Benjamin McAvoy-Bickford

on translating Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Der Erlkönig” has become one of Goethe’s most famous poems because it lends itself well to musical settings, of which one by Franz Schubert has become the most well-known. However, its long history of musical settings stretches from the first setting, by the actress, musician, and singer Corona Schröter, to Carl Loewe’s popular version, to more recent works such as Marc-André Hamelin’s “Étude No. 8 in B-Flat Minor”, “Erlkönig, after Goethe”. “Earl King” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops also deserves note as a recent, and quite good, musical reworking of this scene. Some of the reasons that this poem calls out to musicians is in its strong sense of rhyme and a continual forward movement of the action, which I attempted to imitate in my English rendering by setting it to one of the meters typical of a ballad.

Furthermore, this suits the history of the poem; Goethe was inspired by the Danish ballad “Elveskud”, also called “Elverskud” and an interpretation of the ballad by Johann Gottfried Herder, the second poem translated here. The title of “Erlkönigs Tochter”, or “Elm-King’s Daughter”, seems more common to me than the alternate title of “Herr Oluf.” The Herder poem has a similar musicality, since it was only lightly adapted from the original source material in the process of translation. I chose to render it in a different meter common among ballads and hymns that better suited the rhythm of its lines.

However, Herder’s translation differs significantly from the source text in one way: It discusses the “Erlkönig”, or alder-king, instead of the elf-king found in the earlier Danish ballad. Although a common approach in English is to simply render “Erlkönig” as erl-king, I found this unsatisfying because it destroys the history and meaning of the original. Three things, to me, are important about the “Erl” in “Erlkönig”: The way it sounds, its meaning of referring to an alder, and how it was supposed to initially refer to elves. I found that a translation of elm-king preserved the sound symbolism, connected it with trees, and resembled the word elf-king.

I also sought to preserve the different but interlinked feels of the two poems. Goethe’s version takes its time elucidating every line, but the poem progresses quickly and straightforwardly to the inevitable end. The lines of Herder do not force the reader to slow down as much, but instead the poem circles back again and again with its chorus. Ultimately, I decided to balance the need to preserve that character with the limits of a literal translation. The translation that I settled on isn’t wholly literal but tries to be literal when possible and strictly abides by line divisions. I also left some archaisms that seemed to want to sneak into the Herder poem stand, which helped preserve its folk-esque origins while giving me additional freedom to stick to my self-imposed metrical scheme.