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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
A new translation by acclaimed poet Will Stone of the visionary Austrian poet Georg TraklGeorg 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 (1887–1914) was born in Salzburg, Austria, and spent his youth there. He began writing poetry at age 13 and later became apprentice to a pharmacist in Salzburg, then went on to take a degree in pharmacy at the University of Vienna. Following his father's death in 1910 Trakl enlisted in the army, eventually working in the military hospital in Innsbruck. With the outbreak of World War I, Trakl volunteered as a medical orderly and attended soldiers at the Eastern Front in Galicia. After the battle of Grodek, he suffered a mental collapse and was confined to a military hospital in Kraków where he died of a cocaine overdose.
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SURRENDER TO NIGHT
Collected Poems of Georg Trakl
Selected and translated by Will Stone
PUSHKIN PRESS
LONDON
This book is dedicated to the memory of Anthony Vivis (1943–2013)
Translator of German literature, co-translator and friend
CONTENTS
LIST OF POEMS
Poems, 1913
The Ravens
The Young Maid
Romance to Night
In Red Foliage Filled with Guitars…
Music in the Mirabell
Melancholy of Evening
Winter Dusk
Rondel
Benediction to Women
The Beautiful City
In an Abandoned Room
Thunderstorm Evening
Evening Muse
Dream of Evil
Spiritual Song
In Autumn
Towards Evening My Heart
The Peasants
All Souls
Melancholy
Soul of Life
Transfigured Autumn
Forest Nook
In Winter
In an Old Album
Metamorphosis
Little Concert
Mankind
The Walk
De Profundis
Trumpets
Dusk
Smiling Spring
Suburb in the Föhn
The Rats
Dejection
Whispered in the Afternoon
Psalm
Rosary Songs
Decay
In the Homeland
An Autumn Evening
Human Wretchedness
In the Village
Song of Evening
Three Glances into an Opal
Night Song
Helian
Sebastian in Dream, 1915
SEBASTIAN IN DREAM
Childhood
Song of Hours
On the Way
Landscape
To the Boy Elis
Elis
Hohenburg
Sebastian in Dream
On the Moor
In Spring
Evening in Lans
On the Mönchsberg
Kaspar Hauser Song
By Night
Transformation of Evil
AUTUMN OF THE LONELY
In the Park
A Winter Evening
The Cursed
Sonja
Along
Autumn Soul
Afra
Autumn of the Lonely
SEVEN-SONG OF DEATH
Rest and Silence
Anif
Birth
Decline
To One Who Died Young
Spiritual Dusk
Western Song
Transfiguration
Föhn
The Wayfarer
Karl Kraus
To the Silenced
Passion
Seven-song of Death
Winter Night
SONG OF THE DEPARTED
In Venice
Limbo
The Sun
Song of a Captive Blackbird
Summer
Close of Summer
Year
The West
Springtime of the Soul
In Darkness
Song of the Departed
DREAM AND DERANGEMENT
Poems Published in Der Brenner, 1914–15
In Hellbrunn
The Heart
Sleep
The Thunderstorm
Evening
Night
Melancholy (II)
The Homecoming
Lament
Surrender to Night
In the East
Lament (II)
Grodek
Revelation and Downfall
Uncollected Poems and Prose
The Three Ponds in Hellbrunn
St Peter’s Churchyard
A Spring Evening
In an Old Garden
Evening Roundelay
Night Soul
Desolation
De Profundis (II)
At the Cemetery
Sunny Afternoon
Aeon
Dream of an Afternoon
Luminous Hour
Childhood Memory
An Evening
Season
In Wine Country
The Dark Valley
Summer Dawn
In Moonlight
Fairy Tale
Lament (III)
Springtime of the Soul (II)
Western Twilight
Daydreaming at Evening
Winter Walk in A-minor
Ever Darker
December
(Untitled)
Delirium
At the Edge of Old Waters
Along Walls
(Untitled)
(Untitled)
(Untitled)
(Untitled)
(Untitled)
In the Evening
Judgement
(Untitled)
(Untitled)
To Novalis
Nocturnal Lament
To Johanna
Melancholy (III)
To Lucifer
Daydreaming
Psalm (II)
Age
The Sunflowers
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would first and foremost like to express my gratitude to Dr Hans Weichselbaum, director of the Trakl Gedenkstätte in Salzburg, for sharing his unsurpassed knowledge concerning Trakl’s life in Salzburg. I am also grateful for the assistance offered by Professor Eberhard Sauermann of the Brenner Archive in Innsbruck during my initial research into Trakl’s poetry, which, like that of Dr Weichselbaum, informs this later volume. My thanks, too, go to Wolfgang Görtschacher, the editor of Poetry Salzburg Review, for inviting me many years ago to present my Trakl translations at the university of Salzburg, and to the programme The Verb on BBC Radio 3, which also invited me to read some of these poems. I am grateful to the following publications for enabling a number of these translations to take their first tentative steps into the world: Agenda, Black Herald, Gorse, Modern Poetry in Translation, 3:AM Magazine, The International Review and Poetry Salzburg. Lastly, I should like to mention the debt I owe to the poet Michael Hamburger, whose translations and pioneering critical work on Trakl and other German- and French-language poets forms a cornerstone of European poetry in the Anglophone world, a noble example of the dedicated life.
GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914): A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Georg Trakl’s life was short, in the fabled tradition of the poète maudit, which he undoubtedly was and thought himself to be. Yet he was so much more. The unclassifiable, morbidly introspective poetry which mesmerizes new generations of readers was the sole fruit of his troubled existence and confirms his status as one of the key German-language poets of the twentieth century. Trakl’s poetic legacy was forged over five dynamic years for European culture, 1909–14, before the poet vanished in cruel circumstances in the opening months of the First World War. Trakl’s life was principally spent in Austrian towns and cities, first in the sanctuary of the romantic Baroque surroundings of Salzburg, then later in the, for him, more alienating metropolis of Vienna and in the home city of his publisher, Innsbruck. Apart from a trip to Venice in the summer of 1914, Trakl spent most of his short life in these three locations. Following the poet’s ordeals on the Eastern Front in Galicia, a final tragic denouement took place in the Polish city of Kraków.
Georg Trakl was born on 3rd February 1887, the fifth of seven children, in the Schaffner House (now the “Trakl-Haus” museum) on Waagplatz 1a in Salzburg. His Hungarian father and Slavic mother had immigrated in 1879 from Wiener Neustadt and in 1893 his father, Tobias, opened a hardware store on nearby Mozartplatz, to which the family moved, taking spacious apartments on the first floor. Some of Trakl’s early poems concern subjects he saw from the windows of these bright-lit rooms, namely the Mozart statue in the square and the surrounding mountains of the Gaisberg, the Kapuzinerberg and the Mönchsberg. The building is now a café, offering a view largely unchanged since Trakl’s time, and its outer wall bears a discreet commemorative plaque. Here the Trakl children, virtually abandoned by their mother, were taught by a Catholic governess from Alsace who introduced them to French, the required language of the European cultural elite. Trakl’s early life was one of the outward security of a middle-class milieu, with piano lessons, visits to the theatre, happy hours spent in the rustic summer house of a nearby idyllic garden—a traditional bourgeois upbringing which the Trakl parents, despite their immigrant roots, were keen to espouse for those belonging to the Bildungsbürgertum.*
Period photographs show the ubiquitously sailor-suited and lace-adorned infants obediently lined up in age and height for formal portraits. But the mother, Maria Catharina, was self-absorbed and distant, more concerned with her bibelots and antiques than with her children, and she was also a little too keen on opium, a vice that would later contribute to her son’s ruin. It was the governess, then, who shaped the children’s adolescence and it was she who introduced young Georg to French-language poetry: the requisite Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, but also, importantly, the strange, dreamlike poetry of the Belgian poet and dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck. In childhood Trakl became particularly close to one sister, Margarethe or Grete. The nature of this infamous, arguably incestuous, relationship, whose parameters have never been fully confirmed and perhaps should not be, proved a defining existential moment for the acutely sensitive boy, and later left him wracked by guilt at the desire he felt for his sibling and what had taken place between them in childhood. Though apart much of the time in adulthood, their spirits remained closely interwoven throughout their lives, both destined for struggle and unhappiness, victims of depressive illness and suicidal impulses.
