To The Silenced E-Book

Georg Trakl

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: Arc Translations
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Seitenzahl: 123

Beschreibung

Although the Austrian poet Georg Trakl was born over a century ago, the mesmerising imagery and haunting visions of his highly sensitive and morbidly introspective poetry are as powerful today as they were when he poured forth his extraordinary and unclassifiable volume of work. A source of inspiration for artists, musicians and writers throughout the Expressionist period and beyond, Trakl's poetry – bleak, yet full of tenderness and hope, nightmarish yet eeriely beautiful – has steadfastly defied any coherent critical analysis. Will Stone's outstanding new translation, complete with contextualizing essays, promises to rekindle interest in the work of this seminal poet. GEORG TRAKL (1887-1914) was one of the most influential poets of his time. Born in Salzburg, Austria, he died at the tragically early age of 27 from an overdose of cocaine whilst being held for psychiatric observation in a military hospital in Krakow, Poland. WILL STONE is a poet and translator, whose translations of the work of Nerval, Rodenbach, Baudelarie, Verhaeren and Egon Schiele have been published in books and literary journals. He has published several pamphlet collections of poetry, and reviews by him have appeared in the TLS, Guardian and Independent on Sunday and in various literary magazines. This title is also available from Amazon as an eBook.

Leseprobe

TO THE SILENCED

AN DIE VERSTUMMTEN

Published by Arc Publications,

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK Copyright in original poems

© Trakl Haus Foundation 2005

and © Brenner-Archiv 2005

Translation copyright © Will Stone, 2005

Introduction copyright © Will Stone, 2005 Design by Tony Ward

Cover design by Tony Ward ISBN (pbk): 978 1 904614 10 4

ISBN (ebk): 978 1 908376 70 1 The publishers wish to thank: Forschungsinstitut Brenner-Archiv, Innsbruck for permission to reproduce: ‘Ex Libris’ Georg Trakl by Max v. Esterle on the cover; Georg Trakl Caricature by Max v. Esterle; Georg Trakl at the Lido, Venice, photograph, August 1913; the last poems ‘Klage’ and ‘Grodek’ written on the reverse of ‘Testaments Brief’, Trakl’s letter to Ficker, Krakow, 27 October 1914; and the Georg-Trakl-Forschungs-und-Gedenkstätte, Salzburg for permission to reproduce Georg Trakl photograph, May 1914. The publishers also wish to thank Will Stone for allowing them to use his photographs taken during the preparation of this book. This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications. The publishers acknowledge financial assistance from ACE Yorkshire

Arc Publications Translation Series

Editor: Jean Boase-Beier

Georg Trakl

TO THE SILENCED

AN DIE VERSTUMMTEN

SELECTED POEMS

~

Translated and introduced by

Will Stone

2005

To my parents

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors of the following journals in which a number of my Trakl translations first appeared. Modern Poetry in Translation, Pretext, The International Review and Poetry Salzburg. I would also like to thank Arts Council East for their financial contribution towards this project and the British Centre for Literary Translation who granted me a period as Translator in Residence at the University of East Anglia to work on these translations.

I would like to give generous thanks to those individuals without whose help this book would not have come to fruition. Firstly I acknowledge the enthusiasm and generous assistance shown me by Dr Hans Weichselbaum at the Trakl Haus foundation and archive in Salzburg. His permission to use photographs and illustrations from the collection is gratefully appreciated, as was his willingness to act as guide to sites of special interest in Salzburg relating to the poet. Thanks also to Professor Eberhard Sauermann for allowing me to view original manuscripts, letters and photographs at the Brenner Archive in Innsbruck. Here in the UK my heartfelt thanks go to Arc’s tireless editor Dr Jean Boase-Beier for her steadfast support, her wise editorial input and personal commitment to these translations. Lastly I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the legacy of the poet Michael Hamburger, whose literary contribution to this country in the course of the last sixty years is immeasurable and who first landed Trakl on anglophone shores in the form of a little known pamphlet of twelve poems published by The Latin Press, St Ives over half a century ago.

