translated by Donald Mace Williams

Music: statues’ breath. Perhaps: 
silence of pictures. Language where languages 
end. Oh you, time, 
who upright stand on the path of vanishing hearts. 

Feelings toward whom? Oh you, feelings’ 
transformation to what?– to audible landscape. 
Oh you stranger: music. Oh grown-from-inside-us 
heart space. Our greatest intensity, 
which, overcoming us, presses forth,– 
holy departure: 
where around us the innermost stands 
as the well-known distant, as the other 
side of the air: 
pure, 
gigantic, 
no longer habitable. 

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was a Czech-born poet most of whose work was written in German. Though he anticipated writing his Duino Elegies for many years, as his letters show, he wrote in the meantime a flood of short poems, nearly always in rhyme and meter but as “modern”-sounding as the work of much later poets. 

Donald Mace Williams is a retired newspaper writer and editor with a PhD in Beowulfian prosody. His Rilke translations have run in more than a dozen literary magazines, and his iambic translation of “Beowulf” was published in April 2024. He lives in Austin, Texas.