10 Misc Laff: Goethe's "Erlkönig"

Goethe's "Erlkönig" (1782) is a classic of weird poetry. It tells a story about a father riding through the night with his child. The child believes he is being lured away by the supernatural Erlking. The poem has two obvious readings: on one, the child is seeing a real supernatural presence; on another, he may just be sick, fevered, frightened, and dying while the father keeps explaining everything away as fog, rustling leaves, and wind. The child is having a visionary experience of spiritual terror, and the father is rationalizing it, and it all drives the poem toward a brutal ending, where the father arrives home to find the child dead in his arms.

English readers know it through Sir Walter Scott's translation, which is more like an English Romantic ballad than a line-by-line rendering of Goethe. Scott gets the speed, drama, and sweep, but he takes liberties with phrasing and tone. He makes the poem sound more like an English border ballad than something filled with dark psychological ambiguity.

When in the 1950s Lafferty was translating from Spanish, French, Italian, German, and other languages, one of the poems he translated was "Erlkönig." If you read Scott and Goethe in an interlinear translation, you will see the liberties Scott takes. Lafferty usually translates line by line. Scott polishes lines into smooth English Romantic convention. We get the “woodland.” He substitutes "clasp'd to his bosom.” He turns "das Kind" into "the infant."

Lafferty tries to follow Goethe's syntax line by line, even when it wrenches English, so we get the bluntness of "das Kind war tot" as "the child was dead." His English sometimes adopts German word order in constructions like "Home he arrive did most tired and a-dread," which is a calque. Lafferty's "And be you not willing, I'll take you the same" is brilliant. It captures the weird, scary Thanatos and Eros in Goethe (the Elf King’s “your beautiful form excites me”) that Scott neuters. That is the weird. I prefer it to Scott's "Or else, silly child, I will drag thee away,” Scott’s version of Goethe’s “And if you’re not willing, then I will use force.”