Will Stone

CONTENTS

Translator’s Preface

Revelation and Downfall: An Introduction to Georg Trakl

Part I – Life

Part II – Work

Part III – Further Reading

SELECTED POEMS

Das Grauen

•

The Horror

St. Peters-Friedhof

•

St Peter’s Churchyard

Winterdämmerung

•

Winter Dusk

Romanze zur Nacht

•

Romance to Night

Die Ratten

•

The Rats

Traum des Bösen

•

Dream of Evil

Psalm

•

Psalm

Trübsinn

•

Dejection

De Profundis

•

De Profundis

Trompeten

•

Trumpets

Menschheit

•

Mankind

Drei Blicke in einen Opal

•

Three Glances into an Opal

Zu Abend mein Herz

•

My Heart towards Evening

Nähe des Todes

•

Nearness of Death

Amen

•

Amen

Helian

•

Helian

Untergang

•

Decline

An den Knaben Elis

•

To the Boy Elis

Elis

•

Elis

Unterwegs

•

Wayfaring

Sebastian im Traum

•

Sebastian in Dream

Am Moor

•

On the Moor

Ruh und Schweigen

•

Rest and Silence

Am Mönchsberg

•

On the Mönchsberg

Kaspar Hauser Lied

•

Kaspar Hauser Song

Entlang

•

Along

Der Herbst des Einsamen

•

Autumn of the Solitary

An die Verstummten

•

To the Silenced

An Einen Frühverstorbenen

•

To One who died Young

Geburt

•

Birth

Der Wanderer

•

The Wayfarer

Die Sonne

•

The Sun

Föhn

•

Föhn

Winternacht

•

Winter Night

In Venedig

•

In Venice

Sommer

•

Summer

Sommersneige

•

Close of Summer

Jahr

•

Year

Abendland

•

The West

Gesang einer Gefangenen Amsel

•

Song of a Captive Blackbird

Vorhölle

•

Limbo

Das Herz

•

The Heart

Die Schwermut

•

Melancholy

Die Heimkehr

•

Homecoming

Der Abend

•

Evening

Die Nacht

•

The Night

In Hellbrunn

•

In Hellbrunn

Klage (I)

•

Lament (I)

Nachtergebung

•

Surrender to Night

Im Osten

•

In the East

Klage (II)

•

Lament (II)

Grodek

•

Grodek

Trakl in Salzburg

Biographical Notes

Georg Trakl caricature by Max v. Esterle

© Brenner-Archiv

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

By the late autumn of 2001, I had completed the better part of these translations. A number of poems were beginning to take their first tentative steps in sympathetic journals but I had still not secured a publisher. I was however reasonably upbeat. There had not been a new book of Trakl’s poetry for decades. The pioneering Sixties Press collection by Bly/Wright in the US had been followed in 1968 by Cape’s dark green pocket book of translations by Michael Hamburger, Christopher Middleton and others. It was largely these versions which solidified Trakl’s reputation in the UK as a key European poet. This Cape book is now a collector’s item and is increasingly hard to find. But for years Trakl’s works have been out of print and despite a repackage of the Hamburger book in the eighties from Carcanet, including letters and prose poems, though sadly no German, there had been nothing since in the UK and to my mind Trakl seemed in desperate need of a reappraisal. I also noticed how the French were stacking Trakl on tables in their bookshops in a handsome new Gallimard edition, whereas here poets of Trakl’s calibre were customarily incarcerated in some unvisited corner at the back of the shop where the occasional flutter of their flag of genius wouldn’t deflect anyone already marooned in the spreading pool of lurid fiction at the entrance. However, by sheer coincidence another rival Trakl book had loomed up out of nowhere and was about to be published. There was nothing I could do but pull back and presumably wait a few years, though I knew that my book had a different approach and that the two could easily exist simultaneously. To make matters worse a collection from Anvil, a mysterious spectre, haunted the imagination of prospective publishers. This book, which has never materialised in physical form but appears on Amazon and other lists as if it is just about to, made my task even more futile.

Following such traumas, the Trakl project slid wearily into the sidings for a few more years and other challenges presented themselves. But then in a second attempt to secure a berth I had the good fortune to find support from Arc and together we have been able to finally present these new translations as a generous ‘Selected Poems’ in which the majority of key works are represented. I have tried to present the poems in roughly chronological order, following the titles of those collections in the German from which they are extracted. The objective has always been to provide the core of Trakl’s poetry in a bilingual edition, presenting all the most powerful and famous poems as well as others of considerable worth which are more obscure. To this aim I have included a higher density of poems from the middle to latter stages of Trakl’s career, though some of the more interesting and distinctive early poems are also given a well-deserved airing. I felt it was counter-productive to readers, especially those new to Trakl, to swamp them with every single poem he produced and with some even in multiple versions, though I accept such an approach is of value. I wanted rather to hit the reader with the full force of Trakl’s vision without any peripheral padding, to create something more streamlined that packed a definite punch, rather than be content with a vague swing through the air.

