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Surrender to Night: Collected Poems of Georg Trakl
An essential collection of the visionary poet Georg Trakl’s finest work in a new translation by poet Will Stone
Georg Trakl is recognised as one of the most important European poets of the twentieth century. His visionary poetry has influenced not only later poets but also composers, artists and filmmakers. The full measure of Trakl’s genius can be appreciated in this extensive Collected Poems, intuitively translated by poet Will Stone, which features the key collections including the posthumously published Sebastian in Dream, 1915. Supplementary to these are the poems originally published in the literary journal Der Brenner as well as a discerning selection of Trakl’s uncollected work.
Trakl’s trademark tonal qualities, his melancholy stamp, the often apocalyptic but eerily beautiful language gradually infect the reader. His poems are awash with images, symbolic colours and signs; mysterious dream-like figures appear and vanish, and an alternative world is born out of the unconscious. The most sensitive observer of Trakl’s poetry was his contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke, who concluded: ‘For me, the Trakl poem is an object of sublime existence…’
Georg Trakl is recognised as one of the most important European poets of the twentieth century. His visionary poetry has influenced not only later poets but also composers, artists and filmmakers. The full measure of Trakl’s genius can be appreciated in this extensive Collected Poems, intuitively translated by poet Will Stone, which features the key collections including the posthumously published Sebastian in Dream, 1915. Supplementary to these are the poems originally published in the literary journal Der Brenner as well as a discerning selection of Trakl’s uncollected work.
Trakl’s trademark tonal qualities, his melancholy stamp, the often apocalyptic but eerily beautiful language gradually infect the reader. His poems are awash with images, symbolic colours and signs; mysterious dream-like figures appear and vanish, and an alternative world is born out of the unconscious. The most sensitive observer of Trakl’s poetry was his contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke, who concluded: ‘For me, the Trakl poem is an object of sublime existence…’
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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About the author
Georg Trakl
158 books205 followersGeorg Trakl was an Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most important Austrian Expressionists.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
December 9, 2020
This volume is indispensable for readers of Georg Trakl in English. It collects all of Trakl’s published writing—primarily poetry, both lined and prose—and some unpublished work—poetry, drama excerpts, letters—seamlessly rendered into English with the original German as parallel text. I don’t have much else to say about this (you can read my paean to Trakl in my review of Autumn Sonata), as I thought it best to let Trakl speak for himself through reading updates. I hope he has been convincing.
(My only complaint about the book—and it is a minor one—is the cover. Though there is an element of decay to the scene, it doesn’t speak deeply to the dark hypnotic beauty of Trakl's poetry. I still wince inwardly a bit every time I pick up the book).
(My only complaint about the book—and it is a minor one—is the cover. Though there is an element of decay to the scene, it doesn’t speak deeply to the dark hypnotic beauty of Trakl's poetry. I still wince inwardly a bit every time I pick up the book).
December 30, 2012
The Last Gold of Expired Stars: Complete Poems 1908 - 1914 by Georg Trakl translated by Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt is a wonderful treat to all poetry s lovers. I was first introduced to the poetry of Georg Trakl in an anthology titled "The Winged Energy of Delight" by Robert Bly. This bilingual edition includes all of Trakl's mature published work, as well as his youthful poems and prose, drama fragments and selected letters, and is the most comprehensive collection of his work in English to date.
Georg Trakl (1887-1914), the Austrian expressionist poet, has been called one of the most original poets in the German language in the 20th century. Trakl was born on 3rd February 1887 in Salzburg, Austria and underwent initial schooling in a Catholic school and afterwards at Humanistic state gymnasium of Salzburg. Near the end of school years, Trakl became moody and withdrawn and started experimenting with drinks and drugs. After failing to get promoted twice, he left Gymnasium and was schooled at home for a time, where he discovered French symbolists Verlaine and Rimbaud , whose works deeply impressed him and remained an influence throughout his life along wth Nietzshe , Holderin and Dostoevsky.
Trakl decided to train as a pharmacist , against his father's wishes which gave him easy access to drugs his entire life. During his three year apprenticeship, Trakl wrote plays and poetry. From 1908 to 1911, Trakl lived in Vienna, where he studied pharmacy, eventually graduating with a Masters of Pharmacy degree. The death of his father in 1910 who ran a hardware business that went into insolvency was a severe financial blow to him. After this Trakl's life grew more and more unstable ; his depression, drinking and drug use escalated. He returned to Salzburg in 1911 and took up job as a pharmacist and later as an accountant in Ministry of Public works.
In 1914 his manuscript 'Sebastian in dream' was published. He then traveled to Berlin to attend to his sister Margareta, a concert pianist, who became seriously ill after an abortion. She later committed suicide and her image often recurs in his poetry (see poem 'Grodek'). At the end of July 1914, the great Ludwig Wittgenstein awarded Trakl 20,000 crowns from his donation to needy artists. Due to outbreak of WWI Trakl never received the money . In the August of 1914, he was called up as second lieutenant in the Austrian medical corps .
After the battle of Grodek, ninety badly wounded men were left in a barn for him to care for. He had no supplies and was not a doctor and hence could provide little comfort to them. His already fragile mental state deteriorated further . The uninterrupted contact with mutilated soldiers and morbidity of battle overwhelmed him. One evening, as he left the barn that served as an impromptu hospital, he was startled to see the bodies of disloyal townspeople hanged on a tree. He broke down and attempted to commit suicide with a pistol, only to be disarmed by his comrades. A short time later he received orders to report to the Krakaov military garrison hospital , where he thought he was to serve as a pharmacist, only to be placed in the psychiatric ward for observation of schizophrenia and was later confined in a separate cell.
On November 3rd 1914, Trakl died of an overdose of cocaine that he had secretly concealed upon his detention . Ludwig Wittgenstein who had been supporting him arrived three days later to meet him and inform him of the financial reward to relieve Trakl of his financial hardship only to be informed his death. He said of Trakl's poetry : " I don't understand it: but its tone bewitched me. It is the tone of truly ingenious humans." Trakl was buried in Krakov.
Georg Trakl was a modernist poet who possessed a high degree of originality. He evolved a symbolic language very much his own and one which may at first encounter make him appear obscure. Yet gradual familiarity with this highly wrought, economic style, with its patterned imagery and recurrent usages, makes him not forbidding but increasingly accessible. Trakl is preeminently the poet of autumnal moods, though lacking all traces of Romantic self-indulgence. His modernity lies in the hard, almost frigid, clarity of his diction, the severely disciplined mastery of word and image. His poetic style may, to some degree, be likened to musical composition both in its formal patterning and the emotive directness of appeal. An outstanding feature is the separation of lines, phrases and images into discrete or isolated entities.
Trakl’s style demonstrates how poetry empowers words, giving them new emphasis and freshness of meaning. He had a new “visionary” approach, an “inner landscape” that defies the laws of realistic and logical presentation. In spite of its visionary quality, Trakl’s poetic “world” never completely emancipates itself from the “real” world. Rather, the reader observes a gradual dissociation from a realistic representation, a shift toward the imaginary. This is why Trakl can indeed be called an expressionist, since the expressionist artist does exactly what Trakl attempts in his poems: He turns away from a realistic or naturalistic approach to the representation of reality. He no longer copies, imitates, reproduces. He follows the emotional impulse of his inner vision and expresses it, whether this means deforming or distorting reality as it is known, changing its perceptual and logical structure at will, or shifting from a representational to an abstract creative mode.
Let us look at some of the well known poems written by him.
Summer
At evening the cuckoo's lament
In the wood is silent.
The corn stoops lower,
The red poppy.
Black storms threaten
Above the hill.
The cricket's ancient song
Dies in the field.
The leaves of the chestnut
Never stir.
On the winding stair
Your dress rustles.
The candle shines in silence
In the dark chamber;
A silver hand
Extinguishes it;
Deep calm, starless night.
Trakl was seen as the quintessential poet in the Rimbaud tradition — a poet who wrote highly suggestive nature poems like the one below
Toward Evening my heart
At evening one hears the cry of the bats.
