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“As a black blanket weighed the darkness of the cosmic Night on the lunar surface. No star was at sunless sky, creating illusions of light and Heat. Only in the spacesuit helmets of the two men recessed lights cast light on the abysmal Darkness and let the dead, rugged mountains and moon Crater emerge in ghostly form. With an uncontrolled movement of the hand tossed Dewey Copeland, the Sonarskop away. The low gravity the moon saw to it that the sonar unit has many serious Meters through the vacuum and flew somewhere outside the Beam of the headlights fell silently to the ground. “Oh, damn it,” he cursed bitterly. “What the yet all that nonsense? “”
And so begins Das Andromeda-Rätsel (The Andromeda Mystery), the first of the six German-only Space: 1999 novels, as translated by Google.
It wouldn’t be too difficult to revise that into better English, but there’s some stuff through the book that’s difficult to make sense of without knowing even rudimentary German.
So… sprechen sie deutsch, anybody? Would it be wildliy inappropriate to suggest a group translation/editing project? Or is there any chance of an official translation being done some day?
that’s was actually how I did my initial read through of the six novels before I made my Mondstation 1999 website.
It was near enough that I could understand the novels, but required mental gymnastics to really get into them.
For the pages that I did post, I cleaned up the translation a [u]lot[/u], used the LEO english/german dictionary quite a bit too, and smoothed over pieces that still just wouldn’t work out quite right. It was very slow going, so I hadn’t gotten around to cleaning up enough of my additional pages to make it post-worthy on my site.
here’s what I came up with for those first 3 paragraphs:Like a black cover, the darkness of the cosmic night
rested on the lunar surface. No stars were in the sunless
sky to create illusions of light and warmth. Only the
inset headlights in both of the men’s space suit helmets
threw light into the abyss-deep darkness and let the
dead, ragged moon mountains and craters emerge in a
spectral appearance.
With an unchecked arm swing, Dewey Copeland
hurled the sonarscope away from himself. The small
gravitational force of the Moon ensured that the heavy
sonar equipment flew many meters through the vacuum
and fell silently to the soil somewhere outside of the
beams of their headlights.
“Oh, damn it all!” he swore bitterly. “What’s all this
nonsense for?”I remember, way back at the beginning, I asked Mateo if he had thought of getting the rights to these novels and finally publishing them in English. Alas it was not to be, the novels don’t fit into the Powysverse timeline so we miss out. I still think it would be a nice sideline, maybe it could be stories of the alternate Alpha… Hint, hint. 🙂
[b]Enik1138 wrote:[/b]
[quote]I agree. I’d love to see English editions of those German books.[/quote]Same here. Like the Charlton comics and the British annuals, the German books are windows into lost worlds.
Tex
(I’d pay serious money to have them sitting on my Gerry Anderson shelf)
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