Radical Translation of Georg Trakl’s “An den Knaben Elis”
by Maximiliane Donicht
Updated 8/28/2016
To the Boy Elis
After Georg Trakl
Blackbird, your forest is falling
into her cool lips,
drinker of stone.
Blank spaces, empty,
are bleeding
into your flight.
But blue steps softly at night,
whose full rotation depends on purple grapes
and their poor revolution.
Blackbird, your gaze
polishes our daggers, our fins,
how long, Blackbird, have you been?
Your body is a waxen
nun, dipping
her dewy finger in our silence.
Let us enter you softly as an animal
enters a temple or an eye.
Lower yourself, slowly,
as ire drips from the stars, expiring.
Maximiliane Donicht is from Munich, Germany. She once worked as a pastry chef in France and now practices classical Japanese swordsmanship in New York. She earned her BFA in Comparative Literature and the Creative Arts with a minor in Psychology at the American University of Paris before joining Columbia’s MFA program for Poetry and Literary Translation, from which she is due to graduate in May 2016. Her poetry has appeared in Bone Bouquet and several issues of the American University of Paris’ literary journal Paris/Atlantic.
