March Books 14) The Castle, by Franz Kafka

[nwhyte]

Nirgends noch hatte K. Amt und Leben so verflochten gesehen wie hier, so verflochten, daß es manchmal scheinen konnte, Amt und Leben hätten ihre Plätze gewechselt.Nowhere else had K. ever seen one's official position and one's life so intertwined as they were here, so intertwined that it sometimes seemed as though office and life had switched

Comments

[redfiona99]

>>(Note also how Amt is translated two different ways in the quote above, neither very graceful.)<< That's one of the reasons I get very annoyed when English speakers say that German isn't a complex language.

[nwhyte]

Good lord, I must say that is practically the least well-founded complaint I can imagine making about a language with three genders, four cases, arbitrarily long compound nouns and rigid but numerous rules about word order!!!!