Poetry, Translations

Selected Translations W. D. Snodgrass

This collection includes little-known Eastern European poets as well as celebrated poets, troubadours, and composers. In his Selected Translations, W.D. Snodgrass offers us the imaginitive power and the playful wisdom of poems, folk songs, fables, street songs, drinking lyrics, ballads and art songs gleaned from more than five-hundred years of Western tradition.

Slumbersong

by Rainer Maria Rilke

When I lose you, someday,
how will you sleep without me
whispering myself away
above you like the linden tree?

Without me waking to lay down
words, as close as eyelids,
upon your breasts, upon
your limbs, upon your lips?

Without my closing you to leave
you alone with what is yours,
like a garden with its sheaves
of melissas and of anise-stars?

© BOA Editions, Ltd 1998

Available editions:
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Price: $13.50

FormatPaperback

Publication DateJanuary 1, 1998

ISBN1-880238-60-8

$13.50

About the Author

The author of nineteen collections of poetry, W.D. Snodgrass’ first collection of poems, Hearts Needle received the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. Often credited with being one of the founding members of the “confessional” school of poetry, he dismissed the term and never regarded his work as such. Snodgrass published five collections of poetry with BOA Editions: The Fuehrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (1977), revised edition titled The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle: Poems (1995); Each in His Season (1993): Selected Translations (1998): After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (1999); and Not For Specialists (2006). Snodgrass died in 2009.