Trakl was a conventional student and there was little to mark him out. He began to read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, required reading along with the Symbolist poets, and his own early poems he read aloud to his classmates. He impulsively left school early to train as a pharmacist, his assumption being that he could more easily gain access to the narcotics with which he was already locked in a fatal embrace, completing three years of on-the-job training at the Apotheke “Zum weissen Engel” (the White Angel) at Linzergasse 5 in Salzburg between 1905 and 1908. In these years Trakl was part of a literary group called “Apollo”, which was later renamed “Minerva”. A telling photograph from 1906 shows the earnest young dilettantes posed awkwardly around an ornate antique table positioned on a lawn before a house romantically overgrown with ivy. Encouraged by Gustav Streicher, a local playwright, Trakl wrote two dramatic texts, “Totentag” and “Fata Morgana”, which were shown at the prestigious city theatre. But they proved a critical failure and Trakl ceremonially destroyed his notebooks and reverted to poetry.
Trakl’s position in the pharmacy facilitated his access to veronal, opium and later cocaine. He grew increasingly dependent on a range of drugs to cope with what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke would later term “the unbearable weight of his own existence”. Trakl’s lifestyle became more anti-bourgeois and erratic, and by now he was an avid reader of the magazine Die Fackel (The Torch), edited by Karl Kraus, which regularly lambasted Austrian politics and institutions. Trakl eschewed crowds, preferring solitude, long walks and lonely vigils in country taverns. His early poems are saturated with memory images of this wandering country life in the landscape around his home city, visions of the drunken man returning from the tavern through the dusking wood. Trakl found solace roaming the wooded hills of the mountains, or lingering in the romantic environs of the castle of Anif, or the palace and gardens at Hellbrunn. In 1908 Trakl abruptly left the provincial life and his minor post at Apotheke “Zum weissen Engel”, moving to Vienna to study pharmacy.
Faced with the alienating effects of the metropolis, Trakl’s innate sense of anxiety and despair at mankind’s spiritual decline was heightened by what he experienced and observed in the capital. In Europe this was an era of burgeoning materialism and technological change, progress appeared prescribed, unstoppable, but nationalism was emboldened, there were ugly stirrings around social Darwinism, dark tributaries leading into the eventual rapids of revolution and totalitarianism, the final paroxysm Trakl painfully anticipates. The poet’s alienation from the decadent city multitude now crucially fused with the earlier formative atmosphere of rural solitariness, of being the outsider apart from the normal country folk, of being in some sense damned, a “lonely one”, in the company of madmen, beggars and prostitutes, the fallen with whom he felt a bond. Trakl’s distinctive poetic language seems to evolve, to gather momentum out of this difficult Vienna period.
Trakl’s close school friend Erhard Buschbeck also moved to Vienna at this time, and through Buschbeck’s social circle Trakl became acquainted with figures from the “Wiener Moderne” such as Adolf Loos, Arnold Schönberg und Oskar Kokoschka. Later Trakl would visit Kokoschka almost daily in his studio and there admired his 1913 painting Die Windsbraut (Bride of the Winds), a tortured vision of the relationship between the enigmatic Alma Mahler and the painter who idolized her. Trakl celebrated this powerful painting by referring to it in his poem “Die Nacht” (“Night”). A number of Trakl’s poems also appeared in the combative Expressionist art paper Der Ruf (The Cry) which championed, amongst others, Egon Schiele, whose brutally honest, risqué erotic drawings of prostitutes and models must surely have struck Trakl.
In the summer of 1910, Trakl finally achieved his title of “Magistrum artis pharmaceuticae” and was qualified to practise as a pharmacist. Tobias Trakl died, and with him in the space of a few years the family business. It was essential now for the disorderly poet to establish himself financially, but his periods of work were erratic, short-lived and fraught with anxiety, and money issues dogged him. He even sold his cherished Dostoyevsky volumes and those of Nietzsche, Rilke, Wilde and Shaw in order to make ends meet. Grete’s decision to marry at this juncture did not help Trakl’s mental state, and as a result he became ever more alienated from the family in Salzburg.
In 1912 Trakl secured a position in an Innsbruck pharmacy. Buschbeck introduced him to Ludwig von Ficker, the founder and editor of Der Brenner, named after the legendary pass into Italy close by. Ficker saw the genius in Trakl’s poetry from the outset and became a fervent supporter, unfailingly publishing his poems in issue after issue. In all, Trakl placed sixty-four poems in the magazine. Der Brenner then became the showcase for his work, the bedrock of his publications and the channel to his increasing renown. The loyal Ficker grew to be a close friend and exhibited a paternal influence, whilst also providing financial support and lodgings to the wayward poet. Finding the work at the pharmacy in Innsbruck intolerable due to his increasing inability to face the public, Trakl resorted more and more to dependency on drugs and alcohol to function. Attempts to find other jobs in Vienna all came to nothing. Typically, Trakl would take up a new position and then abruptly leave, unable to bear the responsibilities thrust upon him.
