Checking translation for "Durch meine Hände wird das größte Reich zerfallen"

Question

As I am not a native speaker and I am only a beginner in the language, I just want to be clear that a sentence that I have tried translating on my own (for creative writing purposes) is correctly translated. I would not want anything to be off!

"By my hands will the greatest of empires crumble."

And I dug around for some words, and strung together this:

"Durch meine Hände wird das größte Reich zerfallen."

Would someone please confirm if the sentence structure and the meaning is preserved while being grammatically correct – or if, in fact, there is a better way to write this phrase while preserving the English structure? The story I am working on is inspired by some biblical stories, and has a formal, old English feel to it, as the atmosphere is very important to the story.

Basically, what's important to me is knowing: Would this translation preserve the same implications as the English sentence does? And would it have the same feel of the old, formal and biblical style that I am searching for?

Answer 1

The word order is perfectly fine. The rest depends on what you want your sentence to mean. If the person speaking is a ruler or high official in the empire, it would be more appropriate to write something like:

In meinen Händen wird...

The English phrase appears somewhat poetic through word order alone, because ordinary English sentences never start with an adverbial phrase. In German by contrast, this order is not unusual and does not by itself appear old.

What would make the sentence seem older, is switching from "by my hand" to something like "by my hand's work":

Durch die Arbeit meiner Hände...

"Werk" is an older word for "work" in this sense (it's a modern word for "work" in other contexts). So you can make it more old-fashioned:

Durch das Werk meiner Hände...

Or put the genitive before the word to remove it further from the colloquial language:

Durch meiner Hände Werk...

"Das größte Reich" is also a bit prosaic for the context. "Greatest" just carries connotations that "größte" does not, it's more similar to "largest". To get around this, add some description of what kind of empire it is:

... das größte / herrlichste Reich [der Griechen / unter dem Himmel / etc.] ...

Think of some pompous phrase the empire might use about itself, and use that.

Answer 2

Since the biblical style often is pictorial (bildhaft) I would intensify the verb.

Durch meine Hand wird das größte Reich zu Staub zerfallen.

Durch meine Hand wird das größte aller Reiche zu Staub zerfallen.