I think this is pretty accurate. Let me know if I have made any mistakes. (I'm glad it only had the one phrase in German.)


WO SIND DIE ELEFANTEN?
As recorded by Leon Rosselson on “Wo sind die Elefanten?” (1991)

East Berlin in February, twenty degrees below:
Hurrying figures hunched against the darkness and the snow,
And I watched them file down Karl Marx Alley queuing at the light,
So they can cross the road and fade into the night.
If I could only find the German I once learned from the BBC,
I could ask them: are they happy? Are they free?
But only one phrase lingers on from lesson three.
It remains in my brain like a lonely refrain, like a song that has no ending and is sending me insane:

And I say: Wo sind die Elefanten? Faces turn and stare.
The question sparks no answer as it dies upon the air.
Wo sind die Elefanten? No one wants to know,
Or dares disturb the silence of the snow,
And I thought I knew the answer long ago.

The young man wears a party badge, a clenched fist in his head,
And his speech marks out the future, and for him the future’s red,
And I watch him as he builds a wall to keep the shadows out
From an ordered world that has no room for doubt.
Does he believe the chants he marches to, the slogans and the lies?
Or does he calculate that that’s the way to rise?
And is that certainty he wears, a disguise?
And again in my brain there’s this lonely refrain like a song that has no ending and is sending me insane,

And I say: Wo sind die Elefanten? What’s the latest news?
Are they doing tricks in circuses or locked in concrete zoos?
Wo sind die Elefanten? He doesn’t seem to know,
Or won’t disturb the silence of the snow,
And I thought I knew the answer long ago.

Now the Berlin wall is crumbled like sand castles in the sea,
And there’s been a revolution where it wasn’t meant to be,
And I’ve watched the crowds on TV as if waking in the dawn.
They see the old world dead, the new world not yet born,
And are they bright with hopes of videos and dish-washing machines,
Big macs, cosmetics, polo magazines,
And Dallas on their television screens?
And I hear: ev’rywhere cash is king; drop your share in the corridors of choices; are there voices still that dare to ask it?

Wo sind die Elefanten? Nomads roaming free,
Once they ruled the continents from the mountains to the sea.
Wo sind die Elefanten? No one wants to know,
Or cares to break the silence of the snow,
And I thought I knew the answer long ago.

Once elephants roved Hampstead Heath; it’s still in my mind’s eye.
I see them silhouetted against the eastern sky
With their trunks raised up in triumph to salute the rising sun,
And then one day I woke and they were gone—
Those strange fantastic creatures with their gentle caring ways,
Too large to fit the landscape of these days,
Where nothing is preserved unless it pays;
But the poor are still poor and there’s greed and there’s war and the muck is junk-house squalor that the dollar cannot cure.

So tell me: Wo sind die Elefanten? Weeping for their dead,
Circulating sadly round the dried-up river bed.
Wo sind die Elefanten? Vanished with the snow.
Were they just a dream of long ago?
A story for a child I used to know?