Translation - Übersetzung

My somewhat career goal is to be a German-to-English translator.

Realistically speaking, I am probably going to end up working with the EU translating documents and contracts and boring stuff like that.  But while I am still young and free, I can dream about introducing Amercans to German children's fantasy.  You've probably heard of Cornelia Funke and Inkheart, but do you know Kai Meyer?  He is (nearly) as brilliant as she.

I may be violating copyright laws by doing this, but here is the Prologue from Meyer's book Frostfeuer ("Frostfire"), translated by my very own self:

                Where night and north end, over the mist lies the fastness of the Snow Queen

                Nobody had ever charted the range of her icy kingdom.  None went there without a good reason.  And hardly anyone thinks that her palace still stands today, on top of the last and tallest of all cliffs, where snow and ice melt into eternity.

                The Snow Queen is old, but no one knows when she first strode through this ice-cold waste.  From wind and frost and magic she built her palace, and even today the stroms whine for mercy, when they lose their way in the endless halls and corridors.  Snow blows through the winding chambers, without ever seeing the sun.  And even the starlight of the Beginning is enclosed here, in towers of ice crystals and in the deadly eyes of the Queen.

*

                Years ago, which today in fact appears to many to mean only the blink of an eye in the lifespan of the palace, a snow-eagle hunted through the labyrinth of halls and chasms.  It was no ordinary eagle, but that was known only to itself and the one whose hate-filled gaze followed it.  It had stolen what was most dear to her.

                In its talons, covered with glittering hoarfrost, it carried an icicle – a icicle that held the heart of the Snow Queen.

                One so old and cold and clever as the Lady of the Northland does not bear her heart in her chest.  A heart can warm even the blackest soul – sometimes even when the worst would not hav counted on it – and even one such as the Queen would well have felt joy now and then as well, or have it beat more quickly in a rare moment of joy.

                But the Queen had guarded against all that.  In her was only ever cold.  Many ages ago she had plucked the heart from her breast and since then saved it in a chamber in her palace, unmolested by human or magical influences. 

                No one had ever succeeded in casting a glance upon it – until that day, when the snow-eagle flew through a crack in the ice of the fastness, lighted down on the heart of the Snow Queen, and broke an icicle from it.  The pain that this theft brought forth quickly dissipated.  But in that same moment that the icicle split from her heart, she lost the better part of her power.  Even a being such as she had a weak point, and this was, as she now knew, her own icy heart.

                At once she called her cruel servants to her, to capture the eagle and being the icicle back to its place.  And yet she was not to catch the bird.

                With widening wingbeats, it swept through the halls and the labyrinthine ways.  Once it was frightened when its reflection on the bare ice flitted past it, and when an avalanche of snow rampaged through the corridor, and struck at him with crystal talons.

                But at last the eagle found its way back to the crevasse through which it had penetrated into the inner sanctum of the Queen, and with him came the trapped storms out into the freedom of the northland waste.

                Fog billowed around the icy steep face, which melted into edge of the cliff underneath it.  Not even the eagle’s eyes could peer deeper in:  Whatever surged against the crags from beyond the see, it was not an ocean.  Perhaps the end of the world; or a remainder of that which came before it; or ever that which was yet to come, at the parting of all days.

                The snow-eagle hit a snag and glided inland, carried by the unleashed winds which, out of joy for their freedom, carried it over the white waste faster than any other bird before.

                On the ground, the snow-covered roofs of a city that stayed behind clawed at the cliffs of the fortress, crooked, humped, in humility and fear for the the Lady.  The eagle knew that eyes were watching it from under there, hidden in the shadow of thick fur hoods, people who knew what it had done and were thankful for it.

                Quick as an arrow it shot over the frozen polar waste.  Once it thought it heard a terrible cry behind it, half crazed with rage and the thirst for revenge.  But it did not look back at the castle because it feared to see the face of the Queen, high above over the battlements and towers, formed of driving snow and the night-black of the edge of the world.

                It held the icicle of her heart fast in its talons, flew as fast as it could, far, far, far into the land beyond, thither to the south to the Czardom, there, where it could catch its breath and hide both itself and the icicle.

                On the way, the eagle turned back into a woman with blue hair who resumed her journey by sledge.  Next to her stood a suitcase and an umbrella.  She still did not look over her shoulder.  She suspected that she was being followed.

                A long way.

                A peculiar woman.

                And the beginning of a wondrous story.