Two black horses leap in the meadow,
The red maple rustles.
To the wanderer the small inn appears along the way
Glorious taste the young wine and nuts.
Glorious:to stagger drunk in the dusking forest.
Through black branches grievous bells sound.
Dew drips on the face
The images in the above poem have a mysterious connection with each other. The rhythm is slow and heavy, like the mood of someone in a dream. 'The red maple rustles' is an inexhaustibly rich and wonderful thing, simply because the poet has had the patience to look at it.
Among the abstract concepts that recur in Trakl’s poetry are decay, disintegration, disease, and, ultimately, death. These concepts all point to a facet of reality that elicits the poet’s lament even though it cannot be regarded as the fruit of modernity. Trakl often links decay and disintegration with humanity’s sinfulness and with an undefined. The mood in many of Trakl’s poems is one of melancholy, anxiety, and desperation. Subdued emotions such as melancholy, however, prevail over the harsher expressions of negative emotions. The poet frequently establishes a connection between expressions of negative emotions and the themes of decay and sinfulness, which are in turn interrelated.
The contrasting themes of sinfulness and purity that permeate the poems of the second phase of his poetry culminate in the third phase in the creation of the mythical figure of a surrogate god, Elis, who represents the ideal of ethical purity.
'Mankind', written in 1912 before Trakl had experienced actual warfare, is resonant with apocalyptic foreboding. Stark images of destruction and violence are meaningfully juxtaposed with devotional imagery which highlights the notions of human guilt and its atonement through the wounds of a sacrificial act. At its conclusion, St Thomas, the figure of doubt and lack of faith, stands ultimately for all humanity
Mankind
Mankind placed before fiery gorges,
A drum roll, foreheads of dark warriors,
Steps through blood-fog; black iron resounds,
Despair, night in sad brains:
Here Eve's shadow, the hunt and red money.
Clouds through which light breaks, the Last Supper.
A gentle silence dwells in bread and wine
And they are gathered twelve in number.
At night under olive branches they scream in sleep.
Saint Thomas dips the hand into the stigmata.
Let us see an excerpt from another wonderful poem titled "Occident" . This one no longer presents a view of reality as it is traditionally and normally perceived. The images joined together in the stanza can still be construed, with some effort on the part of the reader, as the evocation of a moonlit night in spring. However, who is the “sickly shape,” and why are the lovers in their black boat moving toward death? This stanza seems to have originated in a dream.
Occident
To Else Lasker-Schüler, with admiration
1
Moon, as if a dead shape would step
From a blue cave,
And many blossoms fall
Across the rocky path.
Silvery, a sickly shape weeps
By the evening pond,
In a black boat
Lovers have died crossing over.
An aura of mystery surrounds the life and poetry of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Although he was born over a century ago, his starkly original poems provide a window into the psyche of the early twentieth century with its anguish, melancholy, and occasional exaltation. From a life inflicted with drug addiction and mental torment, Trakl paints a vivid, musical portrait of his autumn soul as in the one below. poem titled " Grodek". It is a ferocious poem constructed with great care. A short passage suggesting a whole of German Romantic poetry of nineteenth century appears, and is followed by a paassage evoking the mechanical violence of the German twentieth century. This alternation is strongly felt even in translation.
Grodek
In the evening the autumn forests resound
With deadly weapons, the golden plains
And blue lakes above which the sun
Rolls more somberly; night embraces
Dying warriors, the wild lament
Of their broken mouths.
Yet silently in the meadow
A red cloud, in which an angry god dwells,
Gathers spilled blood, lunar coolness;
All roads end in black decay.
Under golden branches of night and stars
The sister’s shadow staggers through the silent grove
To greet the ghosts of heroes, the bleeding heads;
And quietly the dark autumn flutes resound in the reeds.
O prouder grief! you brazen altars
Today an enormous pain nourishes the hot flame of the spirit,
The unborn grandchildren.
If Munch’s art can be said to culminate in a scream, it can be said that Trakl’s poems culminate in a whisper. With gentle expressions, Trakl, who lived his brief life in the chains of mental anguish and pharmaceutical dependency, sought light through the wormhole of melancholy and wrote from the hellhole of addiction.
As Rilke rightly said " Trakl's poetry is to me an object of sublime existence...It occurs to me that the whole work has parallel in the aspiration of a Li Po; in both , falling is the pretext for the most continuous ascension".
Georg Trakl (1887-1914), the Austrian expressionist poet, has been called one of the most original poets in the German language in the 20th century. Trakl was born on 3rd February 1887 in Salzburg, Austria and underwent initial schooling in a Catholic school and afterwards at Humanistic state gymnasium of Salzburg. Near the end of school years, Trakl became moody and withdrawn and started experimenting with drinks and drugs. After failing to get promoted twice, he left Gymnasium and was schooled at home for a time, where he discovered French symbolists Verlaine and Rimbaud , whose works deeply impressed him and remained an influence throughout his life along wth Nietzshe , Holderin and Dostoevsky.
Trakl decided to train as a pharmacist , against his father's wishes which gave him easy access to drugs his entire life. During his three year apprenticeship, Trakl wrote plays and poetry. From 1908 to 1911, Trakl lived in Vienna, where he studied pharmacy, eventually graduating with a Masters of Pharmacy degree. The death of his father in 1910 who ran a hardware business that went into insolvency was a severe financial blow to him. After this Trakl's life grew more and more unstable ; his depression, drinking and drug use escalated. He returned to Salzburg in 1911 and took up job as a pharmacist and later as an accountant in Ministry of Public works.
In 1914 his manuscript 'Sebastian in dream' was published. He then traveled to Berlin to attend to his sister Margareta, a concert pianist, who became seriously ill after an abortion. She later committed suicide and her image often recurs in his poetry (see poem 'Grodek'). At the end of July 1914, the great Ludwig Wittgenstein awarded Trakl 20,000 crowns from his donation to needy artists. Due to outbreak of WWI Trakl never received the money . In the August of 1914, he was called up as second lieutenant in the Austrian medical corps .
After the battle of Grodek, ninety badly wounded men were left in a barn for him to care for. He had no supplies and was not a doctor and hence could provide little comfort to them. His already fragile mental state deteriorated further . The uninterrupted contact with mutilated soldiers and morbidity of battle overwhelmed him. One evening, as he left the barn that served as an impromptu hospital, he was startled to see the bodies of disloyal townspeople hanged on a tree. He broke down and attempted to commit suicide with a pistol, only to be disarmed by his comrades. A short time later he received orders to report to the Krakaov military garrison hospital , where he thought he was to serve as a pharmacist, only to be placed in the psychiatric ward for observation of schizophrenia and was later confined in a separate cell.
On November 3rd 1914, Trakl died of an overdose of cocaine that he had secretly concealed upon his detention . Ludwig Wittgenstein who had been supporting him arrived three days later to meet him and inform him of the financial reward to relieve Trakl of his financial hardship only to be informed his death. He said of Trakl's poetry : " I don't understand it: but its tone bewitched me. It is the tone of truly ingenious humans." Trakl was buried in Krakov.
Georg Trakl was a modernist poet who possessed a high degree of originality. He evolved a symbolic language very much his own and one which may at first encounter make him appear obscure. Yet gradual familiarity with this highly wrought, economic style, with its patterned imagery and recurrent usages, makes him not forbidding but increasingly accessible. Trakl is preeminently the poet of autumnal moods, though lacking all traces of Romantic self-indulgence. His modernity lies in the hard, almost frigid, clarity of his diction, the severely disciplined mastery of word and image. His poetic style may, to some degree, be likened to musical composition both in its formal patterning and the emotive directness of appeal. An outstanding feature is the separation of lines, phrases and images into discrete or isolated entities.
