Translation practice

Today you will receive a small excerpt in English to practice your translation skills.Tomorrow, we will send the answer keys and some comments about this text. Try to do the translation with your own words before consulting the dictionary.

“In winter on the Zaragoza front, except at night, when a surprise attack was always conceivable, nobody bothered about the enemy. They were merely remote black insects whom one occasionally glimpsed hopping to and fro. The prime concern of both sides was essaying to keep warm. The things one normally associates with the horrors of war seldom raised their ugly heads. Up in the hills it was simply the mingled boredom and discomfort of stationary warfare. A life as uneventful as a city clerk's, and almost as regular. Atop each hill, knots of ragged, grimy men shivering round their flag. And all day and night, the senseless bullets and shells wandering across the empty valleys and only by some fluke getting home on a human body. I would gaze round the wintry landscape marveling at the futility, the inconclusiveness of such a kind of war. Could you forget that every mountain-top was occupied by troops and thus littered with tin cans and crusted with dung, the scenery was stupendous.”

George Orwell. Homage to Catalonia. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1975, pp. 25-26.