blood

These are my English translations of poems by the Jewish Holocaust poet Miklos Radnoti, the Scottish poet William Dunbar, the German poet Georg Trakl, the English poet Pauline Mary Tarn who wrote poems in French as Renee Vivien, and other poets. 

Postcard 1
by Miklós Radnóti, written August 30, 1944
translation by Michael R. Burch

This is my modern English translation of the poem "To the boy Elis" by Georg Trakl.

To the boy Elis
by Georg Trakl
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Elis, when the blackbird cries from the black forest,
it announces your downfall.
Your lips sip the rock-spring's blue coolness.

Your brow sweats blood
recalling ancient myths
and dark interpretations of birds' flight.

Yet you enter the night with soft footfalls;
the ripe purple grapes hang suspended
as you wave your arms more beautifully in the blueness.

These are poems about blood roses. The rose is a symbol of love and tendernesss, but it is also the color of blood …

Frantisek “Franta” Bass was a Jewish boy born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1930. When he was 11, his family was deported by the Nazis to Terezin, where the SS had created a hybrid Ghetto/Concentration Camp just north of Prague (it was also known as Theresienstadt). Franta lived there under terrible conditions for three years. He was then sent to Auschwitz, where on October 28th, 1944, he was murdered at age 14.