Need some assistance...

...from German speakers.

Can someone be so kind as to give me a decent translation or at least an accurate summarization of the following text?

I have the text, but Google doesn't give me what I need from this...in fact, it confused me somewhat.  I need someone who feels the language.

Not a native speaker, but I know a bit and with a little googling I get something like this:

"He first entered the career of a publisher with the quickly bankrupted finincial-economic magazine "Green pages"; the desctruction of [his?] health occured later when he was publisher of the "Viennese general newspaper", which he abandoned on 21 Octobre 1888 as a broken man and after a loss of close to a half million [currency not specified]."

Thanks...

Does this mean his first publishing venture went bankrupt and later while pubishing another paper or periodical, it failed along with his health and fortune?

"Mein Deutsch ist schlimm."  Mine is nonexitent. :-D

Google translate is retarded.

I think that's what it means, yes. I'm not entirely sure if the second paper actually went bankrupt. "Zurucklegte" sounds to me like "giving back". So maybe he just gave up his role in the enterprise.

Thanks.  That was my original interpretation, but, it comes as a revelation to me, so I wanted to make sure I was getting the correct sense.

Being monolingual is a drag.

@L.I. Mark: Yes, that's why Batgirl is asking her friends and others here, rather than using some nonsense crutch that is a small step above dialing up Jackie the Jokeman.

The superiority of asking friends and interested parties over using google has been extensively demonstrated on this discussion:

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/to-those-that-mock-you-with-quotwhy-couldnt-you-googles-thatquot

Thank you.

It's from a German magazine, "Deutsches Wochenschach und Berliner Schachzeitung."  I want to know for an article I'm preparing.

he failed twice in a row, the first time due to not closer indicated reasons and the second time he his health got crushed while he failed. Its nothing said about the reciprocity of both, his poor health and his failure as entrepreneur. As a german native speaker I have to say these german sentences aren't fully correct or at least highly discussable.  

Well, Google translates "Grüne Blätter" not as "Green Pages" but as "Green Leaves" which does sound a bit more poetic.  Of course, I'll just call it "Grüne Blätter."

@Mell-Ann: That is interesting!  Can you please elaborate on your concern a bit?  I was thinking that the text may have been Swiss or some Austrian dialect, but Batgirl said it was from a Berlin-based periodical (Berliner Chess Newspaper), and it has to be at the oldest from the late 19th century but probably later than that, based on the typeface.

Fascinating.  Why would a Berlin-published article have non-standard German? 

Thanks Mel Ann.  Do you mean that his health and the failure of his publications aren't being connected by the author of this article?

The article, as I noted above, came from a 19th century German chess periodical.

Well, I've got to hang it up for a while.  Thanks for the "bump" Mark.

If anyone thinks they can refine this passage, I will appreciate it.  But I probably won't respond until tomorrow.

        19th century style journalism?

The point here is that 'zurücklegen' can mean several things, the mostly used translation would probably be to put something back, but the author wanted to say that he abandoned which means to give up and translated 'aufgeben'. He abandoned his work as a editor. (=Er gab seine Arbeit als Herausgeber auf). The wrong use of 'zurücklegen' makes it so complicated. But beside that the grammar is highly sophisticated and shows off educational writing.

p.s. Blätter = pages and leaves :P 

"Blatt" is colloquial for a newspaper.

It does sound as though the failure of the second mentioned nespaper was the cause of the failure of his health. It says "as publisher of the paper"; I think that if there had been no causal effect the author would have said "during" ("während") instead of "as" ("als"). It's arguable, but the feeling that comes across on reading it is that the failure of the paper was responsible for his physical collapse.

Re style: it's not colloquial, just dated (late 1800s up to 1930 at a guess?). There's a full stop where there should be a comma in line 4 after "er", but that's probably just a typo; otherwise it's perfectly correctly written.

(My qualifications: bilingual, author (mainly in German), living and working in Berlin for 30 years).

Exactly. The feeling comes across but its not mentioned specifically.

Edit to classify:I'd bet there was a causal effect.  

"He began his journalism career with the rapidly misfortunate financial newspaper Green Pages;  a breakdown of his health was brought on later, when he was publisher of Vienna General News.  [He was?] a broken man and after a loss of nearly half a million, the 21st October 1888, back where he started." 

There seems to be a typographic error; the second sentence doesn't quite parse and is missing an initial capital.