These are modern English translations of the "Xenia" epigrams written in collaboration by the German poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, plus an elegy Goethe wrote for Schiller...

ON LOOKING AT SCHILLER’S SKULL
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Here in this charnel-house full of bleaching bones,
like yesteryear’s
fading souvenirs,
I see the skulls arranged in strange ordered rows.

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 best modern English translations of poems by the first poet we know by name, the ancient Sumerian poet Enheduanna, other wonderful ancient female poets like Sappho and Tzu Yeh, the great Jewish Holocaust poet Miklos Radnoti, the ancient Scottish poet William Dunbar, the eclectic German poet Georg Trakl, the avant garde French poet Renee Vivien, and other poets from around the globe so famous that we know them by a single name, such as Basho, Chaucer, Corinna, Dante, Hesse, Homer, Issa, Pushki

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

These are my modern English translations of Holocaust poems by Paul Celan, a Jewish poet who wrote the original poems in German. 

Herbsttag (“Autumn Day”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch