Above the Mountaintops – Goethe

Above the Mountaintops
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(Translated, from the German, by Rita Dove)

Above the mountaintops
all is still.
Among the treetops
you can feel
barely a breath—
birds in the forest, stripped of song.
Just wait: before long
you, too, shall rest.

Trên Đỉnh Núi
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Võ Tấn Phát dịch

Trên đỉnh núi
Thảy lặng thinh.
Giữa ngọn cây
Bạn có nghe
Hơi thở khẽ —
chim giữa rừng,
trừ tiếng hót.
Kiên nhẫn nhé:
Không lâu đâu
Bạn yên nghỉ.

(Thanks to Nguyễn Huy Hoàng for pointing out this new translation)

Woodblock by Fumio Fujita

https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/johann-wolfgang-von-goethe

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s