With the assistance of Karl Kraus, Trakl’s first collection, Gedichte (Poems), appeared in 1913 from Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig. In August he made a rare trip with friends outside of his native land, to Venice. An extraordinary photograph shows Trakl, incongruous in a dark bathing suit, wandering the sands of the Lido. When asked of his opinions of the fabled city, he described Venice as “the gateway to hell”. Returning to Innsbruck, he worked on his second collection, Sebastian im Traum (Sebastian in Dream), which would only appear in 1915, after his death. In March 1914 Trakl rushed to Grete’s bedside after she suffered a miscarriage and tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to leave Berlin for Salzburg. He left in despair, lamenting later of having witnessed “terrible things”. He never saw his sister again. A beleaguered Trakl searched around desperately for options—he spoke of working in Borneo or Albania as a pharmacist—but these proved only delusions. Then came a turning point. In the spring of 1914 he received a generous donation from a certain Ludwig Wittgenstein (Rilke was another recipient), which meant that his financial position would again be secure. However, the fortunate poet was in such a state of high anxiety that he was apparently unable to summon the courage and strength of mind to stay in the bank long enough to draw on the sum, fleeing in terror from the tellers. By then war was upon Europe; Trakl was soon mobilized and would never take advantage of Wittgenstein’s timely gift.
Having volunteered as a medical orderly in August 1914, Trakl joined a unit destined for the Eastern Front in Galicia. There he joined elements of the Austrian Army who took part in the Battle of Grodek, a bloody defeat for the Austrians. Without proper medical resources, Trakl was obliged to tend to over ninety seriously wounded men in a barn. Many of the soldiers begged him to end their misery with a pistol. The raw suffering before him meant Trakl’s fears for humankind were confirmed with gruesome realism, and thus a mind already perilously fragile broke decisively. One evening at the officers’ meal, Trakl suddenly pushed his plate away, stood up and declared his intention to end his life. A revolver was wrestled from his hand. Following this public collapse, he was admitted to the garrison hospital in Kraków for close observation. On hearing the disturbing news, the loyal Ficker rushed to his aid and strenuously argued for Trakl’s release. Fatefully, he was rebuffed by the physician in charge and forced to depart with his charge still incarcerated. Trakl succumbed to an intractable despair and expressed himself in a letter as being already “beyond the world”. He wrote a brief final will and testament, to which he added two final poems, “Klage” (“Lament (II)”) and “Grodek”. During the night of 3rd November 1914, Trakl took an overdose of cocaine smuggled into his cell by a sympathetic guard and died of heart failure. Three days later he was interred in the Radowicki Cemetery in Kraków, but in 1925 Ficker arranged for Trakl’s remains to be relocated to his local cemetery at Mühlau, near Innsbruck.
*Bildungsbürgertum: enlightened social class, based on material wealth, cultural education and human perfectibility achieved through a classical education. The term originates from Germany, dating back to the mid-eighteenth century.
APPROACHING SILENCE: THE POETRY OF GEORG TRAKL
I
Trakl’s elusive, enigmatic poems have been the subject of interminable debate in the modern age. The resulting presentations may illicit admiration from the reader, but also frustration. As the rational mind struggles to explain what cannot be explained, these dreamlike, otherworldly poems have been dubbed mood paintings, tonal poems, impressionist collages, colour-coded dream images and so on. The general consensus is that they are unique, a visionary flare sent up at a specific point in European history, at a vital schism between the old order and the new, lending the work a special force, insistence and sense of being outside linear time. Today the word “visionary” is of course catastrophically over-employed in a culture which bestows it on almost anyone with a modicum of talent in his or her field; but occasionally in our European culture a special case emerges and we recognize the rarity of a poetry, music or painting that sounds or looks like nothing else of its kind before or since. Trakl’s poems strike the senses in both a visual and an audible way, their imagery is innately mystical, reverberations of some primordial longing; yet his work is also uncompromisingly apocalyptic, the dislocation at the heart of the modern age always strongly present.
