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A Review by Chris Faatz

I remember the first time I read Austrian poet Georg Trakl like it was yesterday. It was in the translations section of the collected poems of James Wright, and I fell in love immediately with the feel of the poems, the general tenor, their air of sadness and imminent doom. It wasn't that I was a teenager going through angst; even in an imperfect English translation, it was evident that this was the work of a master, that these poems captured something eternal in the human condition, and that their utter strangeness and wondrous intensity just brought them closer to home.

Now I've read four -- no, make it five -- different Trakl translations, and I've stumbled around a bit in the original German. It's wonderful, weird, and transformative stuff, and I'm hopelessly besotted with it. Last year, a new Trakl translation (new to the US, it had already been issued in the UK) came out, Poems and Prose, translated by Alexander Stillmark, and I thought that it was pretty wonderful. Now, though, the UK's Anvil Press has issued, both in the US and the UK, The Poems of Georg Trakl, translated by native German speaker Margitt Lehbert. This book, with its fullness and mellifluousness, is, I believe, the best collection of Trakl's work to date.

Now, before I say anything else, let me come right out and admit that I'm neither a translator nor am I fluent in German. Having said that, though, I'd hazard the guess that this is the best Trakl for reading in English based on the sheer poetry of the work itself. Lehbert obviously loves her subject, and it shows. She's also obviously well-versed in the intricacies of English, and is able to translate her native tongue into clear, crisp, highly readable English-language poems with alacrity.

As the introduction to this fine book asserts, this may not be as difficult as it seems. According to Lehbert, Trakl's poems are relatively easily translated into English. His avoidance of slang, regional particularities, and historical personalities in favor of an almost Jungian type of reliance on archetypal and mythic figures leans towards a universality that virtually makes translation easy.

But, enough of this; onto Trakl himself.

Georg Trakl lived at a tumultuous time in European history. His life spanned the latter part of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century, and a deeply troubled life it was. He was heavily into various drugs -- cocaine, opiates -- and alcohol, and suffered from a level of nervousness that would probably land him in the hospital as a ward of the state today. He barely got along; only through the help of various friends and family did he manage to survive. Towards the end of his life, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein awarded Trakl an anonymous stipend to help release him from the drudgery of work so he could focus on his poetry. Trakl, typically enough, would nearly collapse at the very thought of entering the bank to make a withdrawal from Wittgenstein's gift (Rilke was the only other recipient of such largesse).

In addition to being a drug addict (ironically, he was also a pharmacist), there are rumors that Trakl had an adulterous relationship with his sister. While never substantiated, this allegation, too, lends a troubling note to his already obscure poetry.

Trakl continued to decline, but, with the advent of World War I, was called into active duty. He saw action at the battle of Grodek, and suffered a total nervous collapse when put in charge of several dozen seriously wounded soldiers. A few days later, Trakl committed suicide with an overdose of cocaine.

Trakl's poetry is, in short, amazing. His reader is gifted with visions of a darker world, an autumnal place of surreal beauty and a dying splendor. It is not a world that is friendly to people -- it is full of death, desolation, and decay, strange creatures and arcane gods. But, it is beautiful nonetheless. Hauntingly beautiful. These poems are full of pre-Christian and Christian symbolism, yet they're not religious in the least, unless being sacred in tone connotes religious nature. They're more reflections or meditations coming out of a deeper place within us, a place beyond words, a place of weariness, of loss and fear. We recognize these poems, and we recognize ourselves in these poems, but in a way that goes beyond the power of words to make clear. As Wittgenstein put it, "I do not understand [Trakl's poems]; but their tone pleases me."

Here's "De Profundis," one of my favorite of Trakl's individual poems:

It is a stubble field on which a black rain falls.
It is a brown tree that stands alone.
It is a whisper-wind that circles empty huts.
How sad this evening.

Beyond the hamlet
The gentle orphan still gathers scanty ears of wheat.
Her eyes gaze round and golden in the twilight
And her womb awaits the bridegroom of heaven.

On their return,
Shepherds found her sweet body
Putrid in the thorn-bush.

A shadow am I, far from gloomy hamlets.
God's silence
I drank from the grove's well.

Cold metal emerges on my brow.
Spiders seek my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth.

At night I found myself upon a heath
Stiff with filth and the dust of stars.
In the hazel-bushes
Crystal angels once more sounded.

If there's a weakness to this edition's lovely contents it's that it doesn't include the German originals. Other than that, this is a wonderful book, full of meaning and strange attraction. You'll find yourself turning to it again and again.