Trakl’s style demonstrates how poetry empowers words, giving them new emphasis and freshness of meaning. He had a new “visionary” approach, an “inner landscape” that defies the laws of realistic and logical presentation. In spite of its visionary quality, Trakl’s poetic “world” never completely emancipates itself from the “real” world. Rather, the reader observes a gradual dissociation from a realistic representation, a shift toward the imaginary. This is why Trakl can indeed be called an expressionist, since the expressionist artist does exactly what Trakl attempts in his poems: He turns away from a realistic or naturalistic approach to the representation of reality. He no longer copies, imitates, reproduces. He follows the emotional impulse of his inner vision and expresses it, whether this means deforming or distorting reality as it is known, changing its perceptual and logical structure at will, or shifting from a representational to an abstract creative mode.
Let us look at some of the well known poems written by him.
Summer
At evening the cuckoo's lament
In the wood is silent.
The corn stoops lower,
The red poppy.
Black storms threaten
Above the hill.
The cricket's ancient song
Dies in the field.
The leaves of the chestnut
Never stir.
On the winding stair
Your dress rustles.
The candle shines in silence
In the dark chamber;
A silver hand
Extinguishes it;
Deep calm, starless night.
Trakl was seen as the quintessential poet in the Rimbaud tradition — a poet who wrote highly suggestive nature poems like the one below
Toward Evening my heart
At evening one hears the cry of the bats.
Two black horses leap in the meadow,
The red maple rustles.
To the wanderer the small inn appears along the way
Glorious taste the young wine and nuts.
Glorious:to stagger drunk in the dusking forest.
Through black branches grievous bells sound.
Dew drips on the face
The images in the above poem have a mysterious connection with each other. The rhythm is slow and heavy, like the mood of someone in a dream. 'The red maple rustles' is an inexhaustibly rich and wonderful thing, simply because the poet has had the patience to look at it.
Among the abstract concepts that recur in Trakl’s poetry are decay, disintegration, disease, and, ultimately, death. These concepts all point to a facet of reality that elicits the poet’s lament even though it cannot be regarded as the fruit of modernity. Trakl often links decay and disintegration with humanity’s sinfulness and with an undefined. The mood in many of Trakl’s poems is one of melancholy, anxiety, and desperation. Subdued emotions such as melancholy, however, prevail over the harsher expressions of negative emotions. The poet frequently establishes a connection between expressions of negative emotions and the themes of decay and sinfulness, which are in turn interrelated.
The contrasting themes of sinfulness and purity that permeate the poems of the second phase of his poetry culminate in the third phase in the creation of the mythical figure of a surrogate god, Elis, who represents the ideal of ethical purity.
'Mankind', written in 1912 before Trakl had experienced actual warfare, is resonant with apocalyptic foreboding. Stark images of destruction and violence are meaningfully juxtaposed with devotional imagery which highlights the notions of human guilt and its atonement through the wounds of a sacrificial act. At its conclusion, St Thomas, the figure of doubt and lack of faith, stands ultimately for all humanity
Mankind
Mankind placed before fiery gorges,
A drum roll, foreheads of dark warriors,
Steps through blood-fog; black iron resounds,
Despair, night in sad brains:
Here Eve's shadow, the hunt and red money.
Clouds through which light breaks, the Last Supper.
A gentle silence dwells in bread and wine
And they are gathered twelve in number.
At night under olive branches they scream in sleep.
Saint Thomas dips the hand into the stigmata.
Let us see an excerpt from another wonderful poem titled "Occident" . This one no longer presents a view of reality as it is traditionally and normally perceived. The images joined together in the stanza can still be construed, with some effort on the part of the reader, as the evocation of a moonlit night in spring. However, who is the “sickly shape,” and why are the lovers in their black boat moving toward death? This stanza seems to have originated in a dream.
Occident
To Else Lasker-Schüler, with admiration
1
Moon, as if a dead shape would step
From a blue cave,
And many blossoms fall
Across the rocky path.
Silvery, a sickly shape weeps
By the evening pond,
In a black boat
Lovers have died crossing over.
An aura of mystery surrounds the life and poetry of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Although he was born over a century ago, his starkly original poems provide a window into the psyche of the early twentieth century with its anguish, melancholy, and occasional exaltation. From a life inflicted with drug addiction and mental torment, Trakl paints a vivid, musical portrait of his autumn soul as in the one below. poem titled " Grodek". It is a ferocious poem constructed with great care. A short passage suggesting a whole of German Romantic poetry of nineteenth century appears, and is followed by a paassage evoking the mechanical violence of the German twentieth century. This alternation is strongly felt even in translation.
Grodek
In the evening the autumn forests resound
With deadly weapons, the golden plains
And blue lakes above which the sun
Rolls more somberly; night embraces
Dying warriors, the wild lament
Of their broken mouths.
Yet silently in the meadow
A red cloud, in which an angry god dwells,
Gathers spilled blood, lunar coolness;
All roads end in black decay.
Under golden branches of night and stars
The sister’s shadow staggers through the silent grove
To greet the ghosts of heroes, the bleeding heads;
And quietly the dark autumn flutes resound in the reeds.
O prouder grief! you brazen altars
Today an enormous pain nourishes the hot flame of the spirit,
The unborn grandchildren.
If Munch’s art can be said to culminate in a scream, it can be said that Trakl’s poems culminate in a whisper. With gentle expressions, Trakl, who lived his brief life in the chains of mental anguish and pharmaceutical dependency, sought light through the wormhole of melancholy and wrote from the hellhole of addiction.
As Rilke rightly said " Trakl's poetry is to me an object of sublime existence...It occurs to me that the whole work has parallel in the aspiration of a Li Po; in both , falling is the pretext for the most continuous ascension".
May 1, 2025
Blue sallow morbidities wander rampant with scythes tempered in orphan corpse crops swelling fallow fields. Autumnal ardors for his… friggin sister… consumes the heart in guilt ridden and dark desultory putrefactions of lust. If Poe heard Cousins by Kanye and responded “Alright, bet.”Georg Trakl said “I’ll do u one degree of separation less,” in an effort to out Fall of the House of Goth them. Why you would want to do that? IDK I don’t shop at hot topic. Can you come to a plane like this, to the universe - the illusion that sustains reality, and not metaphysically and/or literally murder yourself? Not get addicted to your substance of choice? Not live and/or die through a world war? Evening strikes so deep a wound! The angel of death tends the wound and the wound proffers the unfortunate bars in the silent countenance of night shattering mouths. The moon, crepuscular in its constancy, faltering silvery and yellow nocturnal wayward wayfares, gets its lunatic mentions in, because if you don’t mention the moon frequently you are just not a very good poet.
When evening comes, she lights her new-ish, glass bright lamp and reads in great yellowed tomes or an epub on her iphone. She reads with a fevered, resounding heart, until the present, to which she does not belong, sinks away. And the shadows of the past loom up immense, still feverish over book and image and instant coffee cups.
When evening comes, she lights her new-ish, glass bright lamp and reads in great yellowed tomes or an epub on her iphone. She reads with a fevered, resounding heart, until the present, to which she does not belong, sinks away. And the shadows of the past loom up immense, still feverish over book and image and instant coffee cups.
January 26, 2020
"Trakl's poetry is for me a thing of sublime existence." - Rainer Maria Rilke
Romance to Night
The lonely one beneath a tent of stars
Moves through the stillness of midnight.
The boy wakes, reeling from his dreams,
His grey face wasting into the moon.
The idiot woman with hair loose weeps
At the staring window, barred.
Lovers drift by on the pond
Their sweet journey truly a miracle.
The murderer smiles waxen into wine,
Death’s horror grasps the afflicted.
A nun prays naked and wounded
Before the crucified saviour’s anguish.
A mother sings softly in sleep.
So peacefully the child gazes into night
With eyes that are wholly truthful.
Laughter rings out from the whorehouse.
By candlelight, down in the cellar hole
With white hand the dead one paints
Smirking silence upon the walls.
The sleeper whispers still.
---
from The Beautiful City
From brown illumined churches
Death gazes in pure images,
Fine shields of great princes.
Crowns shimmer in the churches.
Horses plunge out of the fountain.
In trees blossom claws menacing.