In the English-speaking world there have been a number of studies of Trakl’s poetry over the last five decades. These are in the main academically driven works by German-literature scholars, whether attempts to elucidate the existential religious contours of their subject, to decipher the composition and symbolism of the complex dream imagery which is the hallmark of Trakl’s oeuvre, or to thresh out elements of his short biography, notably his incestuous relationship with his sister Grete. Such works, the fruit of considerable research, often prove interesting and even helpful; but none of these studies, any more than the attempt by the philosopher Martin Heidegger to analyse Trakl’s colour palette, are wholly successful, nor do they explain how Trakl could, with a handful of lines on a page, encompass a mood or feeling so consummately.
There are also of course a range of introductions available, like so many smaller craft attending the growing flotilla of translations of Trakl’s poetry into English. Each translator, one perhaps more a scholar, the other more a poet, who has resided within Trakl’s image-extravagant universe wishes to express their ardently held personal take on the poetry and the particular challenges they faced in landing their cargo safely on English or American shores. Each translator, because of their perhaps long-standing personal connection with the poems, would like to think they have an exclusive angle on this prescient spirit which has somehow eluded the others. They may be suspicious of, even in certain depressing cases hostile to, the other translators who have dared to breach their domain, so they try all the harder to nail their colours to the mast, to ensure that their assumptions, laced with critical seriousness, are foremost.
Then there will be the more abundant crop of German-language essays and biographies, from the post-war years to the present day, an international slough of monographs and theses. And there will be well-organized conferences at which leading scholars will deliver papers and there will be applause and there will be centenary memorials for birth, for death, there will be still more carefully organized debates and colloquiums and there will be pilgrimages. But where exactly does all this “activity” lead in terms of helping the general reader meaningfully to interpret the supernatural forces and secret alchemy that must have colluded to enable human inwardness to deliver such a vision—borne so painfully by an awkward, ungainly, self-loathing young man in provincial Catholic Austria in the years preceding the First World War?
The answer is: it leads nowhere, or at least the terra firma it may initially promise suddenly begins to shift beneath the reader, making any sense of firm anchorage a chimera. For to approach Trakl’s poetry with our carefully amassed, painstakingly interwoven thought and words, with the language each of us has been granted at birth, in whichever country on this earth, merely causes a frustrating veil to descend over that which we wish so ardently to illuminate. To encounter Trakl’s reclusive poetry with the tools at our disposal is to remain permanently cut off, like passengers marooned on a craft, who see the verdant island they wish to land on but can never actually reach, due to unseen currents that keep them back from the line of surf breaking on the shore. They see the poetic language glinting there like ice in the sun on a glacier, see it clearly; but how do they read it and how deeply do they feel it? At which level of receiving does their consciousness come to rest, and is there for the next reader still further to go? Kafka can be read on a variety of levels, so why not Trakl? In order to create these arcane visions, “this chaos of rhythm and images” as he himself termed it, Trakl surely needed access to another undisclosed language, a mysterious connecting filament which hovers about his own poetic one and that of the external world.
But what is this language and can we really term it as such? Walter Benjamin, in his legendary essay on translation, “The Task of the Translator”, evocatively suggests of an elusive pure language, “that ultimate essence”, which it is the task of translators to liberate from the original. Rilke, the curator of solitude, had the rare capacity to articulate inwardness, and, like a skilled watchmaker, by employing the most sensitive adjustments, sought to pinpoint Trakl’s poetic essence. In 1915, following Trakl’s death, Rilke wrote to Ficker, after encountering the works of his late contemporary. “I have discovered much in them: overwhelmed, amazed, wondering and mystified; for one soon realizes that the conditions of these tones which rise and fall away are irrevocably singular, like those circumstances in which a dream might arise. I imagine that even one who stands close by must experience such spectacles and perceptions as though pressed, an exile, against a pane of glass: for Trakl’s life passes as if through the images of a mirror and fills its entire space, which cannot be entered, like the space of the mirror itself.” In 1917 Rilke was back, seeking again to define the mysterious aura: “For me the Trakl poem is an object of sublime existence… but now it puzzles me how its form, fleeting from the start and delicately by-passed in description, could possibly bear the weight of its own oblivion in such precise images.”