After much deliberation I have not included the prose poems here either, partly due to lack of space but also because I wanted to maintain the momentum of the verse translations. The prose poems certainly contain some impressive imagery, particularly in ‘Dream and Derangement’, but they lack the decisive pauses and more honed feeling of the verse poems, which gives the sense of their holding a spring-coiled visionary energy gathered in the least number of words necessary to contain it. This is especially evident in the later poems. Sometimes in the prose poems the images seem clogged and rather overblown as if one is suffocating another. They tend to run down the page in a cascade of delirium into which one gropes excitedly for an anchor only to find more of the same. The limited space of the verse poem, the invisible shape within which the poem fits works to maximise Trakl’s visionary impulse, selects more of the red meat so to speak and strips away the fat.

This collection, then, is not an exhaustive scholarly tome, neither is it a ‘Greatest Hits’ of Trakl, but I hope a representative selection which delivers the poems with as little erosion to their vision as is possible given the limits of translation. I wanted to produce a reader-friendly, accessible and with luck even durable edition which could be accessed by anyone interested in poetry and at reasonable cost. It is high time Trakl was released from the rather narrow confines of German-language academia and was given the opportunity to appeal to a more diverse readership as is the case with his Gallic forebear Rimbaud. Having once attended a Trakl literary event I was dismayed to observe that everyone in the room bar myself and the girl struggling with a tray of canapés was in late middle age and of academic extraction. If this had been a reading of Rimbaud’s poetry, the audience would surely have reflected a much more healthy cross-section of ages and backgrounds. Rimbaud is of course an icon like Dylan Thomas or for that matter Bob Dylan. His reach goes far beyond the domain of the literary world. Given the ‘difficult’ hermetical nature of his poetic language and (in spite of an unrivalled visionary intensity) the limited range, Trakl is hardly likely to join these reluctant deities, but I sense there are many more people who would be deeply rewarded by discovering his work if they actually knew of his existence.

I have to confess I have avoided most of the formally rhymed early poems. These lesser works do not lend themselves easily to translation nor are they the most deserving of inclusion. I feel more comfortable translating from free verse forms, since that is the form which my creative English seems to favour in my own work. As a translator of poetry I must in the end have a real poem to show for my struggle, not a collection of carefully constructed lines which read like a poem but are in fact already decomposing before they reach the page. It doesn’t always come off, but if there are more that succeed than fail then one carries on. I try to let a new poem create itself from the ingredients which the original has left over in the cupboard. One can be creative with very little when cooking. I never construct something in a painstakingly over-conscious manner. I do not approach translation like a Telegraph crossword, nor do I like to embroider in order to whip up the orchestra. Music comes from the new poem’s identity, its unique pulse. People talk about retaining the music of the original as if somehow the melody can be re-wired. Music cannot be ‘reconstructed’ out of old notes torn out of their native soil and somehow rearranged. Slapping on more and more filler will never make the repair look convincing. The only way is to go back to the bare metal. I am concerned with borrowing Trakl from the German language. Is that all? No. It just happens that this was the language Trakl was born into. I am instead trying to absorb and filter that more elusive language lying just beyond, a language which the German is privileged to carry. The German is where the poetry breathes freely and it does not suffer fools gladly. In trying to wrench Trakl out without due care, one may inadvertently tickle the toe of a monster. Language has a nasty habit of obscuring our thoughts at the moment when it becomes the subject. The religious leader Rowan Williams is perhaps an unlikely figure to wheel on here, but he seems to have grasped something of this which he expresses in a refreshingly simple way. “If a translator catches the music, not of the words which is impossible to reproduce, but of the ‘symmetric’ complexes of image and feeling, what emerges is still poetry.”

Much has been said about the translation of poetry and it remains a fiercely subjective battlefield where two opposing sides representing freedom and fidelity periodically slug it out. One usually finds oneself wandering somewhere between the two in no-man’s land trying to win the approval of both sides. This is generally where the most readable and comfortable translations spring up, Stephen Mitchell’s Rilke, let us say, or Anthony Hasler’s Heym. Even the Baudelaire and Rimbaud of Messrs Scarfe and Bernard, interestingly two of the most enduring prose translations of major European poets, stake out this liberal ground. That’s not to say the extremes don’t have their value, but they tire easily since they make a lot more noise. The general reader expects consistency and faithfulness to the original ‘voice’ of the poetry. He/she needs to trust the translator. How many times does one hear the complaint that somehow the reader suspects he/she is getting a raw deal, that the original is diluted and the poet’s voice is coming through watered down or disabled in some way, that the apprentice has tried to out-perform the master. In the situation where a reader does not know the original language they tend to go with how the English sounds as a poem; what else can they do? Mitchell’s Rilke