Boys confused in dreams are playing
Gently at evening by the fountain.
---
from Evening Muse
Once more to the flower window returns the
steeple’s shadow
And gold. The fevered brow fades in peace and
silence.
A fountain falls in the darkness of the chestnuts’ branches;
And you feel it: all is good! In the painful
languishing.
---
Dream of Evil
Sound of a gong, dying out—
A lover awakens in black rooms
Cheek by flames that flicker at the glass.
On the river, flash rope, sail and mast.
A monk, a pregnant woman in the throng.
Guitars strum, the shimmer of scarlet gowns.
Chestnuts sultry wither in golden radiance;
Black looms the churches’ mournful pageantry.
From pale masks peers the spirit of evil.
A square darkens morbid and terrible;
Whispers well up on the islands at nightfall.
Lepers, perhaps rotting away at night
Read confused signs from bird flight.
Trembling, siblings behold each other in the park.
---
In an Old Album
Always you return, melancholy,
Oh meekness of the lonely soul.
To the end a golden day glows.
With humility the patient one bows before pain
Resounding with melodies and tender madness.
See! It is already dusk.
Again night comes in and a mortal laments
And with it another suffers.
Trembling beneath autumn stars
Yearly the head bows deeper.
---
At evening plague borders her blue vestment
And softly a sinister guest closes the door.
Through the window sinks the maple’s black burden;
A young boy lays the brow in her hand.
Often her lids sink evil and heavy.
The child’s hands run through her hair
And his tears fall hot and clear
Into her sockets black and vacant.
A nest of scarlet-coloured snakes coil up
Sluggishly in her turbulent womb.
Her arms let go something dead,
Enclosed by a carpet’s sorrow.
---
Fear! Death’s dream complaint,
Dead, grave and stark, the year
Gazes out from tree and deer;
Bare field and farmed earth.
The herdsman calls in his fearful flock.
Sister, your blue brows
Beckon softly in the night.
Organ sighs and hell laughs
And a horror grips the heart;
Desire to gaze on stars and angels.
Mother laments before her infant;
Red sounds the ore in the shaft,
Lust, tears and stony pain,
Dark legends of the Titans.
Melancholy! The lonely eagle’s lament
---
In the East
Dark is the wrath of the people
Like the wild organs of winter storm,
The crimson wave of battle,
Stripped leaf stars.
With shattered brows, silver arms
The night beckons dying soldiers.
In the shade of the autumn ash
The spirits of the slain are sighing.
Thorny wilderness girds the city.
From bleeding steps the moon
Chases the terrified women.
Wild wolves broke through the gate.
---
St Peter’s Churchyard
Rock loneliness is all around.
Death’s pale flowers shudder
On graves, which mourn in darkness—
Yet this mourning knows no grief.
Silently heaven smiles down
Into this dream-sealed garden,
Where silent pilgrims await it.
On every grave the cross awakes.
The church rises up like a prayer
Before an image of eternal grace,
Many a candle burns beneath the arches,
And mutely petitions poor souls—
While the trees bloom in the night,
That death would conceal his countenance
Within their beauty’s shimmering fullness,
That has the dead dream deeper still.
---
De Profundis (II)
With night the chamber of the dead is filled
My father sleeps, I keep vigil.
The hard face of the dead one
Glimmers white in the candlelight.
The flowers have scent, the fly hums
Without feeling my heart listens and goes silent.
The wind beats softly at the door.
It opens with a bright clattering.
And outside a field of corn rustles,
In the firmament the sun crackles.
Heavy with fruit hang bush and tree
Birds and butterflies whir in space.
In the field the peasants mow
In the deep silence of noontide.
On one dead I make the sign of the cross
And soundlessly my step fades in the green.
---
In Moonlight
A host of vermin, mice, rats
Cavorts in the hallway, that in moonlight shimmers.
The moon cries out as if in a dream and mewls.
Tiny leaf shadows tremble at the window.
Now and then birds chirrup in the branches
And spiders creep over black walls.
Through empty passages pale flecks shiver.
An uncanny silence dwells in the house.
In the courtyard lights seem to float
Over rotten wood, mouldered clutter.
Then a star glistens in a black pond.
Figures still there from bygone times.
You yet see tracings of other things
And a writing, faded on mouldering sketches,
Perhaps the colours of bright pictures:
Angel, in song before the throne of Mary.
Romance to Night
The lonely one beneath a tent of stars
Moves through the stillness of midnight.
The boy wakes, reeling from his dreams,
His grey face wasting into the moon.
The idiot woman with hair loose weeps
At the staring window, barred.
Lovers drift by on the pond
Their sweet journey truly a miracle.
The murderer smiles waxen into wine,
Death’s horror grasps the afflicted.
A nun prays naked and wounded
Before the crucified saviour’s anguish.
A mother sings softly in sleep.
So peacefully the child gazes into night
With eyes that are wholly truthful.
Laughter rings out from the whorehouse.
By candlelight, down in the cellar hole
With white hand the dead one paints
Smirking silence upon the walls.
The sleeper whispers still.
---
from The Beautiful City
From brown illumined churches
Death gazes in pure images,
Fine shields of great princes.
Crowns shimmer in the churches.
Horses plunge out of the fountain.
In trees blossom claws menacing.
Boys confused in dreams are playing
Gently at evening by the fountain.
---
from Evening Muse
Once more to the flower window returns the
steeple’s shadow
And gold. The fevered brow fades in peace and
silence.
A fountain falls in the darkness of the chestnuts’ branches;
And you feel it: all is good! In the painful
languishing.
---
Dream of Evil
Sound of a gong, dying out—
A lover awakens in black rooms
Cheek by flames that flicker at the glass.
On the river, flash rope, sail and mast.
A monk, a pregnant woman in the throng.
Guitars strum, the shimmer of scarlet gowns.
Chestnuts sultry wither in golden radiance;
Black looms the churches’ mournful pageantry.
From pale masks peers the spirit of evil.
A square darkens morbid and terrible;
Whispers well up on the islands at nightfall.
Lepers, perhaps rotting away at night
Read confused signs from bird flight.
Trembling, siblings behold each other in the park.
---
In an Old Album
Always you return, melancholy,
Oh meekness of the lonely soul.
To the end a golden day glows.
With humility the patient one bows before pain
Resounding with melodies and tender madness.
See! It is already dusk.
Again night comes in and a mortal laments
And with it another suffers.
Trembling beneath autumn stars
Yearly the head bows deeper.
---
At evening plague borders her blue vestment
And softly a sinister guest closes the door.
Through the window sinks the maple’s black burden;
A young boy lays the brow in her hand.
Often her lids sink evil and heavy.
The child’s hands run through her hair
And his tears fall hot and clear
Into her sockets black and vacant.
A nest of scarlet-coloured snakes coil up
Sluggishly in her turbulent womb.
Her arms let go something dead,
Enclosed by a carpet’s sorrow.
---
Fear! Death’s dream complaint,
Dead, grave and stark, the year
Gazes out from tree and deer;
Bare field and farmed earth.
The herdsman calls in his fearful flock.
Sister, your blue brows
Beckon softly in the night.
Organ sighs and hell laughs
And a horror grips the heart;
Desire to gaze on stars and angels.
Mother laments before her infant;
Red sounds the ore in the shaft,
Lust, tears and stony pain,
Dark legends of the Titans.
Melancholy! The lonely eagle’s lament
---
In the East
Dark is the wrath of the people
Like the wild organs of winter storm,
The crimson wave of battle,
Stripped leaf stars.
With shattered brows, silver arms
The night beckons dying soldiers.
In the shade of the autumn ash
The spirits of the slain are sighing.
Thorny wilderness girds the city.
From bleeding steps the moon
Chases the terrified women.
Wild wolves broke through the gate.
---
St Peter’s Churchyard
Rock loneliness is all around.
Death’s pale flowers shudder
On graves, which mourn in darkness—
Yet this mourning knows no grief.
