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.
Correct, we live in the U.S.
They're spelling mistakes when not typed.
