A 150th Anniversary Reader
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote many short lyric poems of remarkable beauty and intensity. Donald Mace Williams has selected some of the best and brought these works of one of the 20th century’s most influential poet to English-speaking audiences.
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. 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.
Category: Poetry
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN (paper): 978-1-965766-34-7
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-965766-35-4
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.
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.
Using traditional forms, monologues, riddles, and translations, this collection of poems from Donald Mace Williams links personal memory and family tenderness with tyranny, war, technology, and death, asking what beauty, truth, and courage can still mean.
This new translation of the oldest narrative poem in English—the first in more than twenty years—is designed for easy, pleasant reading. It cuts the scholarly touches to a minimum, using simple margin notes to explain some word or phrase. With students, young readers, and Beowulf fans in mind, Donald Mace Williams has approached his translation as both a published writer of modern metrical poems and a scholar in the verse structure of Beowulf.
These sixty-one poems, only a few of which are longer than a page, have the clarity and terseness that newspaper reporters strive for. No wonder—Donald Mace Williams spent most of his long adulthood as a newspaper writer and editor. They are his observations, full of joy and sadness, about life, loss, and nature.
In this epic re-release, Donald Mace Williams adapts Beowulf to late nineteenth-century Texas in Wolfe. In Being Ninety, he reflects on more than nine decades of devotion to the writing life.
