I Sing Goodnight

Over the past week, the Orsa Youth Choir from Sweden was here in town. I spent a bit of time with them over the course of a few days, and one night they sang this lovely song. I posted it on Youtube and wanted to find the history behind the song. I asked one of the choir members if I had the translation right. She said that she translated it on the fly and that it was correct.

Turning to Google Translate, I put in the english text, and translated it to Swedish. Then I took the “lilla askling” from the first line, which means “little darling”, and “sjunger godnatt” which means “good night” and put that into Google. It came up with a song entitled “Jag sjunger god natt” which means “I Sing Goodnight.”

Now that I had the title, I could Google search “Jag sjunger god natt”. This led me to a couple of youtube videos, as well as a couple of websites that had the lyrics to this song. On one of these websites, http://trebarnslandet.se/?p=3070, Google offered to translate the Swedish text to English. I took them up on their offer and the result is below.

BUT YOU MUST LISTEN TO THE YOUTUBE VIDEO FIRST!! It is a lovely touching song.

goodnight

 

You can see the original text on the left, and the translated text on the right. Now keep in mind this is a goodnight lullaby. But as you get to the second chorus,.. I broke out laughing! Read the text closly.

Now I couldn’t stop laughing to find out more about the original source, which says it’s an “American Melody” or on another website an “American Folksong.”

 

 

0saves
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Leave a reply