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Experience this Event
Trakl's poetry marks a turning point in the history of Germanic art, a turning point which attempts to think and speak the impenetrable. This brilliant collection gathers the work of this illusive and dark artist-a poet obsessed with death, decay, and the obscure. Like all great art, Trakl's work resists easy interpretation, it constitutes a radical break with the acceptable boundaries of form and content. A tour de force of artistic bravery. Alexander Stillmark has provided faithful and artfully rendered translations of the original. ... Read more

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Georg Trakl's poems are considered some of the most difficult for any translator to tackle; his German is dense and sometimes almost impenetrable. Daniel Simko's collection Autumn Sonata, has been lauded for the "simplicity and directness" of its translations, accomplished with out sacrificing the drama of Trakl's rich imagery.Suffering from manic depressive episodes and haunted by his experiences tending the wounded and dying during World War One, Trakl's poems reflect a sense of lostness: nightmare visions and disembodied voices provide an often eccentric perspective of reality. Though he yearns for deliverance, there poems do not anticipate it. Instead, they map the interior landscape of a brilliant, though troubled, spirit. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Some unforgettable imagery
There were a few poems that didn't seem to fully blossom but the vast majority are exciting, some shockingly good. Some of the absolute best poetry I've read in years.

Expressionism Straight
Fans of German Expressionism owe a debt of gratitude to Simko for this book.Trying to find a book from this era can be extremely difficult.Other famous authors of the period (Gottfried Benn, Georg Heym) are almost impossible to find.

The book presents both the original German text, and a very good English translation.Trakl's poetry is bittersweet, the meter almost hynoptic.The reader confronts a collage of colors and emotions in a Trakl poem.

Trakl died young, a victim of WWI. No bullet killed him, but rather he killed himself while working at a military hospital.Although his poems reveal his grief, and his despair, the reader finds himself somehow empowered by them.Out of his suffering came some of the most beautiful poems in the German language.

Cold Metal Stepped on His Forehead
Trakl strolls through the dream of a child decaying under blood-red leaves. Silver waters shimmer and recieve the sky's terrible unction. In the elderbush, a wolf devours an Angel, or an Angel expires like the sigh of a golden flame falling into a mythic well whose pit is the open mouth of the man gasping as his murderer confronts him. In the knife is reflected the compassionate face of your melancholy sister, or is it a vengeful God's purple laughter? Your face goes cold as the child speaks your name.

the last gold of fallen stars
Georg Trakl is the greatest German poet most english readers have never heard of. Most of his best poetry dates from the period just before and during his service in the Austrian Army during the First World War and this makes him a brief contemporary of Rilke. However, while Rilke's verses are each a world of incandescent beauty and spiritual profundity, Trakl's are intimations of death, decay and expressions of a world trapped in a cycle of hell. His poems are intensely expressionistic, dark and powerful. Simko's translation is excellent; though he makes a few word choices from the German that might be open to debate, he does an excellent job of preserving the poems' structure while transmitting their power in English. My only quibble is that I would have liked it if the selection of poems was broader.

Trakl
This is a very fine book of translations. To read Georg Trakl in German, of course, is far better. His German is extroadinarily beautiful. Trakl was a magnificent poet; I would say one of my absolutely favorite poets. His techniques are marvelous. He comes from, and surpasses, the lineage of such master technicians as Edgar Allen Poe, and Charles Baudelaire. He wrote poetry as if he were composing music, modulating colors and emotional content rather than tones and harmonies. One has the sense that he was divinely inspired. His work is miraculous. ... Read more

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This collection of Trakl's essential poetry contains the two books published in his lifetime, Gedichte (`Poems', 1913) and Sebastian im Traum (`Sebastian in a Dream', 1914), together with the later poems published in the magazine Der Brenner which might have formed the nucleus of a third collection.

His starkly beautiful, musical poems are rightly regarded as being among the early twentieth century's most original poetry. From a life marred by drug addiction and breakdowns, he created work of great depth and power, brought hauntingly to life in Margitt Lehbert's close and sympathetic versions. ... Read more

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Although the Austrian poet Georg Trakl was born over a century ago, the mesmerising imagery and haunting visions of his highly sensitive and morbidly intro-spective poems are as powerful today as they were when he wrote them. A source of inspiration for artists, musicians and writers throughout the Expressionist period and beyond, Trakl's poetry - bleak, yet revealingtenderness and hope, nightmarish yet eerily beautiful - can be savoured to the full in Will Stone's new translation of a representative selection of Trakl's finest work (complete with introductory essays and commentary), a volume which promises to rekindle interest in the work of this seminal poet. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Great Introduction
In the minds of most readers, Rainer Maria Rilke is the foremost poet writing in German at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Rilke's shadow, we find Georg Trakl.

The poets knew of each other. When Ludwig Wittgenstein, the famous Austrian philosopher allotted money to deserving poets writing in the German language, Rilke and Trakl were the first on the list. Rilke received the money with no problems. Trakl, being morbidly afraid of public places, had difficulty picking up the money reserved for him, sweating profusely outside the bank where his funds were held.

In the lineage of French symbolists Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Trakl is the 20th century answer to the derangement of the senses. His poems are dark, wine and drunkenness appear throughout as do angels, moons and fields of corn. Colour is equally important - crimson clouds, brown wine, black tree tops. At times it feels as if his entre oeuvre was bathed in a perennial twilight, a dream world of shadows and bare imagery. He shares the symbolist tendency to use colour. But his directness is both fascinating and hermetic. Take for example the lines from Unterwegs (Wayfaring)

"in the next room the sister is playing a Schubert sonata
So softly her smile into the ruined fountain,
Which rustles bluish in the twilight. Oh how ancient
our lineage
Someone whispers below in the garden, someone has
left this black Heart."

I simply can't describe it. The images are haunting, each poem ghostly and difficult to interpret.

His most famous poem, "Grodek" was writtten shortly before Trakl overdosed on cocaine. As a military medic on the eastern front in Galicia, Trakl, a highly sensitive man, he witnessed the carnage of battle and was left, without medical supplies to tend to the wounded.

Trakl's poetry continues to haunt me. "Grodek" is the last poem in this collection and perhaps the most telling. This book, under 200 pages has the best of Trakl. My favourite is still the Hamburger/Middelton/et all translation. Will Stone has acted bravely here. It is a great translation, no doubt, but the energy of the earlier collaborative collection is difficult to compete with. Trakl needs many hands and many readings - if you pick up this book, you'll most likely read and re-read it many times. If you love Rilke, Trakl is a must. ... Read more

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'Williams has found an ingeniously indirect method for dealing with powerful and conservative voices in Trakl criticism, a method that unburdens the debate of its weighty pomposity and elicits delight from readers familiar with the critical context' - Francis Michael Sharp, author of "The Poet's Madness: A Reading of Georg Trakl" bib 1993 x, 350 pages. ... Read more