon area.”

    In conclusion, please enjoy this link to Old-English Wikipedia. You’re welcome.

  • Watch out for strange women in forests (Waldgespräch)

    Poor old Robert Schumann. Was I too hard on him in a previous post? He wrote a lot of good stuff, including a fine setting of Eichendorff’s Waldgespräch:

    Waldgespräch means “forest conversation.” But I just did my own translation and I’d like to call it…

    Waldgespräch Meeting in a forest
    Es ist schon spät, es wird schon kalt,

    Was reit’st Du einsam durch den Wald?

    Der Wald ist lang, Du bist allein,

    Du schöne Braut! Ich führ dich heim!

    		 The hour is late, the air grows cold,

    Why ride forsaken through the wood?

    The wood is long, thou art alone,

    O lovely maid, I’ll lead thee home!
    “Groß ist der Männer Trug und List,

    Vor Schmerz mein Herz gebrochen ist,

    Wohl irrt das Waldhorn her und hin,

    O flieh! Du weißt nicht, wer ich bin.”

    		 “False and deceitful are all men,

    My heart is rent with bitter pain,

    The hunting horn has led thee astray,

    O flee! Thou knowest not my name.”
    So reich geschmückt ist Roß und Weib,

    So wunderschön der junge Leib,

    Jetzt kenn ich Dich – Gott steh’ mir bei!

    Du bist die Hexe Loreley.

    		 So richly adorned are lady and steed,

    So beautiful and young indeed,

    I know thee now – God be my guide!

    The witch thou art, the Loreley.
    “Du kennst mich wohl – von hohem Stein,

    Schaut still mein Schloß tief in den Rhein.

    Es ist schon spät, es wird schon kalt,

    Kommst nimmermehr aus diesem Wald!”

    		 “Thou know’st me well – my silent keep

    Looks down into the Rhine so deep.

    The hour is late, the air grows cold,

    Shalt never leave this evil wood!”

    I could spend paragraphs justifying my choices here, but wouldn’t that be dull? Instead, put your quibbles in the comment box. I know there are some. Every literary translation walks around with a horde of quibbles carrying its train.

    On the plus side, this English version should fit the music quite well. The first line of stanza 3 is a little awkward but you can make it work.

    In conclusion, here’s an unusual and very pleasant recording of Schumann Lieder where a cello takes the singer’s part. This song starts at 24:29.

     

  • American girls won’t get up early to shine your shoes

    Deutsch für Amerikaner, my mom’s old German textbook (copyright 1960) is an interesting social-history artifact. Here’s a passage where a university student from Germany discusses the American family he’s staying with. (All these people are fictional of course, but intended to be representative of their time and place.)

    WHO IS HEAD OF THE HOUSEHOLD?

    The day before yesterday Prof. Welliver, who is an enthusiastic hunter, took a day off to go pheasant hunting. A neighbor who also hunts came at 6:30 in the morning to pick him up. At six he was in the kitchen frying himself a couple of eggs for breakfast. I was also up early doing a term paper and he invited me to have breakfast with him. I was surprised that neither Mrs. Welliver nor one of his daughters had gotten up to help him.

    He must have read my thoughts because he said: “Yes, my wife and daughters don’t think much of hunting and they think my enthusiasm for hunting is a bit queer.

    So I can’t expect that they’ll get up at 5:30 in the morning. Where you’re from in Germany a professor can afford to hire a maid. But I can’t do that. Our American girls and women would rather work in factories and offices than in other people’s houses. That’s understandable. And then, of course, maids can charge so much money that a university professor can’t afford to keep one.”

    Then I asked him: “May I ask a personal question?”

    “Shoot!” he laughed.

    “I can imagine your wife is tired,” I said, “but why did neither of your two daughters get up to make you breakfast?”

    Prof. Welliver laughed: “They are also too tired. The life of an American girl in high school is more strenuous than you think.”

    I looked at him with astonishment, because I knew that high school students here did not work nearly as hard as we do. He said his daughters were very popular and that meant they had to be at everything. Then Prof. Welliver saw that I had nothing left on my plate. “More toast, Karl, another egg?” Before I could answer, he had already put the bread in the toaster and cracked an egg into the pan. How friendly and affectionate it sounds when this professor with gray hair who specializes in the Reformation calls me Karl! And what a charming host he is! On such occasions I always feel something of the warm-heartedness and true humanity that could only have developed in democratic America.

    And who is Prof. Welliver’s hunting partner? A dean? A colleague? An academic? Not at all! The neighbor is the manager of a grocery store in the center of our little university town. But the two men called each other by their first names, as I noticed when the professor got into the gleaming car.

    Kolonialwarengeschäft!

    I had offered to wash the dishes. How quickly one gets used to the American way of life! In Germany I would not have dared to offer a professor my help in his house, because it would have embarrassed him even if he didn’t have a maid. The thing about the maid is not so tragic, by the way. Mrs. Welliver does not have a maid but she has a refrigerator, a freezer, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine with automatic dryer, an electric dishwasher, in other words everything that American technology has to offer the housewife.

    However, it’s not the case that she has more freedom than a German housewife. She has many social duties. School, church, clubs and the social lives of her two daughters fill her days and some of her evenings.

    I didn’t really like the fact that neither of the two girls had gotten up to help their father. And that they made fun of his hunting seemed to me disrespectful, considering their young age. This lack of paternal authority, or male authority in general, bothers me as a German especially. I know the absolute authority of the man, as was considered a given in Germany – especially Germany before the First World War – is not ideal. I myself know German families where the daughter cleans the father’s and brothers’ shoes on Sunday mornings while the “men” are still peacefully sleeping.

    As a cultural critic, when I see something like that, I shake my head sadly. I do the same when I see Prof. Welliver’s daughters with their “boy friends” here in the house.

    These visits by the “boy friends” are arranged through long telephone conversations. When the girls speak to their young men, neither the professor nor Mrs. Welliver nor I can get on the phone, because these conversations go on for hours. They giggle, and the most trivial things are discussed earnestly, to the point where you could think these girls were not entirely normal. But that’s not true. That’s just how they talk with their young friends. When I talk to them, all at once they become different people, very mature, very intelligent and full of interest in anything that is worth knowing.

    If the “dates” come into the house, they have no consideration for anybody. The young people laugh and scream and dance to loud music from the record player. The fact that their father is sitting in his office upstairs working on one of his publications obviously does not bother them at all and their father doesn’t say anything. I always expect the door to his office to fly open and for him to demand quiet with a thundering voice. But that is a German expectation. The office door opens, but the professor just goes down to greet his young guests and tell them “Have a good time!”

    But there’s one more thing I should mention. The girls’ long telephone conversations prevent me from using the phone, but they’re useful to me nonetheless. I have to listen, because the phone is at the foot of the stairs near my room. This way I can expand my American vocabulary and my list of untranslatable words. But I still don’t know why a certain Bill is “a card,” a certain Joe is “a square,” a certain Bob is “a doll,” and a certain Hank is “a creep”.