Silently heaven smiles down
Into this dream-sealed garden,
Where silent pilgrims await it.
On every grave the cross awakes.
The church rises up like a prayer
Before an image of eternal grace,
Many a candle burns beneath the arches,
And mutely petitions poor souls—
While the trees bloom in the night,
That death would conceal his countenance
Within their beauty’s shimmering fullness,
That has the dead dream deeper still.
---
De Profundis (II)
With night the chamber of the dead is filled
My father sleeps, I keep vigil.
The hard face of the dead one
Glimmers white in the candlelight.
The flowers have scent, the fly hums
Without feeling my heart listens and goes silent.
The wind beats softly at the door.
It opens with a bright clattering.
And outside a field of corn rustles,
In the firmament the sun crackles.
Heavy with fruit hang bush and tree
Birds and butterflies whir in space.
In the field the peasants mow
In the deep silence of noontide.
On one dead I make the sign of the cross
And soundlessly my step fades in the green.
---
In Moonlight
A host of vermin, mice, rats
Cavorts in the hallway, that in moonlight shimmers.
The moon cries out as if in a dream and mewls.
Tiny leaf shadows tremble at the window.
Now and then birds chirrup in the branches
And spiders creep over black walls.
Through empty passages pale flecks shiver.
An uncanny silence dwells in the house.
In the courtyard lights seem to float
Over rotten wood, mouldered clutter.
Then a star glistens in a black pond.
Figures still there from bygone times.
You yet see tracings of other things
And a writing, faded on mouldering sketches,
Perhaps the colours of bright pictures:
Angel, in song before the throne of Mary.
July 11, 2023
After several months, I've finished this book of poems "Surrender to night", which in a way, accompanied me since November, reading a few poems at random times. I particularly liked his writing.
Georg Trakl combines images of nature that are often "sombre", but always marked by considerable beauty. He also chooses a vocabulary that is sometimes brutal, echoing his wartime experiences of death and destruction, opening up to a raw, gripping realism, but with a great deal of lyricism. It's a sort of relationship with nature as freedom, where death and war intrude and stand in the way.
To return briefly to Georg Trakl's life, he was born in Salzburg in 1887, in Austria-Hungary. At the time, it was already in decadence before its dislocation in 1918.
Two main things in his life: his incestuous love for his sister Grete, the source of many of his poems, and his participation in the First World War.
As a pharmacist, he was mobilized into the medical services, where he was responsible for providing first aid to the wounded at the front. With all this in mind, he made his first suicide attempt with a firearm, before succumbing some time later to an overdose, probably deliberate.
He more or less took on the figure of the cursed poet, the poète maudit (?).
He was also friends with the painter Kokoschka (Expressionism), whom he visited in his studio and who painted, among other works, the Bride of the wind.
"Sleep and death, the dark eagles,
Night-long sweep about this head:
Eternity' icy wave
Would engulf the golden image
Of man. On terrible reefs
His crimson body is smashed
And rhendark voice laments
Over the sea.
Sister of stormy melancholy
Lookba fearful boat sinks
Beneath stars,
The silent countenance of night."
"Feelings in momenta of death-like existence: all humans are worthy of love. Awakening you sense the world's bitterness, in which resides all unresolved guilt; your poem, an imperfect atonement." autumn 1914
Georg Trakl combines images of nature that are often "sombre", but always marked by considerable beauty. He also chooses a vocabulary that is sometimes brutal, echoing his wartime experiences of death and destruction, opening up to a raw, gripping realism, but with a great deal of lyricism. It's a sort of relationship with nature as freedom, where death and war intrude and stand in the way.
To return briefly to Georg Trakl's life, he was born in Salzburg in 1887, in Austria-Hungary. At the time, it was already in decadence before its dislocation in 1918.
Two main things in his life: his incestuous love for his sister Grete, the source of many of his poems, and his participation in the First World War.
As a pharmacist, he was mobilized into the medical services, where he was responsible for providing first aid to the wounded at the front. With all this in mind, he made his first suicide attempt with a firearm, before succumbing some time later to an overdose, probably deliberate.
He more or less took on the figure of the cursed poet, the poète maudit (?).
He was also friends with the painter Kokoschka (Expressionism), whom he visited in his studio and who painted, among other works, the Bride of the wind.
"Sleep and death, the dark eagles,
Night-long sweep about this head:
Eternity' icy wave
Would engulf the golden image
Of man. On terrible reefs
His crimson body is smashed
And rhendark voice laments
Over the sea.
Sister of stormy melancholy
Lookba fearful boat sinks
Beneath stars,
The silent countenance of night."
"Feelings in momenta of death-like existence: all humans are worthy of love. Awakening you sense the world's bitterness, in which resides all unresolved guilt; your poem, an imperfect atonement." autumn 1914
September 19, 2016
Un libro asombroso. Las imágenes poéticas de Trakl oscilan entre un lirismo abrumador y una melancolía irremediable. Transita por lo sublime con depresión y por lo podrido con alegría. La llegada de Trakl es intensa, titánica en mi opinión. Es un poeta maldito, nocturno, incandescente. Creo que está entre lo mejor del siglo XX. Se suicidó a los 27 años. Era farmacéutico, retraído, profundamente enfermo. Fue amigo de los mejores artífices culturales de esa época tan rara previa a la primera guerra mundial. Fue alcohólico, cocainómano, incestuoso. No está claro el episodio, pero su poema Pasión parece sugerir que su hermana abortó un hijo suyo. Trakl poeta escribió sin mediación, sin interferencias extrínsecas. Nada externo contaminó su prodigioso arte de la palabra emergente de un fondo interno conmocionado, totalmente mudo. Traducido al español conserva una fuerza tremenda. En su alemán original, austríaco de Salzburgo, se agrega a su estética una cadencia bellísima. Trakl escribió poesía musical desde el abismo. No tenía nada que perder. Poeta en carne viva.
November 29, 2021
is God (and monotheism) more redemptive than the fluidity and schizophrenia of narcotics? is it better to accept your fate in the gutter gnawed at by vermin than resist? Can you ever go home again? all this and more in Trakl's poetry. Trakl: the patron saint of living fast and dying young
April 11, 2020
Trakl is a slow burner persistent and below the skin. If you imagine poetry as a forest, Trakl is a difficult forest from where you don’t return
April 21, 2025
Trakl's poetry is the definition of what it means to simmer in dark decadence. The same potion is brewed with identical ingredients, the same prayer with identical stanzas, the same ritual slaughter carried out with the same offal-encrusted dagger. Again and again the poet seer shuffles the same pastoral scenes; smouldering hamlets, skeletal brooks, rotting groves etc.--and the same elements of spiritual carnage; star-broken brows, blue phantoms, angels fed to wild beasts, until a sensual black spark is ignited in the interior chamber of the reader's skull. The ashes, the bones and the flames are but different facets of the selfsame Night.
Long live decadence!
Long live decadence!
December 30, 2016
Veo en Trakl que la caída es una especie de redención, una ascensión por una bajada pedregosa. Sé que no podría ascenderse si se está cayendo, pero no encuentro otra manera de expresar la potencia de la poesía del médico y escritor austriaco. En Trakl, las naturalezas muertas (no a la manera de los bodegones, sino de los cuadros de Turner o de Friedrich) son el pretexto para el viaje interior más largo, para la redención de lo que yace más oculto al alma humana. De consciente línea expresionista, en su poesía los colores van unidos a imágenes de fuerza desbordante, condicionándolas bajo el peso del afecto (el color como afecto). La simbología permea las imágenes y los colores las dotan de cierta cadencia, de sentimientos que se incrustan en el lector y no lo dejan concentrarse del todo. Por eso, leer a Trakl es un reto: sus poemas deben rumiarse...deben degustarse. Es difícil leer a alguien para quien los ángeles son la antesala de la muerte (y aclaro que no soy creyente, y tal vez sea por esto que me cuesta imaginarme esos seres alados), para quien las iglesias muertas significan algo que habla sobre la propia vida.
