Susan McLean, a retired professor of English from Southwest Minnesota State University, has published two books of poetry, The Best Disguise (2009) and The Whetstone Misses the Knife (2014), as well as one book of translations of the Latin poet Martial, Selected Epigrams (2014). Her poetry has won the Richard Wilbur Award and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and her book of translations was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Translation Award. Her translations have also appeared in Transference, First Things, Presence, Subtropics, Measure, and elsewhere.
by Rainer Maria Rilke The angel spoke to him and took great pains to reach the man, whose hands were tightly balled: “But don’t you see that in her every fold she is as cool as God’s own early morn?” Yet back at him the other darkly stared, muttering just “What’s made this change in…
by Rainer Maria Rilke In there, the languid pacing of their paws creates a stillness that can almost daze; then one of the great cats abruptly draws your gaze (which periodically strays) forcefully into its great eye, and there your gaze, held fast as if within the whirl of a maelstrom, stays afloat a little…
By Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Susan McLean We know nothing about this going hence, which shares nothing with us. We’ve no foundation for showing hate or love and reverence toward death, whose mask of tragic lamentation strangely disfigures him. The world is still full of roles we play. As long as we worry about…
By Rainer Maria RilkeTranslated by Susan McLean Versailles Like kings who ultimately merely pace, almost without a goal, unless to show themselves at times in robes of loneliness to those who bow to them on both sides, so, alone between the balustrades, which bowed already from the start, the stairs rise there, deliberately and by…
