A 150th Anniversary Reader
Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke: A 150th Anniversary Reader is a selection translated by Donald Mace Williams, with the German and English printed on facing pages. Williams keeps Rilke’s meter rather than flattening it into free verse. His translation of “The Girl Grown Up” won the 2024 Der Hovanessian Translation Prize from the New England Poetry Club.
In Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke: A 150th Anniversary Reader Donald Mace Williams preserves the meter of the original works and offers the original German on the page facing his English translations. Williams’s translation of “The Girl Grown Up,” included in this collection, was selected as the winner of the 2024 Der Hovanessian Translation Prize by the New England Poetry Club.
Other classic Rilke works translated in this volume include: “The Panther,” “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Sonnets to Orpheus, “Autumn Day,” and “Love Song.”
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote many short lyric poems of remarkable beauty and intensity. In honor of Rilke’s 150th birthday, Donald Mace Williams has selected some of the best and brought these works of one of the 20th century’s most influential poets to English-speaking audiences. Williams’s translations capture the eloquence and character of Rilke’s own words while preserving the metrical verse of the original poems, which are presented side-by-side with the English translations.
Category: Poetry
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN (paper): 978-1-965766-34-7
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-965766-35-4
List Price: $18.95
Pages: 142
Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5
Dr. Christophe Fricker, poet and translator, Associate Professor of German and Translation, University of BristolWe always need more Rilke translations to keep this astonishing poet alive. Donald Mace Williams’ work isn’t just another Rilke translation though. It is confident in its own voice, almost hauntingly poignant at times, and of an eloquence that rivals Rilke’s own, without ever simply copying the original poet. It will speak to you and invite you to respond.
Professor George Kalogeris, Suffolk University, Boston, author of Winthropos: Poems"The Girl Grown Up” is an exquisitely beautiful rendering of Rilke’s great poem. It gets both the meditative, calmly unfurling tonal profundity of Rilke’s thought while all the while maintaining the strict exigencies of the form, respectful of both the rhyme and the meter. . . . I love the unforced, utterly natural way that this rendering does what the best translations do: it reads like a poem in English.
Alfred Corn, poet, and translator of Rilke’s The Duino Elegies“We sometimes forget that Rilke was a supreme sonic technician. An admirer reading his short lyrics in German instantly perceives that their composition was guided as much by the requirements of meter and rhyme as by any detachable 'message.' Donald Mace Williams has produced versions of these lyrics that imitate in English the sound patterns of the originals. Because earlier translations of the best-known Rilke poems have already been engraved in our memory, Williams has for the most part selected lyrics less familiar to the non-specialist, adding to the available stock of Rilke poems brought over from German with inventiveness and distinction.”
It is a selection of Rilke’s short lyric poems chosen and translated by Donald Mace Williams for the poet’s 150th birthday. The German originals face the English translations, and Williams preserves the metrical verse of the originals rather than rendering them as free verse — an uncommon choice among modern Rilke translations.
Yes. The German poems are printed side by side with Williams’s English translations.
Williams preserves the meter of the originals rather than translating into free verse, and prints the German alongside. His translation of “The Girl Grown Up” from this collection won the 2024 Der Hovanessian Translation Prize.
Dr. Christophe Fricker, poet and translator, Associate Professor of German and Translation, University of BristolWe always need more Rilke translations to keep this astonishing poet alive. Donald Mace Williams’ work isn’t just another Rilke translation though. It is confident in its own voice, almost hauntingly poignant at times, and of an eloquence that rivals Rilke’s own, without ever simply copying the original poet. It will speak to you and invite you to respond.
Professor George Kalogeris, Suffolk University, Boston, author of Winthropos: Poems"The Girl Grown Up” is an exquisitely beautiful rendering of Rilke’s great poem. It gets both the meditative, calmly unfurling tonal profundity of Rilke’s thought while all the while maintaining the strict exigencies of the form, respectful of both the rhyme and the meter. . . . I love the unforced, utterly natural way that this rendering does what the best translations do: it reads like a poem in English.
Alfred Corn, poet, and translator of Rilke’s The Duino Elegies“We sometimes forget that Rilke was a supreme sonic technician. An admirer reading his short lyrics in German instantly perceives that their composition was guided as much by the requirements of meter and rhyme as by any detachable 'message.' Donald Mace Williams has produced versions of these lyrics that imitate in English the sound patterns of the originals. Because earlier translations of the best-known Rilke poems have already been engraved in our memory, Williams has for the most part selected lyrics less familiar to the non-specialist, adding to the available stock of Rilke poems brought over from German with inventiveness and distinction.”
Of Granddaughters and Mars is a poetry collection by Donald Mace Williams, written in traditional forms alongside riddles, monologues, and translations. The poems move between family tenderness and political anger — sequences on bugs and birds, a long poem reimagining the explorer Zebulon Pike, and closing translations from the German Romantics.
Beowulf: For Fireside and Schoolroom is Donald Mace Williams’s translation of the oldest narrative poem in English, made to be read aloud rather than studied. He keeps the Anglo-Saxon kennings — the sea stays “whale paths” — works in four-stress iambic meter, and holds the scholarly apparatus down to eight endnotes.
The Nectar Dancer collects sixty-one short poems by Donald Mace Williams, most of them under a page. He spent his working life as a newspaper writer and editor, and the poems carry the compression reporters aim for — observations of life, loss, and the natural world, written in meter and rhyme.
Old West Monsters and a Texas Poet's Life
Wolfe and Being Ninety pairs two works by Donald Mace Williams. “Wolfe” retells Beowulf in late-nineteenth-century Texas, where Billy Wolfe hunts a creature that has killed livestock and a laborer on a remote ranch. “Being Ninety” is Williams’s memoir of nine decades — a Depression childhood, and a life as poet, journalist, professor, and trained singer.
High-Country Encounters from California to Maine
Timberline, U.S.A. is Donald Mace Williams’s account of the country above the last stunted pine, from California’s Sierra Nevada to New Hampshire’s White Mountains. A career journalist, Williams reports on the high places themselves and on the people who go up into them, asking what keeps drawing Americans into thin air and hard weather.