Hace años (tenía unos 19, hoy tengo 26) logré encontrarme con un par de poemas de Trakl estudiando para una clase de expresionismo. Me interesaba aprender lo posible sobre esa vanguardia, que siempre me ha cautivado y cuestionado. La suerte hizo que escribiese mal el apellido Grosz, permitiendo que Google me corrigiese por Georg justo antes de la palabra "expresionismo". Lo que empezó siendo una búsqueda universitaria de obras del autor, terminó siendo una hora o algo más de lectura de poemas del austriaco (que contaba entre sus admiradores, nada más ni nada menos, que gente como Wittgenstein y Rilke, de quien se sentiría heredero). En ese momento, sentí que algo nuevo se abría ante mi horizonte de comprensión: nunca pensé que alguien pudiese decir tanto con colores. Nunca pensé que un color pudiese ser el rasgo expresivo de todo un cúmulo de sensaciones, que un trazo pudiese canalizar todo el peso de un instante o, incluso, una vida.
En cierto modo, Trakl me enseñó lo que era el expresionismo. Y, desde allí, nunca pude separarme de esa vanguardia. Siete años después, me veo terminando un libro que me tomó algo menos de un año en ser leído. Tal vez menos encandilado por la primera impresión, siento a Trakl igual de fuerte pero menos sugestivo (señal de madurez, o de pérdida de la capacidad de asombro. Ambas cosas parecen ir de la mano). Como todo buen poeta, sus imágenes tienden a repetirse...cuando no a demostrar la obsesión del escritor por las mismas. Leerlo puede ser tedioso, más cuando cada poema puede llegar a tener hasta cuatro versiones del mismo con ligeros cambios. Sin embargo, considero a Trakl de lo mejor que he podido leer en poesía (justo detrás de Pessoa, Miguel Hernández y Bukowski. Y sí, sé que ninguno de estos cuatro pareciera tener relación y que la comparación es injusta, pero aquí me guío por el capricho subjetivo de la persona de veintiseis años que soy).
Le agradezco a la vida haberme encontrado a Trakl. Creo que nadie me enseñó a escribir más que él... a pesar de serme siempre tan distante y oscuro.
Hace años (tenía unos 19, hoy tengo 26) logré encontrarme con un par de poemas de Trakl estudiando para una clase de expresionismo. Me interesaba aprender lo posible sobre esa vanguardia, que siempre me ha cautivado y cuestionado. La suerte hizo que escribiese mal el apellido Grosz, permitiendo que Google me corrigiese por Georg justo antes de la palabra "expresionismo". Lo que empezó siendo una búsqueda universitaria de obras del autor, terminó siendo una hora o algo más de lectura de poemas del austriaco (que contaba entre sus admiradores, nada más ni nada menos, que gente como Wittgenstein y Rilke, de quien se sentiría heredero). En ese momento, sentí que algo nuevo se abría ante mi horizonte de comprensión: nunca pensé que alguien pudiese decir tanto con colores. Nunca pensé que un color pudiese ser el rasgo expresivo de todo un cúmulo de sensaciones, que un trazo pudiese canalizar todo el peso de un instante o, incluso, una vida.
En cierto modo, Trakl me enseñó lo que era el expresionismo. Y, desde allí, nunca pude separarme de esa vanguardia. Siete años después, me veo terminando un libro que me tomó algo menos de un año en ser leído. Tal vez menos encandilado por la primera impresión, siento a Trakl igual de fuerte pero menos sugestivo (señal de madurez, o de pérdida de la capacidad de asombro. Ambas cosas parecen ir de la mano). Como todo buen poeta, sus imágenes tienden a repetirse...cuando no a demostrar la obsesión del escritor por las mismas. Leerlo puede ser tedioso, más cuando cada poema puede llegar a tener hasta cuatro versiones del mismo con ligeros cambios. Sin embargo, considero a Trakl de lo mejor que he podido leer en poesía (justo detrás de Pessoa, Miguel Hernández y Bukowski. Y sí, sé que ninguno de estos cuatro pareciera tener relación y que la comparación es injusta, pero aquí me guío por el capricho subjetivo de la persona de veintiseis años que soy).
Le agradezco a la vida haberme encontrado a Trakl. Creo que nadie me enseñó a escribir más que él... a pesar de serme siempre tan distante y oscuro.
November 14, 2020
Decent edition, perfectly adequate translations as far as I can tell. Really mediocre binding quality and typeface/formatting leaves a lot to be desired; no index, though solid biographical info. Has just about everything of Trakl's, prose or poetical (other than a few letters). Of course probably a shorter anthology is all that's necessary for most readers - the initial collection and 'Sebastian in Dream' being the primary substance of his work. The extra poems are either on par or somewhat worse, never all that bad. A bilingual edition for, I suppose, bilingual readers; also includes drafts and early editions of many of his poems, though Trakl's process of revision is a bit more personal/arbitrary and less informative than, say, Hoelderlin's draftings. Also includes Trakl's efforts as a playwrit, which are fascinating and worth reading but too short and formless to warrant much. This edition, then, recommended for any true Trakl-head, I suppose, but not an essential buy.
May 26, 2016
This wasn't for me. Too repetitive and exerted.
My favorite:
Verfall
by Georg Trakl
Am Abend, wenn die Glocken Frieden läuten,
Folg ich der Vögel wundervollen Flügen,
Die lang geschart, gleich frommen Pilgerzügen,
Entschwinden in den herbstlich klaren Weiten.
Hinwandelnd durch den dämmervollen Garten
Träum ich nach ihren helleren Geschicken
Und fühl der Stunden Weiser kaum mehr rücken.
So folg ich über Wolken ihren Fahrten.
Da macht ein Hauch mich von Verfall erzittern.
Die Amsel klagt in den entlaubten Zweigen.
Es schwankt der rote Wein an rostigen Gittern,
Indes wie blasser Kinder Todesreigen
Um dunkle Brunnenränder, die verwittern,
Im Wind sich fröstelnd blaue Astern neigen.
My favorite:
Verfall
by Georg Trakl
Am Abend, wenn die Glocken Frieden läuten,
Folg ich der Vögel wundervollen Flügen,
Die lang geschart, gleich frommen Pilgerzügen,
Entschwinden in den herbstlich klaren Weiten.
Hinwandelnd durch den dämmervollen Garten
Träum ich nach ihren helleren Geschicken
Und fühl der Stunden Weiser kaum mehr rücken.
So folg ich über Wolken ihren Fahrten.
Da macht ein Hauch mich von Verfall erzittern.
Die Amsel klagt in den entlaubten Zweigen.
Es schwankt der rote Wein an rostigen Gittern,
Indes wie blasser Kinder Todesreigen
Um dunkle Brunnenränder, die verwittern,
Im Wind sich fröstelnd blaue Astern neigen.
March 19, 2018
O mein Bruder
long lost! in decaying dusk
be with me now
in the endless
golden-red autumns
perhaps silent and sullen
yet to wander with me
a momentary stillness...
[continue: https://vonkriege.com/vk-arkiv/ech-s/...]
long lost! in decaying dusk
be with me now
in the endless
golden-red autumns
perhaps silent and sullen
yet to wander with me
a momentary stillness...
[continue: https://vonkriege.com/vk-arkiv/ech-s/...]
September 28, 2021
Poesía hermética, profundamente íntima y simbólica. Nunca llega a verse el fondo de los poemas de Trakl, pero sus imágenes son, al modo de los cuadros expresionistas, un mundo a la vez perturbador, enigmático y redentor.
June 21, 2020
Intense, gothic, a bit repetitive. Enjoyed enough to really wish I could read it in the original.
March 17, 2020
Year
Dark stillness of childhood. Under greening ash trees
Meekness of a bluish glance grazes; golden peace.
A dark thing delights in the scent of violets; swaying corn
At evening, seed and the golden shadows of melancholy.
The carpenter hews the beam, on shadowy ground
The mill grinds; in the hazel leaves a crimson mouth arches,
Masculine red bowed over silent waters.
