Rainer Maria Rilke
trans. by Donald Mace Williams
Two POEMS
[My life is not this steeply rearing hour]
My life is not this steeply rearing hour
in which you see me always rushed.
I am a tree before my own background,
I am just one among my many mouths
and that one that is earliest to shut.
I am the rest that makes a silent tether
between two notes which poorly come together:
for one note, death, sharps from below.
But in the dark of rest they meet each other,
both trembling.
And the lovely song stays so.
[I am alive just as the century goes]
I am alive just as the century goes.
One feels the wind off a majestic page,
which God and you and I have written on
and which is turned, high up, in strangers’ hands.
One feels the glow that comes from a young leaf,
on which all things can yet become.
The quiet powers make trial of their breadth
and fix their dark gaze on each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was a major Franco-German poet of the 20th century. His body of work includes one novel and several collections of poetry for which he has been hailed as one of the most significant writers in the German language.
Donald Mace Williams of Canyon, TX, is a former newspaper writer and editor who also taught journalism and English in four universities. Williams received his PhD in Beowulfian prosody from the University of Texas-Austin. He has published two novels and two nonfiction books, and his second poetry book is to be published in October, 2023. He has done metrical translations of one hundred German poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and an iambic translation of Beowulf.