Need a translation from German...

UnknownSaint

This should be pretty quick. Babelfish gives me gibberish. It's not super critical, just curious.

Leben hab ich gelernt, fristet mir Götter die Zeit.

Thanks!

Dark Moon

I learned to live as gods graced me with the time.

I added the "as" so it would sound better, but the actual German reads like a verse out of a poem.

A more direct translation would be "Living I did learn, gods graced me with the time."

UnknownSaint

Well it IS a verse from a poem, so that makes sense. Thanks DM!

Grobian

Could you maybe give some context? Because I would translate it as "Living I learned, now, gods, give me the time!"

Ok, it's Goethe and there's not really context as it's from a collection of short verses. Still, I'm going with my translation instead of Dark Moon's. "fristet" is an imperative.

evilthecat

i'm with grobian on this one.

the "fristet" seems to imply a command as the speaker hasn't received the time.
had it been "fristen" then it would indicate that the gods had given him time.

the first sentence would seem to mess the former interpretation up though, so context is required.

Grobian

I found it on Project Gutenberg, but, like I said in my edit, there is no context: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/7vepi10.txt

/another edit: I asked some more Germans and they agreed with my translation. Someone bilingual came up with "I have learned (how) to live, now grant me time, ye gods" which sounds way better.