Gentle in autumn, spirit of the woods, golden cloud
Follows the lonely one, the black shade of the grandchild.
Dying out in stony room; beneath old cypresses
Nightly images of tears gather in the spring;
Golden eye of beginning, dark patience of the end.
*
May 6, 2021
This is a fabulous collection of poems by GeorgTrakl.His strikingly visual style and deep sensitivity captivated me beyond measure. Undoubtedly he is the poet of 'the evening' (most of his poems have that setting).His poetry can be a bit complex at times but he creates a lifeworld which is bathed in a light of humanism by which he is able to universalize his existential vision.
May 3, 2020
The Sound of a Blackbird
A blackbird shrills outside in the bright blue.
The old woman stands by the window, ironing
a pair of red socks.
The old man lies in bed, his eyes in day covered
by a nighttime mask. He doesn't snore.
Draw your own conclusions.
A blackbird shrills outside in the bright blue.
The old woman stands by the window, ironing
a pair of red socks.
The old man lies in bed, his eyes in day covered
by a nighttime mask. He doesn't snore.
Draw your own conclusions.
September 27, 2024
Known as one of the most important Austrian expressionist poets, he will simply blow your mind if you into dark, eerie imageries with a haiku-like economy of words. For a better translation, i would definitely give it a 5-star.
January 3, 2023
Oh, der Seele nächtlicher Flügelschlag
April 21, 2025
a bit repetitive, uses beautiful imagery
May 31, 2019
Poetry is an old genre for people to express their sorrow, pain, feelings of joy. This ancient style can be traced back to thousands of years before the Christ. Image is one of the most important elements in ancient Chinese poetry. Poets used symbolic images to represent and channel their emotions. For example, bamboos that have been growing in a straight up fashion mirror the integrity poets have and praise for; plum flowers project a certain kind of beauty that is not afraid of winter, in particular, these kinds of beauty bloom while all the other flowers wither.
Most of these "images" are still in use in most of Chinese/East Asian literatures. One thing is with the sorrow and grieving for autumn. Three or four thousand years ago, poets in ancient China grieved for autumn. Song Yu has been considered as one of the first poets in the world who grieved for autumn in poetry.
The reason why I mentioned these two aspects -- image and grieving for autumn -- are that, in this book collection of poems from Georg Trakl, images and grieving for autumn have been heavily repeated.
On one hand, I appreciate the poet's ability to channel his depressive feelings into those images with various colours that associated with depression in the modern psychological domain. For instance, blue moon, blue pond, black brook, crimson infant, crimson death, black countenance of the door frame, etc. As a reader, I do feel the pain and sorrow the poet felt at that moment when he stared into the crimson brook next to his village.
On the other hand, it raises the question to whether the quality of the translation is ok when these images have emerged in nearly every single poem, in every single page. One major feeling is, after reading this collection, I cannot look at words such as "crimson", "countenance" "blue" "black" etc. There is no German source text to compare with. If there is a high frequency of repetition in the original text, I would question the value of the poems or have a different perspective. Otherwise, I wonder, is anyone bothered by the repetition of words in each poem each page? Since I do assume the translator is competent.
Last but not least, the repetition reduces the quality of reading and appreciating the poems in a large scale. It makes the titles also repetitive. There are some other collections from other depressive poets, but their topics and images in poems vary. This is a big disappointment for me in this book. Because the biography in the intro part really got me interested in Georg Trakl... But after all, I found he is a depressive poets with very limited of imagination and choice of words.
Most of these "images" are still in use in most of Chinese/East Asian literatures. One thing is with the sorrow and grieving for autumn. Three or four thousand years ago, poets in ancient China grieved for autumn. Song Yu has been considered as one of the first poets in the world who grieved for autumn in poetry.
The reason why I mentioned these two aspects -- image and grieving for autumn -- are that, in this book collection of poems from Georg Trakl, images and grieving for autumn have been heavily repeated.
On one hand, I appreciate the poet's ability to channel his depressive feelings into those images with various colours that associated with depression in the modern psychological domain. For instance, blue moon, blue pond, black brook, crimson infant, crimson death, black countenance of the door frame, etc. As a reader, I do feel the pain and sorrow the poet felt at that moment when he stared into the crimson brook next to his village.
On the other hand, it raises the question to whether the quality of the translation is ok when these images have emerged in nearly every single poem, in every single page. One major feeling is, after reading this collection, I cannot look at words such as "crimson", "countenance" "blue" "black" etc. There is no German source text to compare with. If there is a high frequency of repetition in the original text, I would question the value of the poems or have a different perspective. Otherwise, I wonder, is anyone bothered by the repetition of words in each poem each page? Since I do assume the translator is competent.
Last but not least, the repetition reduces the quality of reading and appreciating the poems in a large scale. It makes the titles also repetitive. There are some other collections from other depressive poets, but their topics and images in poems vary. This is a big disappointment for me in this book. Because the biography in the intro part really got me interested in Georg Trakl... But after all, I found he is a depressive poets with very limited of imagination and choice of words.
October 8, 2020
Austrian poet Georg Trakl was trained as a pharmacist in Vienna where his friends helped him get his first poetry published. His service as a medical officer on the Eastern Front during WWI led to depression and attempted suicide. Trakl did succeed in ending his life with a cocaine overdose in November of 1914. Will Stone provides the translation. Stone holds a degree in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and has produced prose and poetry translations of the works of several writers.
Trakl is an impressionist poet and captures the world in symbolism, shades expressed in words, and disconnection. Much like an impressionist painter captures the world in light and colors while blurring the boundaries reality, Trakl accomplishes the same with words:
Black skies of metal
Crossing in the red storms at evening Hunger crazed crows drift
Over the parks mournful and pale.
He carries several themes through his work, most notably, Fall, Winter, and silence. In many poems, there is a youthful feeling balancing with the lateness of the year. Although he only served in the opening months of the First World War, there is a noticeable darkness in many of his works from this period. The horrors of the war are clearly evident. The earlier works are meant to be read and examined in much the same way one would experience a painting by Monet. A remarkable poetic experience. This is also a collection of poetry where one cannot overlook the translator. Stone's work is seamless and unnoticeable in the reading. He is able to preserve the poet's original intent. Masterfully done.
Trakl is an impressionist poet and captures the world in symbolism, shades expressed in words, and disconnection. Much like an impressionist painter captures the world in light and colors while blurring the boundaries reality, Trakl accomplishes the same with words:
Black skies of metal
Crossing in the red storms at evening Hunger crazed crows drift
Over the parks mournful and pale.
He carries several themes through his work, most notably, Fall, Winter, and silence. In many poems, there is a youthful feeling balancing with the lateness of the year. Although he only served in the opening months of the First World War, there is a noticeable darkness in many of his works from this period. The horrors of the war are clearly evident. The earlier works are meant to be read and examined in much the same way one would experience a painting by Monet. A remarkable poetic experience. This is also a collection of poetry where one cannot overlook the translator. Stone's work is seamless and unnoticeable in the reading. He is able to preserve the poet's original intent. Masterfully done.
May 18, 2019
I'm on a hiding to nothing here, for no grade I can give this book is a suitable one. The work in translating and presenting all this is a sterling one, so should be given due credit, and any academics approaching this should not be put off by my layman comments. But it is quite awful. The shtick of the depressive junkie producing all this poetry was to have blunt, dark and depressing non sequitur after blunt, dark and depressing non sequitur. Page 116 here alone has at least two dozen negative words on, from 'smoke' to 'leprosy' to a 'grey and mouldered family vault' where a 'skeleton ascends'. And that's just four verses. Even when he's being almost optimistic it seems his verse is still set in the evening. Elsewhere he gives us such jolly non-images as "In his grave the white magician plays with his snakes." He really does manage to make EA Poe read like Edward Lear. And he most certainly has a thing about mignonettes, whatever they are. It's only in the works that were unpublished or unfinished in his lifetime that you find fully summery pieces, although others in that same section might as well be in code, and to the very end his sunflowers are "deeply inclined towards death". I suppose I must also admire Trakl for managing to thrust out such an oeuvre despite his moods and his hardcore drug-taking in such a short time, but to have a sustained and morbid output like this is surely not to be recommended. This is the very epitome of 'try before you buy'.
