Werden wir uns dort versammeln?

A German translation of “Shall We Gather at the River?”

While thinking about the word Fluss, I got a bit sidetracked when I remembered one of my favorite Protestant religious songs, “Shall We Gather at the River?”, and visited The Cyber Hymnal™ to look it up. One of the lovely things about TCH is its abundance of translations, so I found it interesting that it had no German translation of this particular song.¹ So I decided to make one.

After I assembled my translation, I learned that the tune, “Hanson Place,” is used for a German Christmas carol, “Welchen Jubel, welche Freude,” which might explain why there has (AFAIK) never been a German version of the original words: the tune is already full-up with Yuletide associations.²

Nonetheless, here goes:

1. Werden wir uns dort versammeln,
wo die Engel traten schon?
Werden wir den Fluss erblicken
der fließt vor dem ewigen Thron?

Refrain
Ja, wir treffen uns am Ufer
des wunderschönen, wunderschönen Flusses.
Heilige dort werden sich versammeln
am Fluss vor dem Thron des Herrn.

2. An den Rand des kühlen Flusses,
wo der Gischt uns mild umweht,
preisen wir den Herrn und reden
der Liebe, die ewig besteht.

Refrain

3. Ehe wir den Fluss erreichen,
geben wir die Lasten auf.
Wir erhalten Kleid und Krone
durch des Herren Blut erkauft.

Refrain

4. Wenn der Fluss so freundlich lächelt,
spiegelnd Gottes Angesicht,
alle Heiligen dann singen
über Gnade, die aufhöret nicht.

Refrain

5. Bald erreichen wir das Ufer;
bald ist uns’re Fahrt vorbei.
Preisen wir dann Gottes Güte –
in Frieden, erlöset und frei.

Refrain

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For reference, the main tools I used for constructing this were Google Translate (chiefly for initial brainstorming and back-translation checks), Claude (chiefly to check for errors and brainstorm solutions to them), Reimlexikon der Lyrikecke, Wiktionary in English, OpenThesaurus.de, and my own well-developed sense of what can comfortably be sung.

1. Here’s an archived version of that link, in case the page has issues loading. I was having trouble with it when I posted this.

2. The German carol, meanwhile, seems also to have been translated into Slovak(?) (warning: very annoying ads). Quite a bit of migration for a melody that, to me, is distinctively American almost to the point of sounding provincial.