Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht Translations

These are my modern English translations of poems written in German by Bertolt Brecht. After the poems I have translations of epigrams and quotations by Bertolt Brecht.

The Burning of the Books
by Bertolt Brecht
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

When the Regime
commanded the unlawful books to be burned,
teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires.

Then a banished writer, one of the best,
scanning the list of excommunicated texts,
became enraged: he'd been excluded!

These are my English translations of poems by the first poet we know by name, the ancient Sumerian poet Enheduanna, the great Jewish Holocaust poet Miklos Radnoti, the ancient Scottish poet William Dunbar, the eclectic German poet Georg Trakl, the English poet Pauline Mary Tarn, who wrote poems in French as Renee Vivien, and other poets from around the globe so famous we know them by a single name, such as Basho, Chaucer, Dante, Homer, Issa, Rilke, Rumi, Sappho and Virgil...