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Stefan George

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The hillside where we wander . . .

The hillside where we wander sleeps in shade,
The facing-hill still flickers in the light,
And moonlight in a green and gentle glade
Is but a cloud, a floating wisp of white.

The paths into the distance pale and fade,
A whisper tempts the wanderers to stay,
Is it an unseen rippling cascade,
Or does a bird croon its soft evening lay?

Two dark-winged moths ignore the early hour,
Flit from blade to blade in flippant flight,
The hedgerows blend each shrub, each bush, each flower,
To scented distillate of grieving night.

Stefan George (1868-1933) is often paired with Rilke as the most important and famous German poets of the twentieth century, but his work has not retained the following that Rilke’s poetry enjoys. Deliberately difficult – he refers to his spelling of nouns without their usual capitals, and his omission of punctuation, as “barbed wire to keep out the uninitiated” – his exalted conception of poetry and the poet recalls that of the French Symbolists. His poems, often intensely musical, are paradoxically characterised by end-stopped lines that create a sense of monumental fixity.

Deborah Mercer holds an MA in Literary Translation of the University of East Anglia, where she is now a graduate student. Her translations have been published in Exchanges and she is a contributor to Women Poets in the Age of Goethe, edited by Margaret Ives (forthcoming).

Translated by Deborah Mercer

Page(s) 32

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