Die Obstdiebin / The Fruit Thief
Novel by Peter Handke
I’ve been reading this novel slowly, a few pages a day, hungry for the complex syntax and Handke’s phenomenological observations. Today I came to the sentence below, complex enough that I had to read it several times to understand how the words fit into the grammatical structure. I smiled when I figured it out and thought I would translate it. My translation, for various reasons, is less precisely complex.
Der Jahreszeit, der hochsommerlichen, entsprachen am ehesten, in der Stunde jetzt vor dem Sonnenuntergang, mit dem das Land als ganzes gelb färbenden Licht, die paar wie gedünten hohen Wolkenfelder und dahinter das allumspannende Blau des Himmels, auf den ersten Blick noch zart und vertraut, im Aufschauen aber immer unbekannter anmutend, dabei an etwas erinnernd, nur daß die Erinnerung dann ausblieb und einen, mich, uns im Stich ließ, wie auch dieser blaue Himmel einen zunehmend im Stich ließ, beunruhigender als gleichwelches Drohen.
Befitting the season—high summer—in the hour now before sundown, with yellow light tinting the entire countryside, several dune-like high cloudbanks and behind them the infinite blue of the sky, on first sight tender and familiar, but looking upward increasingly unfamiliar, reminiscent of something, but the memory failed to materialize and left one, me, us bereft, as this blue sky also left one increasingly forsaken, more unsettling than any threat.
THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY 
is the fruit thief a man or a woman?
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the narrator is a man traveling north from Paris on a local train. the fruit thief is a woman, as is apparent in the German: Die Obstdiebin
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and also in the spanish translation which i may buy tho it’s pricey. so this is a work not yet translated into english? is anyone working on an english translation? by the way there is also an Italian translation but again 18 buck for postage is a drag. … i ll respond to handke s wonderful linguistics another time.
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right, no english translation yet, although Seagull Books may have one in the works
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