Today's posts

Today’s poem is my translation of Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig”.  It is a haunting tale in which much is left to the imagination of the reader. Where is the father riding to? Why is he riding at night? How old is the child? Where is the child’s mother? Our imagination has to supply all this information and this makes the poem even more mysterious and worrying.

Goethe used rhyming couplets and I have done my best to do the same. A ballad that does not rhyme is not a ballad.

 

Dorigen’s story continues with Part 3, ‘The Garden’.