Found this in the school hallways. I don’t know German
That's the last verse of Goethe's Erlkönig. There's a translation here: https://dererlkonig.wordpress.com/translations/ (actually several translations because translating poetry is hard)
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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Thanks so much for this!!
There is also a cool 4.5 minute animated movie using Schubert's musical setting of the poem. The translation in the subtitles isn't so good though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS91p-vmSf0
The Wikipedia article about the poem looks good and has a literal translation:
I'm triggered by the son sitting behind the father.
man, that's triggering some instense school PTSD flashbacks.
It is a piece of Goethe's "Erlkönig":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlk%C3%B6nig
Edit: should be noted that whoever wrote it, has either a very very bad handwriting, or made some typos
Whoever wrote this was probably still in school and I would guess in a North American one because of the cursive they wrote in. I think they also copied the text, badly, and that explains the mistakes.
the type of cursive is actually the same I learned in germany as a kid
When and where did you go to school? That capital A that looks more like the lowercase one I've only ever seen from people from North America.
Another European here to chime in that l also learned to write capital As like that in cursive.
The rs, fs and ts don't look like how we were taught though.
Correct, we live in the U.S.
They're spelling mistakes when not typed.
Fun fact: if you have a smartphone, Google Translate is free and has a camera mode. Wife and I use it all the time when captions aren’t translated (we watch a bit of foreign media).
I have an iPhone, it’s not just on Android.
