He wasn't particularly funny,
and he wasn't very well built.
He didn't wear fancy stuff.
He wasn't athletic nor loud.
Didn't stand out from the crowd.
And the boys from his class
just didn't understand:
Because nevertheless the girls were attracted to him
like moths to the light.
He was the best in Latin,
the very best in Latin.
The way he conjugated verbs,
(and) Declined substantives –
Only he could do that ...
He was as exact as a machine.
He even knew when he slept
To a, ab, e, ex, de, cum, sine
and pro and prae follows the ablative case.
He quoted entire fables,
mastered the vocabulary
and was always wide awake.
And the girls in his class
would get weak in numbers.1
He was the best in Latin.
He only got As or Bs.
And when he sang a lament
from Horaz or from Ovid,
the girls would start crying ...
But then he got his latinum.2
His life took a nasty turn.
Because of that in school he was
completely at his Latin's end.3
He was the best in Latin.
He was the expert among laities ...
1. In English it's more appropriate to say 'weak in their knees'. Point is, they fawn at him.2. The Latinum is a certificate that shows you had 5 years of Latin lessons in school. It is needed for some fields of study on universities (e.g. for theology or classical literature).3. (This is the most difficult thing to translate ever) The saying 'I am at my wit's end' is literally told 'I am at my end with my Latin' in German, and that's the entire joke of this song.