Thanks to Google Translate, you can now enjoy this sublime English version of Eichendorff’s Mondnacht.
It was like heaven
The earth still kissed,
That she is in the glow of flowers
Now dream of him.
The air went through the fields,
The ears of corn were soft,
The forests rustled,
The night was so clear.
And my soul stretched
Far its wings out,
Flew through the silent lands,
As she flew home.
OK, OK, I know Google Translate is not meant to be a literary translation service. Sorry to embarrass you by feeding you stuff that’s above your pay grade, GT. But apart from the fact that machines can’t handle poetry, there are a few noteworthy things about this translation.
Take the “still” in “The earth still kissed”. Our English word “still” has a few different meanings: “He’s still in school.” “I told him not to do that, but he still did it.” “She stood perfectly still.” “The still of the night”. But in German it basically just means “quiet” (as in that last English example). So “it was as if heaven/the sky had silently kissed the earth.” But GT’s “the earth still kissed” does not give us the impression of silence – “still” before a verb either means an action that continues to happen, or an action that someone did “anyway” (“They didn’t like each other but they still kissed.”) Related languages might share words, but their meanings do not overlap 100%, so actual thought needs to go into translating these words. GT gets this to some extent – if you type “Die Kirche war ganz still” it tells you “The church was quiet” – but its judgments are not reliable. I can’t imagine the amount of work programmers have to do to teach translation programs how to make such judgments, even at their current unreliable level.
Another noteworthy thing is that GT doesn’t seem to have mastered the German subjunctive (Konjunktiv II in this case) so it ends up with “As she flew home” rather than “As if it were flying home”.
It also does not know the word “wogen” (undulate, wave) which is what the “ears” were doing, so instead of saying they waved gently, it just tell us they were soft. And someone must have programmed it to translate “Ähren” as “ears of corn”, which is OK in British English where “corn” has a more general meaning, but as an American when I read “The ears of corn were soft” my first thought is that this is a horror story where a blight destroys all the sweetcorn, along with the economy of my home state of Illinois.
In conclusion, if you want to read an excellent translation of this poem by a human being, go here.