Otto Julius Bierbaum :

Im Blätterfall

Da nun die Blätter fallen,
Oh weh, wie fahl,
Fühl ich, wie alt ich worden bin.
Das macht mir Qual.

Die Sonne scheint. Ach, Sonne,
Wie bist du kalt.
Einst war der Herbst mir auch ein Lied.
Jetzt bin ich alt.

Otto Julius Bierbaum:

In falling leaves

Since now the leaves are falling -
alas, how dun -
I feel how old I have become:
Age is no fun.

The sun still shines. Oh sunbeams,
how are you cold!
Once fall for me was just a song -
Now I am old.

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Where I got these first poems from? And why I chose these and not others?

Glad you asked. I didn't choose, not really. Maybe some day I will, but not today. So here is the answer to your question:

The first translation, that of Wolff's ballad, happened to be an exercise assigned to a friend of mine for her third-year German class at Dalhousie University. That's what started it all. I just wanted to explain to her that there was more to a German poem than the knowledge of its content. So I translated the first eight lines - and famous first words became famous last words.

For the rest of my early plays with poems I was indebted to a 2003 collection of autumnal verses in the literary pages of the Rheinischer Merkur (which happened to be one of the first Google responses to my query about Herbstgedichte), and to the contents of a wider variety of beautiful German websites with classical poems (and sometimes excellent photographs). It gave me great pleasure indeed to realize that some of the old German traditions still live on.