AMD3 More German Poetry

Last semester, we read, and listened to, “Der Tod und das Mädchen.” A few weeks ago we did the same for “Erlkoenig,” a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, another which Franz Schubert set to music. These activities were a refreshing change of pace for me, and I enjoyed the infusion of classical music and literature into class. For this AMD, I read another poem by Goethe, who I discovered is surprisingly well known (My iphone even autocorrected a botched spelling of his name earlier today).

The poem I read is called “Found.” First, I read the poem once in English, and then waited for a little while, and did some other things. I came back and read the poem in German, and I tried to translate as little as possible, mostly just nouns such as Sinn (intention), Schatten (shade), Sterne (stars), Ort (spot), and Würzeln (roots). I recognized the usage of the words “ging” and “sah,” the narrative past constructions of gehen and sehen, which we saw occasionally in “Oh Wie Schon ist Panama?” Another aspect of the poem that struck me was the use of the word brechen, which generally translates to “to break.” In this poem, which is about a man who sees a flower in the woods, and replants it in his own garden, brechen and gebrochen are translated to “pick” and “picked.” This reiterates the point that words, especially in literature, do not always translate perfectly from one language to another.

It wasn’t a very long poem, but for some reason I had trouble finding very much in the way of German poetry online, except for “Erlkoenig” which was all over the place. I would be all for having more classical work in class; it’s an interesting way to engage in the language.