June 23, 2020
Me propuse leer este libro de un modo distinto a como me había acostumbrado a leer los libros de poesía: es decir, abriendo en cualquier página y sometiéndome a la aventura de lo que toque. Quise ser sistemático porque no quería perderme nada de Trakl y al mismo tiempo no quería leerlo como un trámite, como un desafío. Leería de noche, minutos antes de irme a dormir y solo si mi cabeza estaba concentrada en la lectura de esta poesía. Las imágenes son fuertes y el vocabulario es decadentista si bien el tono tiene más que ver con paisajes interiores y expresionistas.
Tardé un año y medio prácticamente en terminarlo pero agradezco cada uno de esos minutos que me regaló Trakl, un poeta de lo terrible y las tumbas, si, pero también un poeta del adiós de una época. Traza paisajes que bien podrían confundirse con el romanticismo pero hay un dolor y una derrota interior que lo aleja inclusive del romanticismo tardío de autores como Hoffmann.
Leo en el prólogo sus amistades vienesas y entiendo mucho más sus inclinaciones: Kark Kraus, Loos, Kokochka. Ya de algún modo todos confluyen en la misma avenida para ver caerse el Imperio Austrohúngaro en la masacre que sería la guerra de 1914. Trakl no llegó al final de ese año vivo, pero su poesía, breve e intensa, se extiende dolorosamente y certeramente como un preámbulo de Celan.
Tardé un año y medio prácticamente en terminarlo pero agradezco cada uno de esos minutos que me regaló Trakl, un poeta de lo terrible y las tumbas, si, pero también un poeta del adiós de una época. Traza paisajes que bien podrían confundirse con el romanticismo pero hay un dolor y una derrota interior que lo aleja inclusive del romanticismo tardío de autores como Hoffmann.
Leo en el prólogo sus amistades vienesas y entiendo mucho más sus inclinaciones: Kark Kraus, Loos, Kokochka. Ya de algún modo todos confluyen en la misma avenida para ver caerse el Imperio Austrohúngaro en la masacre que sería la guerra de 1914. Trakl no llegó al final de ese año vivo, pero su poesía, breve e intensa, se extiende dolorosamente y certeramente como un preámbulo de Celan.
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February 1, 2022Variationer på en och samma urscen klädd i färger - och färgerna röd, blå, guld och svart. Soldaterna som förblöder och dör i den röda hösturskogen; rödvinet som dricks i en liknande urskog. Blått - det förstelnade liket på ängen, månljuset som smeker systern vid pianot, snön i månsken. Men också bara blått. Guldet - solen och hjärtat. Men det är trots allt aftontid och höst och vinter; solstrålarna kommer snett och blockeras av det tjocka grenverket och av molnen. Svart: den svarta frosten och den stjärnlösa natten. Trots ständigt samma toner så är det alltid nytt. Upprepning gör det nytt, vi återkommer till något vi är bekanta med men som vi inte riktigt sett eller hört på det här sättet - det tyska ordet Unheimlich passande: med hemmet, det invanda att göra, men där det framkommer annorlunda, skevt och kusligt. Trakl spelar med gotiska figurer (fladdermöss, vargar, klämtande klockor), kristen apokalyptik (trumpeter, molnbataljer), pastoral, vansinne och framkallar en uråldrig värld som ligger under - eller jämsides - den moderna världens upplysta utrymmen och dess fina fernissa. Uråldrig betyder här barndom, början och rötter, men också ankomsten till och ihågkomsten av jorden och döden.
January 9, 2024
James Reidel's book is particularly praiseworthy, since it not only includes Trakl's mature poetry, which can be found in the two collections Gedichte and Sebastian Im Traum, plus the poetry that was published in the literary magazine Der Brenner, all of which was authorised for publication, but it also incorporates the posthumously published poetry, as well as juvenilia, dramatic scenes, short prose pieces, and poetic fragments.
What's more, this edition has some useful biographical material as well as thoughtful annotation after each section.
The only minor misreading is in line 12 of the poem Bright Spring, "And toads are sleeping throughout the young leeks." According to the Innsbruck edition of Trakl's poetry, there's a note to the effect that the verb "schliefen" here is not the past tense of the verb "schlafen" - to sleep. Instead it's a dialectal usage, related to schlüpfen, i.e. to slide or to creep. In my own translation of this poem I made the same mistake, until another Trakl enthusiast pointed this out to me.
What's more, this edition has some useful biographical material as well as thoughtful annotation after each section.
The only minor misreading is in line 12 of the poem Bright Spring, "And toads are sleeping throughout the young leeks." According to the Innsbruck edition of Trakl's poetry, there's a note to the effect that the verb "schliefen" here is not the past tense of the verb "schlafen" - to sleep. Instead it's a dialectal usage, related to schlüpfen, i.e. to slide or to creep. In my own translation of this poem I made the same mistake, until another Trakl enthusiast pointed this out to me.
June 3, 2019
2.5
Had only previously heard of Trakl in passing, so I was grateful for the short biography at the beginning of the book which gave me a vague idea of what to expect from his work. There's no doubt that the poet was extremely talented, there were particular verses throughout which were just genuinely stunning in the imagery they invoked.
While it was obvious that his writing was of a deeply personal nature and the poems within the collection give a clear insight to the Trakl's deeply troubled state of mind, it did make for a frustrating read. I did find the poems, while beautifully written, very small in scope and repetitive in nature.
A collection to be dipped into every now and then rather than devoured.
With kind thanks to Netgalley and Pushkin Press for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Had only previously heard of Trakl in passing, so I was grateful for the short biography at the beginning of the book which gave me a vague idea of what to expect from his work. There's no doubt that the poet was extremely talented, there were particular verses throughout which were just genuinely stunning in the imagery they invoked.
While it was obvious that his writing was of a deeply personal nature and the poems within the collection give a clear insight to the Trakl's deeply troubled state of mind, it did make for a frustrating read. I did find the poems, while beautifully written, very small in scope and repetitive in nature.
A collection to be dipped into every now and then rather than devoured.
With kind thanks to Netgalley and Pushkin Press for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
July 24, 2021
"The freedom/literalness see-saw of translation creaks on, and much has been said by those better suited than I to articulate it; but it has always been my feeling that there is an inviting strip of land one can enter whose parameters shift teasingly between the original and the translation, a kind of 'all man's land' which receives the benefit of both sun and shade, safety and risk, lucidity and obscurity, freedom and fidelity. This is an elusive place, and one can drift out of it as easily as into it. But to my mind it is conscientious labouring in this narrow but potentially fertile terrain that makes the hope for a translation's perennial flowering something more than just a solitary translator's private fantasy" (45).
October 26, 2024
This is the complete work of Georg Trakl, an Austrian poet who ended his own life at twenty-seven.
His poetry has a haunting quality to it, where he refers to a scene as an observer from outside the picture. The scenes have a solitary quality to them, touching on isolation and sadness, while never directly referring to these emotions. The reader gets a sense of meaning hidden beneath his writing that is never directly revealed.
The scenes he depicts are well done, but I would add that his work can be very repetitive. The themes and depictions are all very similar. And because Trakl died so young he never got out of his youthful, angsty phase and explored the world and it's variety more broadly. Which is a shame because one needs to wonder what else he would have written.
His poetry has a haunting quality to it, where he refers to a scene as an observer from outside the picture. The scenes have a solitary quality to them, touching on isolation and sadness, while never directly referring to these emotions. The reader gets a sense of meaning hidden beneath his writing that is never directly revealed.
The scenes he depicts are well done, but I would add that his work can be very repetitive. The themes and depictions are all very similar. And because Trakl died so young he never got out of his youthful, angsty phase and explored the world and it's variety more broadly. Which is a shame because one needs to wonder what else he would have written.
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