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Tamara asked this question about The Magic Mountain:
I have the H.T. Lowe-Porter translation (in English). however, when we finally get to the conversation in the "Walpurgis Night" chapter, it is all in French. does anyone know why this is, and could anyone summarize what is said?
Thomas Nelson I used Google Translate to convert the French to English. What follow here is that effort. It is all dialog and you can infer who is talking. What fol…moreI used Google Translate to convert the French to English. What follow here is that effort. It is all dialog and you can infer who is talking. What follows is not the entirety, just the latter portion.

Oh, love is nothing, if it is not madness, something insane, forbidden and an adventure in evil. Otherwise, it is a pleasant banality, good for making quiet little songs in the plains. But as for what I recognized you and that I recognized my love for you - yes, it is true, I already knew you, formerly, you and your wonderfully oblique eyes and your mouth and your voice, with whom you speak once, when I was a collegian, I asked for your pencil, to finally make your worldly acquaintance, because I loved you irreparably, and it is of the, without doubt, it is of my old love for you, that these marks remain to me that Behrens has found in my body. and who are indignant that formerly I was sick too. I love you, I have loved you all the time, because you are the Toi of my life, my dream, my fate, my desire, my eternal desire Let's go! If your preceptors saw you I would not care, I do not care about all these Carducci and the Eloquent Republic and human progress in time, because I love you! Little bourgeois! Nice bourgeois has the little wet spot. Is it true that you love me so much? Oh, love, you know - Body, love, death, these three are one. For the body is sickness and voluptuousness, and it is he who makes death, yes, they are both carnal, love and death, and here is their terror and their great magic! But death, you understand, is on the one hand an ill-fated, impudent thing, which makes one blush with shame; and, on the other hand, it is a very solemn and very majestic power-much higher than the laughing life, the winner of money, and stuffing its paunch-much more venerable than the progress which gossiped by the times. history and nobility and piety and the eternal and the coronation that makes us take the hat off and walk on tiptoe. And so, too, the body, and the love of the cops, are an indecent and angry affair, and the body blushes and palaces on its surface from fear and shame of itself. But also he is a great adorable glory, a miraculous image of organic life, holy blessedness of form and beauty, and love for him, for the human body, it is likewise an extremely humanitarian interest and a power more than all the pedagogy in the world! Oh, enchanting organic beauty that is not composed of oil or stone dye, but of living and corrupt material, full of the febrile secret of life and decay! Look at the marvelous symmetry of the human edifice, the blooming shoulders and hips and nipples on both sides of the chest, and the odds arranged in pairs, and the belly button at the milleus in the softness of the belly, and the sex dark between the thighs! Look at the shoulder blades moving under the silky skin of the back, and the echin which descends to the double luxuriance and fresh buttocks, and large brook vases and nerves that pass from the trunk to the branches by the arches, and as the structure arms correspond to that of the legs. Oh, the sweet regencies of the inner joint of the elbow and hock, with their abundance of organic delicacies under their cushions! What an immense feast to caress them, these delicious places of the human body! Feast to die without complaint after! Yes, my god, let me smell the skin of your kneecap, under which the ingenious joint capsule secretes its slippery oil! Let me touch my mouth with the Arteria femoralis, which beats on the forehead of your thigh and divides lower in the two arteries of the tibia! Let me feel the exhalation of your pores and tater your down, human image of water and anatomy of the tomb, and let me perish, my lips auxtiennes! You are indeed a gallant who knows how to solicit in a deep manner, to the German. Farewell, my Prince Carnival! You will have a bad line of fever tonight, I predict you. Do not forget to give me back my pencil.(less)
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The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
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